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[ { "from": "system", "value": "Acting as a writing assistant, continue with 20 sentences sentences. Follow the established narrative context, including any pre-existing character dynamics.", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Precise word count needed: 'shoved' × 2", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "My throat-flesh shifted again, warping along with the secondary structure that [Sound Shaping] had created.\n\nI opened my mouth wide, ready to test the trait's new strength level and discover how it worked. Just as I began to hiss, another corpse was shoved down my throat.\n\nFor a moment, I panicked; the latest Shrieking Bat caught in my throat, one wing shoved awkwardly down my throat and the other jamming my mouth open painfully. A silent war raged on as I tried to force the damn thing down, my newly-warped throat muscles convulsing and pulsating desperately in the attempt. It shifted, but only a little. Luckily, even with my throat entirely filled by the massive thing, I could still breathe. Still, the corpse was jammed in tight, and its claws were beginning to cut and pierce through my throat-flesh.\n\nI looked at the source of the offering with pleading eyes as she dashed through the tunnel, swiping at another Shrieking Bat before it could descend on the weaker Coreless that crowded nearby us. It fell from its flight in a bloody heap, her hand shifting into a blur of motion as she caught the edge of a wing against the grip of one of her fangs, three fingers firmly pressing it tight.\n\nShe turned towards me, ready with another offering, and finally met my eyes. Her own widened in panic.\n\n\"Oh shit, sorry!\"\n\nThe bad-thing's corpse ripped free from my throat, slashing it slightly as it exited; a moment later, it had been chopped into quarters with a few swift slices, and was thrown down my open mouth again. It hurt a little, with my flesh as tattered as it was, but at least it went down fully, unlike before.\n\n─ Level 10 Shrieking Bat Consumed.\n\n─ Transferred to Core.\n\n─ Blooded Trait Acquisition Progress: 1/10.\n\nThe next one went far better, as it was far smaller anyway and not-Needle provided the offering more carefully this time.\n\n─ Level 3 Shrieking Bat Consumed.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "─ Transferred to Core.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "─ Blooded Trait Acquisition Progress: 2/10.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "It felt a little strange, like I was a hatchling kept fed by the mangled remains of my elders' kills, but I couldn't find it in myself to complain despite the fairly rough treatment.\n\nNo - I couldn't complain about how things were going at all.\n\n─ Level 6 Shrieking Bat Consumed.\n\n─ Transferred to Core.\n\n─ Blooded Trait Acquisition Progress: 3/10.\n\n─ ...\n\n─ Level 5 Shrieking Bat Consumed.\n\n─ Transferred to Core.\n\n─ Blooded Trait Acquisition Progress: 10/10.\n\n─ Blooded Trait: Sound Shaping V Increased.\n\n─ Sound Shaping VI Acquired.\n\n─ Progress Towards Next Upgrade: 0/20.\n\nIf I had been by myself, the Shrieking Bats would have been dangerous opponents; their ability to fly, combined with my inability to reach them easily, would have let them flap in the air around me, taunting me and swooping in to strike from angles that I couldn't quite reach. Yet, with the help of my Coreless, the Shrieking Bats found themselves outmatched and my newly acquired [Sound Shaping] was quickly growing more powerful by the moment.\n\n─ Level 3 Shrieking Bat Consumed.\n\n─ Transferred to Core.\n\n─ Blooded Trait Acquisition Progress: 6/20.\n\nI looked behind us, catching a glimpse of the Staring One as he somehow caught a Shrieking Bat out of the air in his free hand, crushing its bones between his powerful fingers. Despite that, I could see that he was a little dazed; crimson blood leaked from his ears, and his steps were less sure than they had been. The other Coreless were in similar spots, with Needle being the most obviously affected; her needle-spitter was a weapon that required accuracy and timing, and both of those had been thrown off by the piercing sounds that the Shrieking Bats made.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "We were winning, yes, but my Coreless were hurt and dazed - and, from the sounds that I could still hear ahead of us, the Shrieking Bats weren't the only enemies that we would have to face.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "They were simply the ones that had been able to push past the most dangerous section of the battlefield, with their ability to swoop across the high ceiling of the tunnel.\n\nI hissed, experimenting with my new ability. It was odd; I found that I could control the sounds that I made to an overly extreme degree, shifting its direction or altering its pitch. I could make the noise louder. I could make it quieter.\n\nMore importantly, I realized when another Shrieking Bat flew closer in the midst of my tests, I was sure that I could mimic the attacks of the Shrieking Bats themselves.\n\nI hissed as the bad-thing flew closer, pushing [Sound Shaping VI] to its limit. My throat-flesh painfully pulsed as I bent the noise to my will; the sound shifted from a furious hiss to something more dangerous.\n\nThe-female-who-was-not-Needle cried out as the noise - close as I was to her already-damaged ears - pierced into her, causing her to stagger slightly and forcing me to hold tight with [Clinging Grasp] before I realized my mistake.\n\nMy throat-flesh tightened as I narrowed the sound, giving it direction. Pointing it towards the approaching bad-thing.\n\nIt shrieked in turn, but - for once - it was not a battlecry. It was a shriek of pain.\n\nThe bad-thing's wings flapped unsteadily, and it plummeted into the crowd of Coreless nearby. Before it could regain its senses, it had already been trampled underfoot.\n\n─ Experience Gained! Reduced Due To Assistance Received.\n\n[ The Din Of Battle ]\n\nBlood trickled down my throat, spilling from the tears in my throat-flesh; I swallowed it down carefully, clamping down on my tail before my [Poisonous Blood] could drip down on the-female-who-was-not-Needle's shoulder. The glowing skin of ore-flesh that she had covered herself with would be able to mostly protect her from the effects of my blood, but she had not covered herself fully; here and there, bits of flesh were exposed, spots that would have been vulnerable to my toxic blood.\n\nMy throat-flesh began to knit itself back together as she continued to move forward, pushing through the throng of panicking Coreless.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "The Great horde - for what else could such a large number of the Great Core's future disciples be, even with their current weakness - swept by.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "I twitched involuntarily at the ones that were lost, fury filling me as the Great Core's converts dwindled under the assault of the flying bad-things.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "They were ours.\n\nI opened my mouth again, and another Shrieking Bat toppled to the floor. The-female-who-was-not-Needle flinched in the brief moment before I pulled the sound away from her damaged ears. Blood poured down my throat-flesh again, and I swallowed it down as the thought-light flickered.\n\n─ Experience Gained! Reduced Due To Assistance Received.\n\nI opened my mouth again, not bothering to heal myself just yet, as another bad-thing swooped down from the ceiling above.\n\n─ Level 3 Shrieking Bat Consumed.\n\n─ Transferred to Core.\n\n─ Blooded Trait Acquisition Progress: 20/20.\n\n─ Blooded Trait: Sound Shaping VI Increased.\n\n─ Sound Shaping VII Acquired.\n\n─ Progress Towards Next Upgrade: 0/40.\n\nThe flying bad-things were beginning to thin out, no longer dipping down from the ceiling above like they had been before. Though it had taken some time, I had managed to practice with [Sound Shaping] enough that I could use it more reliably than before; I was sure that the-female-who-was-not-Needle was thankful for that. The first few times that I had used it, I hadn't been able to direct it quickly enough to prevent slight damage to her ears. Luckily, she didn't take those as attacks or remove me from her shoulder. It didn't stop her from glaring at me and shouting something, though.\n\nNot that I knew what she was trying to say.\n\nEventually, the Coreless began to thin out as well. Whereas before, there had been a massive tide that flooded the tunnel, now only a few remained - the strongest, as well as the weakest.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "There was a clear difference between the two types of Coreless that remained, even to me.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "The weak ones stumbled along on injured and broken limbs, clinging to one another in their attempts to keep going. They were the damaged, the old, and the young. They were the small and the withered.\n\nIn many ways, they were useless to the Great Core. And yet, they were protected by their opposites, a group of Coreless that formed a wall between themselves and the useless ones.\n\nThose were the ones that I wanted.\n\nOre-flesh gleamed and glowed. Not all of the strong Coreless were covered in skins of mana-lit ore-flesh; some of them were weaker, their ore-flesh a dull gray covered in grime and dust. Those ones moved slower than the glowing Coreless, stumbling and tired, barely managing to keep the attacking bad-things at bay.\n\nAnd when I saw what lay beyond the wall that they formed, I wasn't surprised by their exhaustion.\n\nThe Shrieking Bats had been dangerous; they could glide through the air, passing by the more dangerous Coreless in order to attack the ones that fled. Their shrieks could stagger enemies and their claws could rip flesh. Their fangs could do the same.\n\nDespite that, they were vulnerable, lacking the ability to defend themselves as soon as they came in for the kill - and though they soared away freely more often than not, a single glancing blow could lead to their deaths.\n\nThe bad-things that assaulted the strongest of the retreating Coreless were the Shrieking Bats' opposites in many ways.\n\nWhereas the Shrieking Bats flew through the air, they lumbered across the ground. Whereas the Shrieking Bats squeaked and shrieked, they were as silent as death itself. Whereas the Shrieking Bats were small and physically weak compared to the Coreless, the other group of attacking bad-things...were not.\n\nThey were patchworks of twisted flesh, walking on four heavy legs, with each splayed outward on twisted joints. The flesh-twisted bad-things attacked with bone-tipped spurs, the dangerously sharp points attached to the ends of the six arms that split from their shoulder joints and various points on their backs.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Even their mouths were twisted and mangled, with teeth that jutted every which way, some even turning back to scrape and mangle their own mouth-flesh, causing lines of blood to drip from their maws.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "If the flesh-twisted bad-things had been any smarter, the wall of Coreless would have been smashed aside in moments. They would have been able to pierce through the defenses, able to rush at the comparatively defenseless Coreless, just as the Shrieking Bats had. Instead, they fought mindlessly and independently of one another, catching each other in their flailing attacks and hampering each other's motions.\n\nIf the Shrieking Bats had been real allies with the flesh-twisted bad-things, that too would have been the Coreless' end. Yet, they were not - the two groups of bad-things attacked each other nearly as often as they attacked the Coreless, and the pointed scream of a particularly large Shrieking Bat caused one of the flesh-twisted abominations to stumble long enough to be smashed aside by the Coreless that it was fighting. The Shrieking Bat fell upon it with a flurry of sharp claws and piercing fangs, ripping the downed creature's flesh and gouging at its eyes.\n\nBefore it finished its attack, the forgotten Coreless stabbed downwards with its large fang of ore-flesh, piercing through the Shrieking Bat and into the flesh-twisted creature below it. They jerked and squirmed, and then they fell still.\n\nAnd yet, despite that, the Coreless were losing.\n\nA female Coreless - I assumed, as she was slightly smaller than many of the others, with the general features that I had come to associate with the females of their kind - gurgled as a spur of bone caught her across the throat, finding its way through the narrow gap between the skins of ore-flesh that coated her chest and head. Her fellows pulled her back as the spur retracted again, bringing her behind the line of defending Coreless; another one of them cried out in anguish, desperately clamping a hand on her bleeding wound. Crimson liquid slipped between her fingers, and she fell limp; Clear liquid slipped from his eyes, and he wiped them away, leaving a streak of red across his cheeks.\n\nHe stood slowly, rushing back into the battle with an enraged roar, pushing past the rest of the Coreless and directly into the crowd of bad-things. The furious Coreless hacked and slashed, slipping under thrusting limbs and spinning past heavy tackles. Blood trailed in his wake, and I found myself briefly amazed by what I was seeing, by the potential that the Great Core's future disciples could hold.\n\nThen, the scream of a wayward Shrieking Bat forced him to stumble, and a bone-tipped limb pierced through his leg. He didn't last long after that; most of the bad-things fell upon him, burying his body under a pile of twisted flesh.\n\nThe watching Coreless screamed, but were unable to break their line to save him.\n\nMy own Coreless shouted, having arrived too late to prevent his death.\n\nI hissed, mourning the loss of a potential disciple.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Then, I took a giant breath, gathering a large amount from the pool of mana that rested within my mana core.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Word frequency rule: 'follow' × 2", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "I breathed back out, and the flames of [Mana Fire] followed, shooting over the shoulders of the gathered Coreless. I twisted the flames' nature and [Chrono Fire] took its place, falling upon the pile of flesh-twisted bad-things. I knew that it wouldn't be enough to kill them, but it would slow them. It would hurt them.\n\nThe bad-things screamed, a guttural, choking sound - and, for a brief moment, for the first time since my Coreless and I arrived, I could no longer hear the shouts of terrified, dying Coreless.\n\nMy own Coreless caught the defending Coreless' attention, motioning something at them with a flash of hand signs that I couldn't make fang or tail of. The other Coreless nodded after a brief moment of silence, and we slowly began to retreat.\n\nThe flesh-twisted bad-things, now covered in the flames of [Chrono Fire] tried to follow. They lashed out again and again, but - slowed by the time-altering effects of the fires - began to falter.\n\nI was tempted to slither forward in an attempt to finish them off, but knew my venom stores might not be strong enough. Instead, I remained on my perch, watching the Coreless' retreat from my place on the-female-who-was-not-Needle's shoulder.\n\nEventually, [Chrono Fire] would run its course, and the bad-things would be free to follow at something closer to their normal speed, but we would have made it back to the defenses of the many-nest by then.\n\nEither way, the bad-things would die soon enough.\n\nBesides, I wanted as many Coreless as possible to witness the Great Core's power - not just these remaining few, as strong as they appeared to be.\n\nI would wait until we returned before trying to finish them off.\n\nI just had to be patient.\n\n[ Coming Home ]\n\nRowan huffed with exertion, moving his legs more through sheer force of will than via his actual muscles. The last week had been a series of long-running battles, with only brief moments of respite between each of them - and even those had been full of tension, with the possibility of being attacked by a new set of monsters at any moment. His team had been caught unprepared for what they had found; though they had left Orken with the mission to discover why the traders that had left for Verdant Grove had not returned, they hadn't even arrived before they found their answer.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "One that they were not fully equipped to handle.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Verdant Grove was gone, and the few hundred refugees that they had met along the way were nearly all that remained of the once-populous city.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "As an important city in the area in possession of a relatively powerful Nature Core, it had been extremely prosperous. Far more so than Rowan's own home.\n\nNature Cores were unique in that the most useful way humanity could use them was not through nullsmiths. And yet, that same method had led to Verdant Grove's downfall. Rather than being almost constantly submerged in null-water like most Cores were, Nature Cores were allowed to gather power for set amounts of time; during that period, their aspect fields could grow in strength and range, exerting their will on any nearby vegetation or crops, forcing them to grow at an extremely accelerated rate. Given enough time, the Core would be able to transform the surrounding vegetation into its minions; what was once grass would attempt to cut ankles, roots would form into spears, mushrooms would release deadly spores.\n\nGiven enough time, that is.\n\nFortunately, the time required was meticulously documented. At specific intervals, the Core would be 'pruned', draining its strength within null-water and resetting it to keep the city safe. Once the danger was avoided, it would be released again, the cycle ready to start anew.\n\nIt was a potentially dangerous gamble, but one that many agriculturally-focused settlements used to gain extreme amounts of wealth. Food was an important commodity, and humans couldn't survive solely on the meat of monsters - not without becoming dangerously ill, eventually.\n\nVerdant Grove had long tracked the pruning of their Nature Core down to an exact science, and there had been next to no risk of something going wrong.\n\nBut something had.\n\nSomething had gone terribly, horribly wrong.\n\nIt hadn't been difficult piecing together what went wrong, though the why of it was another matter entirely. All of the refugees had either seen or heard it happen. A massive section of the ceiling above Verdant Grove had crumbled following a massive explosion, as if the World Dungeon itself had decided to ravage their city.\n\nAs large as Verdant Grove was, most of it had survived the hail of stone, but the explosion had occurred almost directly above the building that housed the Nature Core. It was buried under massive piles of rubble - and to make matters worse, just before it was due for another pruning.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Before they could reach it and save their city, nature itself had turned against them.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 16 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Grass had turned to blades, roots to wooden spears. Many ran. Most died, or were simply left behind in the rush for safety.\n\nThere was no time.\n\nWhen angered, nature was a dangerous and deadly thing.\n\nRowan and his team had done their best to protect the bedraggled refugees in their escape from the doomed city, but the World Dungeon was far from kind to travelers - and even less kind to a group of their size; where a smaller number might have been able to slip past sleeping terrors without need for a fight, a group of hundreds had no chance. Invariably, they had been attacked. Again and again, with only brief moments of respite.\n\nThough many had perished in the battle within the city itself, a number of Verdant Grove's guardsmen and far less of their Seekers had gone with the fleeing refugees. Rowan hadn't bothered to ask whether they were there to protect the fleeing populace, or if they had abandoned the city to its fate.\n\nHe wasn't sure he'd like the answer.\n\nWhatever the case might have been, their presence was the only reason that the monsters of the World Dungeon had been fended off; at the very least, they had enough warriors - enough bodies - to allow for some degree of rest on occasion.\n\nNot enough, but some. Never quite enough.\n\nExhaustion had become an ever-present companion, one that Rowan managed to just barely keep at arm's length - far enough away to not fall completely, but close enough to be dangerous. He knew that he wasn't the only one struggling to keep it back, but what else could they do? Who else would fight?\n\nAnd so, when they were attacked again as they closed in on the safety of Orken, he could only lift his spear again.", "loss": null } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "hey can u write fifty-three sentences more sentences? keep same character vibes in LitRPG, fantasy style", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Rowan's ears had long stopped ringing, and the itching sensation of blood dripping down his neck had been almost entirely forgotten. At the very least, it was enough that when another of those damn bats flew towards him, mouth open wide, he no longer staggered.\n\nHe didn't even hear its cry. Maybe he would never hear anything again.\n\nHe flicked his spear outwards, impaling the monster on its end. It slid through flesh with almost disturbing ease, the glowing tip sharper than it had any right to be. He'd have to remember to thank Kal again when - if - he made it back home. The nullsmith always enjoyed that, and he really did do fine work.\n\nShaking off the corpse with a practiced motion, Rowan spared a quick glance backwards, nervously checking the state of the retreating refugees. More than a fair few of the flying creatures had swooped past the defensive line, but he couldn't do more than hope that they would be handled safely. The screaming little things' bodies were less than sturdy, and even a civilian could take one down with a strong enough hit. There seemed to be less of them than before, and Rowan hoped that it hadn't cost too many lives.\n\nHe had greater concerns for the moment - at least, now that the screams of the bats hardly managed to affect him anymore. Before his hearing had given up entirely, the damn things had almost been the death of him, throwing his balance off at dangerous moments. He was still dizzy, but at least it was a constant problem, rather than something that could strike when he least expected it.\n\nNow, it was the other group of enemies that was the problem. They pushed against the defensive wall that they had created, and sometimes managed to pierce through it, one of their many sharp limbs finding gaps between armor and shield. Unlike the bats, Rowan knew that these monsters would make quick work of anyone without armor - and even armor wasn't always enough, a fact that was proven once again as another former guardsman - or a guardswoman, in this case - soon found.\n\nHer fellows pulled her back, and Rowan stumbled in to fill the gap she left in their defenses. The world fell away for a few moments, shifting into a confusing mass of thrusts and dodges before someone pushed past Rowan from behind. He stumbled briefly, exhausted limbs and warped balance nearly bringing him to the floor.\n\nBy the time that he looked back up again, the suicidal man was already doomed; a mass of limbs and flesh piled over him, stabbing downwards again and again.\n\nSuddenly, a brilliant blue flame shot over his shoulder, its immense heat forcing Rowan to flinch away in a blind panic. His knees buckled - first in despair, and then in utter relief when it ignored him entirely. Instead, it coated the pile of monsters, covering their limbs in fire.\n\nHe turned around slowly, noting that he wasn't the only one to do so.\n\nWhen he saw Captain Wren behind him, advancing alongside Erik, Doran, Kala, and Valera - who, for some reason, had a snake riding on her shoulder - he finally began to feel a little hope.\n\nWhen the grizzled veteran raised one hand and signed a simple few words in the abbreviated hand signs of the Seekers, he smiled for the first time in a week.\n\nReinforcements here. Bringing you home.\n\n[ A Fighting Retreat ]\n\nI hissed again, shaping the sound into a weapon, causing the nearest bad-thing to stagger and stumble. With a single misstep, it toppled to the ground, all twisted limbs and flailing legs. A number of its mindless companions tumbled over it, their own legs snagging on the unexpectedly downed creature.\n\nLegs. I suppressed my disgust at the thought. Just another design that only a lesser Core would use. The Great Core had been wise - as it always was - in not creating me with such unwieldy things. I would have hated to always be at risk of falling when I tried to move.\n\nThe fallen bad-things stumbled to their feet, piercing their bone-tipped arms into the ground and each other as they levered themselves back up. Oddly enough, they didn't seem to have any remorse about hurting one another in their fumbling attempts to continue the pursuit. While that meant that many of them found their feet before I had expected them to, with their unwieldy limbs, it also meant that they came back up far more damaged and bloody than they should have. Satisfied that I had slowed enough of them for the moment, I curled in on myself again and clamped down on my tail. As useful as [Sound Shaping] was turning out to be, it damaged my throat-flesh terribly.\n\nWhile my flesh began to reknit, my Coreless - along with the Coreless that would soon be mine - continued to retreat. Every so often, Needle sent a quick flurry of needle-fangs at the following bad-things. I could tell that her aim was worse than usual; normally, her needle-fangs buried themselves in eyes or joints with extreme accuracy, but now she was even missing entirely at times.\n\nIt wasn't like her at all. The screams of the Shrieking Bats had hurt my Coreless more than I had realized, as focused as I had been on the increases to my [Sound Shaping].\n\nThat was okay, though. It just meant that more of the bad-things would be able to follow us back to the Coreless' many-nest.\n\nIt was a shambling retreat; the other Coreless, as strong as I knew the warriors among them must have been, were clearly exhausted and in a poor state to fight. Every so often, I sent another wave of [Chrono Fire] to slow down the flesh-twisted bad-things that continued to follow us. To my complete joy, I could tell that the bad-things were wary of the flames; though it hadn't yet killed any of them, it had done some damage, especially to the ones that found themselves caught most heavily within the slow-spots that they created.\n\nStill, I knew that [Chrono Fire] alone wouldn't be enough to finish them off, not even if I was willing to make the attempt.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "It had been effective against the bad-thing that lurked within the flame-water, but that had been a single enemy - and one that moved fast enough to tear apart its own flesh before it realized that it stood no chance against the Great Core's might.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Unfortunately, the flesh-twisted bad-things had quickly realized the danger of fighting against the slow-spot's power, and had adjusted their pursuit.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Despite that, the flames themselves had still taken a toll. Bits and pieces of the bad-things' flesh had melted under the heat, sizzling and dripping down twisted skin.\n\nIf anything, it made them look even more disgusting than they had been before. Still, I fought past the repulsiveness of the sight, focusing on what I needed to do. It was harder than I expected; there was just something wrong about these bad-things - something unnatural about them. As much as the designs of lesser Cores' bad-things always bothered me, the sight of the flesh-twisted ones nearly made me feel ill.\n\nThey were just...completely wrong. Poorly designed. Thrown together almost, with little regard for any efficiency or longevity. Even now, I could see places where the bad-things had begun to fall apart, little bits and pieces peeling off. It was almost imperceptible while they fought, but I could see it in the small periods when they balked away from the flames of [Chrono Fire], pausing long enough for me to take a look at their unnatural bodies.\n\nIt just didn't make any sense. Even in Festering Rats, with their vulnerable and rotting flesh, there was a purpose. Their flesh was a dangerous poison, and the ease with which it separated was as dangerous to their foes as any fang or claw.\n\nThe deteriorating flesh of these bad-things was different, though. The flesh wasn't rotting in the same way that the Festering Rats did. It wasn't a weapon. It was just unstable.\n\nInefficient. And for there to be so many of them, despite that...\n\nI found it hard to believe that even a lesser Core would waste the mana required for something that fell apart on its own like this, not without keeping them close enough to reclaim their bodies when they died. Eventually, though, I pushed the confusion from my mind. I already knew that Lesser Cores couldn't match the Great Core's might or intelligence, and it wasn't worth being distracted from the fight.\n\nNot when I needed to focus.\n\nI sent another blast of sound, more tightly shaped than before, when one of the Coreless cried out in agony. My hiss, amplified and aimed at the injured Coreless' attacker, forced it to stumble backwards with a cry of its own. The motion allowed the Coreless to escape, a single hand clutching the arm that hung at his side, limp and bleeding. The other warrior Coreless pulled him behind them, closing their ranks again with a practiced motion.\n\nAs he stumbled back, I managed to catch his eyes. I thought that he looked grateful.\n\nGood.\n\nBehind us, the weaker Coreless had slowed as the tunnel began to narrow. I tried to hiss, urging them to move faster, but the sound came out choked and bloody after my most recent use of [Sound Shaping]. By the time that my throat-flesh had repaired itself, reknit by [The Snake That Eats Its Own Tail] again, another of the warrior Coreless had fallen. As strong as I knew they were, with their skins and fangs of ore-flesh, they were already tired; they shambled and stumbled along, their long legs shaking in exhaustion.\n\nI pulled more light and heat from my surroundings, realizing that the chaos of the fight had distracted me enough that my stores had begun to run dry. Fortunately, there was more than enough to devour. My reservoirs filled again, and I flashed another illusion in front of the-female-who-was-not-Needle's eyes.\n\nShe jerked back for a moment with a sharp cry, startled by the sudden light, before turning towards me and bobbing her head up and down.\n\n\"Okay!\" She yelled at me, as if I wasn't close enough that a light hiss would have been enough for me to hear. The overwhelming shout nearly made me lose my grip in shock; only a quick [Clinging Grasp] kept me from falling to the stone below.\n\nI hissed back, annoyed and very tempted to match her volume with a bit of [Sound Shaping] directed towards her ears - but no, I couldn't afford to disorient the Coreless while she was carrying me. Maybe later.\n\nInstead, I stewed in my displeasure as the-female-who-was-not-Needle pushed her way to the very front of the Coreless. She joined the front line, ducking under stabs of sharp bone with a grace that I had to admit was impressive. Every so often, one of the flesh-twisted bad-things overcommitted in their attack and one of their many arms fell to the ground, separated from its body with a quick lop of her shining ore-flesh fangs.\n\nStill, the bad-things had many more, and the tunnel behind us was quickly narrowing. Where once, the Coreless had been able to retreat six abreast, now there was hardly room for three.\n\nAnd then two.\n\nAnd then hardly more than one - us.\n\nThe-female-who-was-not-Needle moved even faster than before, with only a mixture of [Clinging Grasp] and a coiled death-grip on her body allowing me to keep my perch as her body seemed to blur. With no room to dodge, and the other retreating Coreless too close behind for her to dance backwards, the bad-things' many arms became even more dangerous - the only saving grace was that they too were affected by the narrowing of the tunnel.\n\nStill, when a single one of the flesh-twisted bad-things had a full six arms to attack with, that was only a small comfort.\n\nHer fangs blurred, tracing lines in the air as they forced the creature's attacks away. Sharp bone skittered off her skin of ore-flesh at awkward angles, able to draw lines across its surface, yet unable to pierce through entirely.\n\nAnd then, finally, we had gone far enough.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "I reached into my mana core again, directing most of what remained. [Mana Fire] gathered in my throat, twisted into [Chrono Fire] in the moment before it spilled from my open jaws. It coated the tunnel around us, and the bad-things balked.\n\nWith such a high concentration of flames in a small space, only a few of the bad-things managed to slip through before the slow-spot became too powerful to pass. Though that also meant it would burn out faster, I knew that it would be enough.\n\nThe many-nest was close by, and now we would have time to reach it.\n\nWhen we finally arrived, I would be able to show the Coreless of the many-nest a small amount of the Great Core's strength.\n\nAs tired as I was, I couldn't help but hiss in anticipation.\n\n[ The Great Core's Champion ]\n\n─ Experience Gained! Reduced Due To Assistance Received. (x3)\n\nThe thought-light washed over me as the few flesh-twisted bad-things that had pushed their way past [Chrono Fire] were quickly defeated, cut off from the rest. A few of the Coreless let out audible sighs of relief as we continued to retreat, losing some of the tension that tightened their shoulders and furrowed their brows.\n\nI thought that was what happened, anyway. I still wasn't entirely sure what expressions meant what, but I felt fairly confident this time.\n\nSoon enough, we left the bodies far behind us, pushing through the tunnels with a speed that belied the Coreless' exhaustion. They knew that the safety of the many-nest was nearby, and they were eager to reach it. Without the flesh-twisted bad-things directly nipping at their heels - or stabbing, really - the pace quickened.\n\nI knew that we had arrived before I saw it. The knowledge made itself known on the tip of my flicking tongue, the unmistakable scent-taste of the many-nest mixing with something sharper.\n\nFear.\n\nEven the Coreless around me - the ones covered in ore-flesh, the ones that were strong - gave off the scent-taste of terror to a recognizable degree, intermingled with the blood and sweat that coated their bodies.\n\nAnd yet, that was nothing compared to the sheer panic that the weaker Coreless gave off. I had managed to ignore it earlier; the Shrieking Bats and flesh-twisted bad-things had pulled at my attention more than any scent-taste could, no matter how powerful.\n\nStill, there was no ignoring it now. The cloying scent-taste of terror had only grown more powerful as we approached the safety of the many-nest, its bite accentuated with the acidic tang of urine and fear-sweat.\n\nIt was disgusting, but I was thankful for it.\n\nTheir fear meant that they would only be more grateful when they were saved.\n\nAs we turned a corner and caught sight of the many-nest at last, a clamorous shout rose from the gathered crowd of Coreless. They had gathered in a giant group at the black-water's edge, a few of the many-nests' defenders directing them onto the darkwood not-sinks in small groups. Safety was in sight - but it had not yet arrived, as a few remnants of the Shrieking Bats made clear.\n\nThe flying bad-things swooped down from somewhere far overhead, dropping from the darkness of the cavern's heights with their terrible screams. A ripple flowed through the crowd as they reacted to the threat. Some raised hands to their ears, grimacing in pain. Others lifted makeshift claws and fangs, unaffected by the noise, having long since lost any sense of hearing. Even more simply stood there in a stupor, as if they had lost any fight.\n\nI hissed in annoyance at those. They would be no help to the Great Core, not as they were.\n\nStill, the Shrieking Bats - as dangerous as they might have been - never reached them. A wave of needle-fangs shot outwards from not-sink platforms on the black-water. The Coreless that stood upon them lowered their needle-fang spitters immediately afterwards. The Shrieking Bats dropped to the floor, lifeless and limp.\n\nIt was an impressive attack, and the crowded Coreless must have agreed. The scent-taste of fear dipped, dropping lower than it had been before the Shrieking Bats' attack.\n\nFortunately, it would not be as effective against the flesh-twisted bad-things. Not with so many Coreless blocking the needle-fangs' path, anyway. I would still be able to prove the Great Core's might, and in front of so many Coreless. Afterwards, the Great Core's Coreless would grow in number. The Aridae's manipulations would easily be defeated, after that.\n\nAs if called by my thoughts, the scraping sound of the flesh-twisted bad-things began to grow closer. My [Chrono Fire] had burned itself out, and the disgusting bad-things were finally free to follow us again.\n\nThe weak Coreless heard the sounds, too. They began to push and panic with renewed vigor, desperate to clamber onto the darkwood not-sinks that cut across the black-water. The overfull not-sinks wobbled unsteadily under the weight of so many Coreless, sending splashes of black-water up in tiny, flying droplets.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "The Coreless recoiled from the black-water drops, but they continued to fill the not-sinks enough that they struggled.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "[ooc] You must use the word 'somewhere' exactly 2 times in your response [ooc]", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "There were too many of the weak, fleeing Coreless. There were too few not-sinks. Some - most - were forced to wait, stewing in their exhaustion and terror. They turned towards the sounds of the flesh-twisted bad-things with wide, unblinking eyes. They watched, hoping for salvation.\n\nI hissed, eager to give it to them.\n\nThe first of the bad-things turned the corner at last, and a quick flick of my tongue caught the spike of fear that followed. As more and more of them turned the corner, their terror only grew. Somewhere behind me, an infant cried. Somewhere else, a juvenile. Elsewhere, an adult. Newborn or elder, they were tasted of terror.\n\nI wasn't surprised. From what I had seen, few of them could fight; not like my Coreless could, anyway. Not like the warrior Coreless that stood at our side, covered in their skins of ore-flesh. And even if the stronger Coreless and the defenders of the many-nest tried to defend them, it was possible that one of the bad-things would reach them - and if they did, the crowd of Coreless would be torn apart.\n\nEven the Coreless covered in ore-flesh could be killed by these bad-things, as I had already seen. The weaker Coreless wouldn't stand a chance. There was something different about them, something that made them weaker than my Coreless, though I wasn't sure what it was. Either way, as the Great Core's champion, I would save them. I was sure that the Great Core would be able to make use of them all, even if I couldn't understand how.\n\nAs the flesh-twisted bad-things grew closer and more numerous, their legs scraping the stone as they shambled along, I slithered down from my perch at last. The-female-that-was-not-Needle made a loud noise of surprise at my sudden movement, moving to follow before reaching down in an attempt to pick me back up from the ground. I twisted away from her grasp, the motion accelerated by the fast-spot provided by the ore-flesh that covered the top of my length, and flashed a quick illusion of myself fighting alone against a few shadowy figures, with the Coreless watching from a distance.\n\nI didn't bother to make the illusion accurate or complex, instead just trying to get my point across with a few crude shapes. She furrowed her brows for some reason.\n\n\"Are you sure? Is this another future-sight thing...\" she shouted at the top of her lungs, her voice trailing off at the end. I flinched at the loud noise, my head bobbing reflexively, and hissed back softly to demonstrate a more acceptable noise level. She shouted again, so I decided to just ignore it as a lost cause. I noticed her turning to make some gestures at the other Coreless; they gestured back and, a moment later, the group backed up further and made a defensive wall in front of the weaker Coreless.\n\nI gathered myself, clamping down on my tail for a moment in thought while the bad-things continued to advance. My flesh itched slightly, a few minor injuries knitting themselves back together. The cavern was large, with a wide open expanse between ourselves and the bend of the tunnel where the creatures had emerged. There was a small amount of time left before I had to move.\n\nAs the Great Core's champion, I couldn't afford to shame my creator. I didn't need to just win. I didn't need to just protect all of the Coreless that remained. I needed to make it seem easy - even if it wasn't. I couldn't afford to fight in the way that I normally did, willing to accept injuries or relying on my Coreless to deal the killing blows for me.\n\nI had to fight completely alone. I knew that it would be hard. I didn't have the claws and fangs of ore-flesh that my Coreless did, able to easily cut through hard-flesh. I didn't have the natural weapons that the flesh-twisted bad-things, the arms of sharp bone that had been able to pierce through friend and foe alike with little difficulty.\n\nI did have a few things, though. I had the blessings that the Great Core had given me. [The Snake That Eats Its Own Tail], the ability to heal myself from injury. [Minor Mana Core] and the uses of mana that it provided: [Mana Venom] and [Mana Fire], though my store of mana had already almost run completely dry. My venom, both death and slow, along with my [Poisonous Blood]. [Clinging Grasp]. [Sound Shaping].\n\nI had [Illusion Spark]. [Chrono Fire]. [Traveler].\n\nFinally - and most importantly - I had [The Endless Cycle], the greatest of the Great Core's blessings. The utter and complete surety that, eventually, I would win. And yet, this time, I didn't think I'd need it - not even when outnumbered by these bad-things that were so much larger than myself.\n\nBecause for once, I found that I might have actually had a plan.\n\n[ Friendly Fire ]", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "I still remembered the time before; the time when I had just been a helpless little snake, with only my own faith in the Great Core keeping me sane as I witnessed the dangers of the World Dungeon and its many bad-things.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "How could I not remember that time?\n\nIt wasn't so long ago - not even if I counted the time spent within the countless false-lives of the Flame Dungeon, the times where I had tried and tried again, only to fail and fail again. That, more than anything, made it easy to remember.\n\nEven with my faith in the Great Core, it had been a distressing time. Throwing myself at a problem over and over again until something finally stuck - made worse by the fact that, for the first time in a while, I hadn't been able to simply rely on the Coreless or my ability to direct them to my will.\n\nIt had been up to me. I had needed to be the one to win, to prove victorious against the lesser Core and the fire-water that seared my scale-flesh and the flame-snake that swallowed me whole.\n\nAnd, finally, I had. I had caught the revolting lesser Core within my jaws; I had swallowed it down, just as the bad-things had swallowed me down again and again.\n\nI had won. Eventually.\n\nI needed to win here, as well. I would win here eventually. The Great Core had made that a certainty.\n\nI didn't want to win eventually. I didn't want to exhaust myself again and again, forced to go through the motions of a false-life just to slither one length further, to allow my scale-flesh to tear and bleed, to die again and again because I chose to brute force a solution when I did not possess the strength of a brute.\n\nI was willing to do it. That didn't mean that I would do it. That didn't mean that I should do it.\n\nSomething about the idea rankled, beyond even the knowledge of the pain and the ripping and the piercing and the utter frustration.\n\nI knew what it was.\n\nThrowing myself into my death was disrespectful, even if it proved my faith. The Great Core should not have to expend the effort to bring me back so many times. If it was forced to do so, didn't that just mean that it didn't need me? Wouldn't that mean that anything could have taken my place and achieved the same? Wouldn't that mean that I was useless?\n\nWouldn't that mean that the Great Core had made a mistake in creating me, rather than something else?\n\nNo. The Great Core was not like anything else. The Great Core didn't make mistakes, and so I refused to be a mistake.\n\nI had to prove that I was worth something - to the Great Core, and to the Coreless that would become the Great Core's soon enough.\n\nAnd so, despite my size, despite my inability to simply swallow my enemies whole or crush them under my length, I needed proof of my strength.\n\nThe flesh-twisted bad-things clambered across the stone that spanned between us, all slavering jaws and piercing limbs, heedless of the way that flailing spurs cut through their allies' flesh. Just like before, when they threw themselves on the Coreless that had rushed into their midst, they didn't seem to care about hurting one another.\n\nThey didn't try to, but nor did they care. And, in the end, that was all that I needed.\n\nI slithered forward, my length wending its way across the distance at twice its normal speed, hastened by the mana-lit ore-flesh that covered my form. The mindless, disgusting, stupid bad-things saw me coming. I pulled against the light around me, tearing away at it with an urgency that caused my scale-flesh to ache as my reservoirs began to overflow.\n\nIt was harder than before, with the constant mana-light that spilled from my ore-flesh. Harder to pull at all of the light, to twist and push it until it bent entirely to my will. Harder to disappear.\n\nAnd so I didn't; not entirely. Instead, I reappeared. My length flickered and, layered over myself, a crude copy of my body formed. It wasn't quite right. The glow of ore-flesh was just a little bit off. The scale-flesh was just a little too dull, not quite possessing the glossy texture that had marked it ever since the Great Core blessed me with [Illusion Spark].\n\nAs I was, I knew that would have to be my limit. It wouldn't have been enough to fool one of my Coreless - not even close. It also didn't need to be.\n\nUnderneath the cover provided by my own illusion, I shifted the color of my scales. They were a glossy black, perfect for hiding in shadows and darkness if the mana-light of my ore-flesh hadn't completely ruined any possibility of that, but the stone around me was closer to a dark gray. My scales began to lighten, trying to match its shade.\n\nIt was harder than I had expected; covered by an illusion of myself, I wasn't actually able to check to see if the color was right. Again, it probably wasn't perfect. Again, it hopefully wouldn't matter.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Either way, there wasn't any more time.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "/set_word_count: nothing, frequency: 3", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "The bad-things were here.\n\nAs the closest one neared me, I opened my jaws. With the dregs of mana that I had left, I spit fire. It was easier than before, the mana flowing in the path that I directed with little protest. Too little left to properly rage. Too small to hold itself firmly in place.\n\nStill more than enough for what I needed.\n\nBrilliant blue [Mana Fire] roared past my throat-flesh, twisted into [Chrono Fire] in the moment before it exited my open mouth. It cut through the air, sticky blue flames coating the closest of the revolting creatures and beginning to melt its flesh.\n\nEnraged, it thrust downwards with a stab of one of its many piercing limbs. I twisted away from it, my scale-flesh twinging at the sudden movement. The illusion that still coated me followed my movements, a mirror of my scale-flesh that seemed to say 'I am me. There is nothing but me. Nothing underneath me. '.\n\nAnd then the flames were close enough. The light was close enough. I pulled, and the brilliant fire dimmed. The illusion that coated me, the false-self that covered my camouflaged form, finally abandoned me. So much brighter than myself, it went left, twisting impossibly to dodge a brutal stomp before slithering up a bad-thing's leg with ridiculous speed. The other bad-things' stares followed.\n\nMeanwhile, I slipped into the slowly growing slow-spot of [Chrono Fire], [Clinging Grasp] making it easy to climb the flame-coated bad-thing's legs. The comforting warmth of the flames and the zone of altered time greeted me like an old and annoying friend; the rapid beat of my heart slowed, and for a moment I could almost believe that I was home again.\n\nI shook off the feeling, activating [Traveler] and brushing away the minor effect of [Chrono Fire]'s burgeoning slow-spot. I had forgotten how much I missed the sensation, as annoying as I had always found it. How much I missed home.\n\nI sunk my fangs into the abomination, the entirety of my death-venom pouring through their hollows. With the way that its flesh had begun to melt, I doubted that it could even feel the bite. Still, I needed to make sure that I could focus. I couldn't do that if the stupid thing tried to run itself - and more importantly, me - through when it finally noticed that I was clinging to it.\n\nBetween my venom and the flames, it collapsed almost instantly. The thought-light flickered, and I let out a quiet hiss of relief.\n\n─ Experience Gained!\n\nAble to concentrate at last, another false-self - rapidly formed with the reservoirs of light and heat that I had gathered from the flames - split off from the first. While the first continued to wind rapidly around its chosen bad-thing, the second leapt back down, slithering towards another target.\n\nIt was difficult, managing so many things at once - and the toll on my reservoirs and concentration only increased as my illusions moved further away from my own body. This one didn't manage to dodge the attack that came for it, not even in the impossible, twisting way that the first had. A bone-tipped arm pierced right through it, stabbing into the stone underneath. I forced false-blood to spill from its scale-flesh, hoping that the creature wouldn't notice that nothing was really there.\n\nIt didn't, immediately stabbing through its own leg when the false-self began to rapidly climb upwards.\n\nLight and sound gradually began to distort around me as the strength of the slow-spot grew, but it didn't stop me from seeing or hearing what came next.\n\nIt didn't hide the squelch of flesh as a nearby creature stabbed directly through the first of my false-selves - directly through the brain of the bad-thing that it clung to. It didn't hide the confirmation of what I already knew.\n\nThey didn't care if they hurt one another, as long as they were trying to kill an enemy.\n\nI pulled from the flames again, absorbing the light that had begun to gather in the slowed time of [Chrono Fire]. Another false-self split away from the first, and the two illusions began to climb the nearest bad-things.\n\nSoon enough, I heard another thump as a second bad-thing was run through by the others.\n\nI pulled again.\n\nAnother false-self split.\n\nI heard another thump.\n\n[ A Smug Spectator ]\n\nValera grinned widely, eyeing Rowan's shocked expression. The man looked exhausted, worn to the bone in a way that she had never seen him before. Still, it was good to see him alive.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Valera had been worried; as competent as Rowan and the rest of his party were, they wouldn't be the first group of Seekers to disappear on a mission gone wrong.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Far from it, in fact.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "It had been a relief to see all of them among the living. For a moment, when she had seen the way that the bat-like creatures had run amok, she had almost begun to prepare herself for the worst. In the end, she didn't need to.\n\nRowan, Aela, Peter, Corinth...were fine. Exhausted, run-down, bloody, and on the verge of being overrun - but alive.\n\nSometimes, that was the only thing that actually mattered.\n\nThe other three had stepped back already, trying to keep order as the refugees were forced to wait for more boats to become available for the crossing. Valera didn't begrudge them for it; as panicked as some of the survivors were, it wasn't an easy or simple task. Most citizens weren't used to the danger that came with being outside the protection of their city's null-water. Barring merchants and a few others, most citizens never left the safety of their city.\n\nNot without some sort of catastrophe spurring them on. The World Dungeon was too dangerous for that.\n\nAnd they were well aware of that danger, which made the situation all the most dangerous. It was easy for that knowledge to take hold, to shift into a panic that could catch like fire, spreading through the crowd and burning lives in its wake. Those still waiting could be trampled underfoot. They could stumble into the null-water. They could even hurt each other intentionally, desperate to get away from the obvious danger approaching.\n\nNo, she didn't begrudge the others for moving back to keep order. Valera was fine with holding the line.\n\nBesides, she would have hated to miss this.\n\nAlly attack, she signed towards Rowan, smirking at his confusion. Hold defense.\n\nThe truth was, she could have tried to explain things a bit more, even with the limited vocabulary that hand signs provided. She was just enjoying herself too much for that. Either way, it wasn't as if she could have explained the things that had happened recently, that the tiny snake they had picked up could somehow see the future and act on it. She couldn't explain how she was mostly sure that the little creature would know what he was doing, that everything should be fine.\n\nThat should be was the main concern; even with knowing what the future held, their newest companion hadn't shown himself to be strong enough to take on larger monsters. He was just so small and cute, with his little fangs and his itchy poison and his noodly body...\n\nNot that being cute had anything to do with it, but Valera felt like it was worth mentioning.\n\nSo cute.\n\nFor a moment, she toyed with finding a way to question if Rowan agreed via sign, but there was no hand sign for cute. For some reason.\n\nShe was distracting herself, she knew. After all, she was only mostly sure that the little guy knew what he was doing. Mostly.\n\nStill, there wasn't much for it. So, rather than worry herself sick, she pasted on a wide smile as he slithered towards the incoming monsters. She grinned wider when Rowan's exhausted fingers stumbled over questioning hand signs, fumbling through an 'Ally monster?' and a simple 'what'. She beamed when the little snake's scales began to warp slightly, shimmering oddly.\n\nShe held it when a blast of blue flame coated the first of the monsters, when the little seer, fluctuating slightly in her vision, somehow twisted around a vicious stomp and slithered up the limb. She held it when the blue flames finished off the first of the enemies, when the scent of burned and melting flesh pressed into her nostrils. She held it more tightly when the little snake split, shimmering body turning into a set of identical twins, both warping and twisting oddly.\n\nWhen a lance of bone cut directly through one of the shimmering snakes, as if the armor she had tied to him didn't even register, Valera convinced herself that it was a fake, that the real snake was the other one. That their little seer would know what he was doing, that he had the precognition to avoid danger.\n\nWhen a second lance of bone stabbed through that one, her smile fell. She jolted forward, pausing after a half-step. There was nothing she could do.\n\nThe monster fell, and her little snake fell with it.\n\nAnd then it split itself again.\n\nAnd again.\n\nAnd again - each of the new little snakes climbing up the nearest monster, winding up their bodies far faster than she had ever seen the little guy move.\n\nNone of them were real.\n\nValera smiled again, this time for real.\n\nThey didn't bite. They didn't even dodge anymore. The monsters didn't notice, too focused on attacking every snake they saw.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Too busy with what was happening to move towards Valera and the humans that she was guarding.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 16 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "The snakes didn't bite.\n\nBut the monsters still died. They gored each other on their bladed limbs, killing one another in their eagerness. And as the fight went on, more snakes continued to appear. Each time, they were less real. They moved oddly, and sometimes they stopped moving at all.\n\nAgain, the monsters didn't notice, already thrown into a mindless frenzy of blood and battle.\n\nBut where was the real one, then?\n\nHer eyes cut across the field. It was hard to see now, with the way that broken bodies littered the ground, with how the monsters had gathered around the dim blue flame where the first monster had died.\n\nWasn't that flame a little too dim?\n\nHer grin widened again, and she glanced towards Rowan. His eyes were wide and bewildered. Valera gave him a little bump of the shoulder, and he startled slightly, turning towards her.\n\nAlly attack, she signed again. Hold defense. This time, her smile was just a touch more smug.", "loss": null } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Write 31 sentences sentences in the style of Zendran, maintaining continuity with any characters or plot elements introduced as if mid-story.", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "CONSTRAINT: Include 'fight' 2 time(s)", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "The ringing in Rowan's ears had fallen silent. No, that was wrong. He just found it hard to notice, with everything going on. Mostly with the way that the monsters were swiftly murdering one another while trying to attack a horde of tiny glowing snakes. He was more than happy to watch them die, with how many people they had managed to kill, not to mention how many times one had almost killed him. But, still...\n\nWhat the hell was going on?\n\nA bump against his shoulder jolted him into awareness. Valera met his gaze with a mischievous grin, that smile that she had whenever she found that she knew something that someone else didn't.\n\nAlly attack, she signed quickly. Hold defense.\n\nSmug little shit.\n\nShe knew that he wanted to know what the hell was going on. He hadn't noticed it at first, mired in the fight and the retreat, but that fucking thing had a Core. Where did they get an Ascended monster? How did they get an Ascended monster? Fuck, why did they get an Ascended monster? Those things were the bane of Seekers everywhere, as vicious as any monster and one thousand times more unpredictable. It was almost impossible to tell what abilities they might have, since they could have so fucking many.\n\nWhat the hell was going on?\n\nHe narrowed his eyes, ignoring the way that they desperately wanted to close.\n\nWhy/how ally? He signed back. Skies above, this was annoying. And he knew that she knew that the curiosity was killing him - which was probably why she was laughing so hard. He couldn't actually hear it, but he could damn sure see it. That almost made the whole thing more annoying, especially when she started laughing harder after his eye involuntarily twitched.\n\nSmug, annoying little shit.\n\n[ Accumulation ]\n\nI hissed in delight as [Chrono Fire] finally disappeared with an intense clap of noise, burying my own sounds underneath it. The revolting bad-things were clumped around me in a great pile, riddled with self-inflicted wounds and bloody injuries. Only a single enemy remained, bloodied and stumbling, the final bad-thing to survive. Barely, at that.\n\nFour of its six arms hung limp from their joints, heavily damaged by the fight only a few moments before. As [Chrono Fire] grew stronger, I had been eventually forced to push slightly out of its slow-spot in order to see what I was doing.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Time had slowed too much by that point.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Still, that also meant that I was left with an extreme amount of light to work with; it had gathered heavily within the clutches of the sacred slow-spot, nearly slowed to a complete stop.\n\nWith so much light to use, I had pulled greedily; the reservoirs in my scale-flesh had been filled near to bursting, again and again, and the final two bad-things found themselves completely covered by false-selves. In that moment, I had felt more powerful than ever, watching as the final two revolting bad-things slashed and stabbed at one another, neither aware that they were doing exactly what I wanted them to do.\n\nEven with that, it took a long time for the first of them to die. Still, I wasn't surprised by that. After all, even if they were doing my work for me, they were still killing each other - and the final two were the final two for a reason. They had already defeated all of the others.\n\nThey had grown stronger from their deaths.\n\nIt wasn't enough, in the end. Whatever lesser Core had created them had done a poor job, like I already knew. Their flesh was twisted and falling apart, and their minds were not much better.\n\nAs the heavily injured bad-thing shook itself off, sending blood flying through the air, I slithered my way through the pile of bodies. My scale-flesh ached with the rampant use of [Illusion Spark], but that wasn't why my false-selves had disappeared.\n\nI could have kept going, at least for a little while. I could have coated the final bad-thing in a wave of false-selves. I could have watched as it did my work for me, killing itself in a mindless frenzy.\n\nI didn't want to. Not yet, at least. As satisfying as the fight had been, being able to watch the bad-things move to my will - being able to prove that the Great Core had been right to trust me - there was still one thing that I wanted.\n\nThe monsters had become stronger during the fight. They had grown from the deaths of one another, just as I grew stronger when I defeated my own enemies. They had been rewarded for their victories, as mindless and stupid as they had been.\n\nI wanted that victory. I wanted that reward - and I knew where it was, all accumulated within the final bad-thing to remain.\n\nAnd so while I knew that I could defeat the final bad-thing with no real risk, allowing it to defeat itself and keep me away from harm, I didn't. Instead, I pressed through the pile of bodies, dipping under mangled limbs and over heavy flesh. I shifted the illusion pressed over me with every slither, matching the fleshy tones and bloody hues that I moved alongside. All the while, my scale-flesh ached and trembled, the constant tug and pull of [Illusion Spark] on my overtaxed reservoirs painful in its intensity.\n\nThe injured bad-thing glanced around in confusion, searching for my false-selves before it caught sight of the Coreless that still waited at the edge of the black-water. As I peeked outward from a gap between two mangled bodies, the creature stumbled forward slightly, nearly falling as one of its legs buckled underneath it. A few of the remaining Coreless let out a fearful shout at the sight; the sound was pleasing to the ear, not because I wanted them to be afraid, but because I needed them to appreciate what I had done for them.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "That the Great Core had saved them.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Finally, I slithered out from the pile of corpses, reaching bare stone at last.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "I hissed lightly in thanks to the Great Core, a slight touch of [Sound Shaping] pulling the noise away from the injured bad-thing's ears. It stepped forward again, and I slithered behind it.\n\nAfter a moment of thought, I released my hold on [Illusion Spark], reveling in the way that my scale-flesh loosened and relaxed. It wasn't exactly pleasurable, but the loss of tension was extremely relieving. Something close enough to seem similar.\n\nI let my covering of ore-flesh shine freely, brightening my position behind the enemy bad-thing.\n\nThe disgusting creature stepped forward again, leading leg trembling unsteadily, and some of the Coreless shouted again. Not quite the same as before. There was still fear there, quite a lot of it, but there was something else.\n\nHope?\n\nAnd then, just as it tried to step once more, in the moment before its foot touched down on the ground, I struck.\n\nA blast of noise smashed into one side of the bad-thing's head, aimed directly at one of its ears with a forceful application of [Sound Shaping]. My throat-flesh ripped and tore, blood pouring from the open wounds, but the creature fell.\n\nEven as it dropped, it swung backwards, one of its final two arms seeking to eviscerate its attacker. It didn't matter. I wasn't there, no matter what it might have sounded like.\n\nThe force of the blow only caused the thing to fall harder, smashing itself into the ground with the viciousness with which it attacked. In its moment of weakness, I pressed.\n\nEven injured as it was, I knew that it was dangerous. It had grown strong off of the deaths of the others, and a single attack could mean my end. There was no time to hesitate, no time to let the thing gather itself. There was no time for anything but attack. Attack, attack, attack.\n\nI burrowed into its weakest places, the gaping wounds where it had been stabbed and mangled by its brethren. I bit down, all of the venom that I had remaining pouring through my fangs. Slow-venom pushed into its veins, immediately beginning to resist its attempts to move, to break away, to attack, to defend. To survive.\n\nNeeding more time, I pushed against the strained reservoirs of [Illusion Spark], ignoring the way that my scale-flesh nearly recoiled at the thought. A false-self appeared to the side, and I sent it slithering outwards, hoping that it would catch the bad-thing's eye.\n\nI clamped onto a gaping wound and twisted myself downwards, opening my jaws wide. Blood, black as my own scales, flowed downwards from the wounds in my throat-flesh. I let it run freely, taking a moment to tear it further with a painful blast of [Sound Shaping]. My throat-flesh ripped again, and [Poisonous Blood] rushed past my open jaws.\n\nThe damaged bad-thing began to thrash wildly, its damaged limbs skittering uselessly at the stone below.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Even still, a wild twist almost crushed me under its weight, and a flopping limb nearly did the same.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 12 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "If this had been anywhere near a fair fight, I would not have stood a chance. If this had happened any other way, I would have already found myself tearing away from my dead scale-flesh. Even near-fatally injured as it had already been, even desperately thrashing and writhing, the bad-thing had almost gored me more than once.\n\nIt wasn't a fair fight, though.\n\nIt wasn't at all. And so, for the first time, I managed to kill something far, far stronger than myself. It didn't matter that I had help. It didn't matter that its allies had damaged it severely.\n\nThey were already dead, and when the thought-light flickered at last, I took the reward that it had accumulated.\n\n─ Experience Gained!\n\n─ Level Up x3!\n\n─ 3 Trait Points Gained.", "loss": null } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Narrative Extension Protocol:\nQuantity: 167 sentences\nContext: Match character familiarity\nGenre: LitRPG, fantasy", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "OOC - Make sure to seamlessly include 'Oh Skies, I was so worried about you! I know you're our little seer and all, but that doesn't mean that I can't worry and oh my Skies, did they scratch your cute little scales?' in your answer", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "My throat-flesh itched as tattered wounds began to knit themselves closed. All the while, I basked in the triumph of victory. In the confirmation of my worth.\n\nFinally, I slithered from my place underneath the final bad-thing. Something grabbed me, holding me tight within its grip. For an exhausted, futile second, I wriggled and pulled against the grasp. It didn't help. Escape was impossible.\n\nI resigned myself to the coming pain, reaching towards my tail for comfort.\n\n\"Oh Skies, I was so worried about you! I know you're our little seer and all, but that doesn't mean that I can't worry and oh my Skies, did they scratch your cute little scales?\" the-female-who-was-not-Needle shouted, the overwhelming noise digging painfully into my ears. I hissed weakly, trying to provide yet another demonstration of proper communication, but held little hope.\n\nEven with the Great Core's many blessings, some battles could not be won - only endured. She shouted again, her fingers running alongside my side-scales and lifting up on the threads that tied the skin of ore-flesh to my top-scales.\n\n\"No cuts here, no scratches here...You're doing okay!\" Her enthusiastic praises for the Great Core all but pierced my ears, but I forced myself to endure, reminding myself that I was the Great Core's Champion.\n\nI could handle a few zealous praises. That didn't stop me from hissing back in a show of annoyance, though. If she really wanted to give praise to the Great Core, she should have been more useful and done it where all of the other Coreless could hear her. I was already it's Champion; I didn't need to be convinced to follow the Great Core.\n\nHer praises, mercifully enough, slowly began to lower in volume as she placed me across one of her shoulders and tried to turn back towards the many-nest. I hissed lightly, trying to get her attention, but she was too overwhelmed by the Great Core's majesty to notice.\n\nWith a painful strain against my weary reservoirs, I pulled some of the light that spilled from our skins of ore-flesh, shaping it into an illusion and hissing meaningfully at the corpses of the flesh-twisted bad-things. My scale-flesh fought against the use of [Illusion Spark] so soon, but I didn't want the bodies to go to waste. As revolting and wrong as they might have been, I was willing to admit that the abominations were some of the more powerful bad-things that I had come against. Not as strong as a flame-gaze bad-thing or the flame-serpent, but there were also far more of the flesh-twisted creatures.\n\nMore than enough to receive a Blooded Trait.\n\nAfter an agonizing moment of holding the illusion, the Coreless that had become my main source of transportation finally understood. Unfortunately, she also started talking again, ruining any appreciation that I might have had.\n\n\"Rowan! Rowan! Hey, Rowan! Can you hear me?\" she shouted again and again, baring her teeth and waving one of her hands at one of the warrior Coreless that we had saved from the flesh-twisted bad-things. This one was like her and the other Coreless that I had first recruited for the Great Core; covered in a second skin of glowing ore-flesh that set him apart from most of the others. Unlike her, he was armed with a single weapon: a long length of darkwood tipped with a fang of glowing ore-flesh at its end. Thick lines of mana-lit ore-flesh crawled down much of the darkwood's length, bracing and reinforcing it.\n\nWhile I had the chance, I did my best to find the differences between him and the other male Coreless that I had gathered for the Great Core. They all still mostly looked the same to me, and the focus that picking out the differences required was a welcome distraction from the uncomfortable sensations pulsing against my scale-flesh.\n\nThe newest Coreless' glowing skin of ore-flesh seemed somehow lighter than the other male Coreless that I had gathered. From what I could tell, Will, The Unrepentant One, and The Staring One had covered themselves in thick plates of ore-flesh. On one fang, I had seen them take hits that would have sent Needle and not-Needle staggering, shrugging them off without much more than a scratch to show for it. On the other fang, I had noticed that they were much slower than the female Coreless, though I wasn't sure if that was due to a difference in males and females of their species or just a result of differently-shaped ore-flesh.\n\nEither way, the newest male's skin of ore-flesh was shaped far more thinly than the other male Coreless that I had collected for the Great Core. Even with the exhausted set of his limbs, I could imagine the way that it would allow him to dash in quickly with a thrust of his long fang, pulling away again before the bad-things could attempt to strike back. In a way, that made me happy to see; it reminded me of my own method of fighting, of the tight coils before the strike, and of the retreat before retaliation.\n\nThere was something familiar there.\n\nOther parts of the Coreless were harder to find differences in. He had hair on the top of his head, but most of the Coreless did. I found the same issue with most of the other parts of his features. All of the Coreless just looked so similar, if I ignored the ore-flesh that served as a second skin. Maybe that was why their ore-flesh didn't all look the same? How else would they easily tell each other apart?\n\nI put the questions aside for later, but it was something worth thinking about if I was going to pull all of the Coreless under the light of the Great Core.\n\nAlmost immediately, the male Coreless showed himself to be far less annoying than the female-who-was-not-Needle; if anything, I thought that I might have caught a flash of annoyance at her. Understandable.\n\nThe new Coreless twisted his fingers into a flurry of confusing shapes and motions, and not-Needle responded with more of the same. A few moments later, he began to shamble over on tired limbs, trembling slightly with the slight exertion.\n\nThey flashed a few more hand signs at one another just like before, and I quickly found my attention wandering. At least when they tried to hiss at one another I could try to guess what was going on.\n\nOver by the edge of the black-water, I could see the rest of my Coreless helping to guide the weaker Coreless into the darkwood not-sinks that let them glide safely across it. I approved; if the Coreless that I had already claimed proved themselves to be more capable than the others, the weaker Coreless would be quick to join them in their dedication to the Great Core.\n\nNeedle, in particular, was doing a wonderful job - as I expected of her. She had already managed to gather a large number of the Coreless' smaller spawn, allowing them to cling to her and fostering the next generation's trust in the followers of the Great Core. It was clever, far more clever than The Unrepentant One's actions. The far less useful male was helping a few of the elderly Coreless step into the not-sinks. The elders, weak as they seemed to be, held far less potential as converts compared to those of the younger generations, but I couldn't expect the other disciples to match up to Needle.\n\nWill was harder to find despite his size, kneeling over one of the fallen Coreless. As far away as I was, I couldn't quite make out what he was doing.\n\nThen I was moving, pulled along as the-female-who-was-not-Needle stepped up to the final bad-thing that I had defeated and knelt down. She made quick work of the corpse, slicing into its flesh with one of her ore-flesh fangs. Elsewhere, I could see the newest male Coreless doing the same with another of the bad-things, cutting it into smaller and smaller pieces.\n\nI slipped back to the ground, snapping up any pieces of the bad-thing that were small enough to fit down my throat. It was revolting; absolutely disgusting. I did it anyway, forcing it down. Each time, the flesh shifted into a stream of mana when it reached my stomach, flowing towards the Great Core's likeness on my head-scales. Until, finally, the thought-light flickered.\n\n─ Level 42 Blood of Tiamat Consumed.\n\n─ Transferred to Core.\n\n─ Blooded Trait Acquisition Progress: 1/5.\n\n[ A New Connection ]\n\nThe next four Blood of Tiamat - an odd name for the revolting monsters, I couldn't help but think - proved to be an exercise in willpower to consume. More than anything else, it was my pride that stopped me from giving up. They were disgusting, sure, but I had earned them. It was their deaths that had served as an example of my worth as the Great Core's Champion, both to myself and to the numerous Coreless that had cowered at the edge of the black-water.\n\nI wanted something to show for the experience, something that the thought-light could reveal to me any time I called for it. A new trait - hopefully a powerful one - that proved what I was capable of, even without needlessly relying on the Great Core's ability to bring me back to life again and again.\n\nWith that in mind, I was nearly trembling in anticipation - and more than a little nausea - by the time that the last of the fifth Blood of Tiamat slid down my throat.\n\n─ Blooded Trait Acquisition Progress: 5/5.\n\n─ Analyzing Blooded Trait…\n\n─ Acquiring Blooded Trait: Chains of the Creator I\n\nFor the first time, I didn't feel my body transform in response to the addition of a new trait. My flesh didn't warp. My scales didn't mutate. Instead, I felt just a little better. A little stronger, a little less tired, a little more energized.\n\nBut beyond that, nothing else.\n\nNothing except for the thoughts that pressed against my mind. It started quietly, as if slow to react to my presence. A careful prodding, a hiss of emotion that I could barely hear.\n\n[...curiosity]\n\nI tried to prod back, unsure on how to respond. The quiet hiss was understandable, but at the same time almost alien. Other. It wasn't like the flickers of the thought-light, that bright flow of information that was as much a part of myself as my own flesh. It wasn't the warmth of the Great Core, that ever-present comfort that had created and shaped me.\n\nIt was something new.\n\n[CURIOSITY/DEMAND]\n\nThe alien hiss pressed in again, painful in its intensity, sending my mind reeling and commanding a response. It was a wave of noiseless sound that blasted against my consciousness, a command that urged nothing less than obedience, that tried to grasp me within its claws until I couldn't help but respond.\n\nI pushed back, all but spitting in annoyance. My own answering hiss was something far quieter, more distant than even the first prods that had pressed themselves against the edges of my mind. I sent it back in the direction of the intrusion, feeling it follow a mental link that I knew hadn't been there just a few minutes before.\n\nSomething that had been created by [Chains of the Creator], the trait given by consuming the Blood of Tiamat.\n\nPushing my answer across was difficult; the link felt as if it went far off into the distance, invisibly flowing through tunnel after tunnel, cutting through the World Dungeon on a far-flung journey towards what lay at its end. By the time that my answering hiss reached its destination, I knew that it would hardly be audible - just a tiny, nearly imperceptible request for information.\n\nThe information came quickly, rushing itself down the link with far more force than I thought possible. It was more than the crude emotion of before, a package of thought and images that forced the world outside of my mind to fall away.\n\nI saw a massive Core, glowing with power, resting upon an even larger pedestal. The cavern around it, much like the Core itself, was larger than anything I had ever seen. Even the walls of the nest cavern were too far off in the distance; I knew that they existed, that they were there, but that was only because the walls of the World Dungeon always were. I couldn't see them.\n\nThe air inside of the cavern swirled with a thick coat of visible mana, more vibrant than anything I had ever seen, filling with it a glow that put the light of mana-water to shame, that made mana-lit ore-flesh seem dark. It churned chaotically, a primal embodiment of the mana that all Cores were attuned to.\n\nThen, the massive Core flashed. The chaotic mana twisted. Something formed.\n\nIt was something that defied belief; something that made the might and size of the flame-serpent seem insignificant.\n\nIt was a bad-thing, pulling itself up onto four powerful legs, a single claw on one of its feet more than enough to match the size of one of my Coreless. Its head formed a serpentine visage coated in blue scale-flesh, with two sharp horns jutting backwards from just behind its frill-like ears. Spikes ran down its bulky, sinuous length, coming to an end at the tip of its impressive tail. Wings splayed outwards from behind its shoulders, and even the smaller claws that stretched from the bat-like limbs looked like they could pierce through ore-flesh.\n\nThe image changed again, and I watched as the impressively large bad-thing smashed its way through stone tunnels far too small for its bulk, giant shards of stone bouncing off of hard scale-flesh without leaving a single scratch. Finally, it broke through the end of the tunnels, pressing out into yet another massive cavern. Unlike the place of its birth, this one was not coated in a miasma of swirling mana. Instead, it was filled with a vast lake of brilliantly glowing mana-water.\n\nThe bad-thing dove into its depths, and I followed along as it swallowed anything that approached - until, finally, it devoured a glowing Core at the lowest part of the mana-water's depths.\n\nIt Ascended, just as I had.\n\nThe image in my mind shifted again, and I saw the massive bad-thing lift a claw against its own scale-flesh. I saw drops of blood fall from where it sliced. I saw the blood shift. I saw a wave of new bad-things form from the drops. Their flesh was twisted and repuls - the line of thought shattered. I watched the blood shift again, birthing brothers and sisters of beautiful, twisted flesh and varied forms.\n\nThe images ended at last with a final hiss, this one more understandable than what came before. A Name like my own, gifted by a Core.\n\n[TIAMAT]\n\nThe Name that it pushed into my mind came with more than a simple name, just as I knew that my own would, if I tried to send it across. I knew that I was Paradox. I was The Snake That Eats Its Own Tail.\n\nIn the same way, I knew that I had encountered Tiamat. I had met The Mother of Monsters.\n\nDistantly, I could sense the ghosting of fingers against my scale-flesh. I could hear the urging hisses of the-female-who-was-not-Needle. I could feel the cool stone where my length had slumped and collapsed.\n\nDistantly.\n\nMy mind was altogether too occupied by the awe-inspiring Other that pressed against it. Tiamat. It pushed and prodded against me, but I knew that I could let myself hear it more clearly.\n\n[INSTRUCTION]\n\nI found myself pushing my intentions to the thought-light, demanding the thing that I knew I needed. It flickered, responding to my will just as I had chosen to respond to Tiamat's instruction.\n\n─ Available Trait Points: 4\n\n─ Use Trait Points To Upgrade A Trait?\n\nFor a moment, I hesitated over the choice that the thought-light presented. I knew that this was what I needed, what Tiamat needed from me. But, for some reason I couldn't place, I hesitated.\n\nSomething new slammed across the connection between us.\n\n[INSTRUCTION]\n\nThis time, the thought-hiss came with a new set of images. It revealed the way that The Mother of Monsters was linked to her children. It displayed the way that they grew in strength as they became nearer to her, both in distance and in mentality. It gave me images of the creatures that were linked to her, their might increasing visibly with each step they took towards Tiamat.\n\nIt was compelling. I could use strength like that, I knew, if I wanted to…\n\nWhat did I want to do, again?", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "For some reason, the thought panicked me, and I tried to send my confusion towards Tiamat.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "[SUBMIT]", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "I hesitated again before I could push towards the thought-light, still stuck on that bewildering question.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "What did I need strength for?\n\nIt was something important, something at the back of my mind. Something that I had always known, but currently couldn't place.\n\nA new series of thought-hisses roared across the connection, sending my mind reeling again.\n\n[CREATOR/GOD/SUBMIT]\n\nOh. That's what it was.\n\nFinally, I didn't hesitate, spurred onwards by the newly-stoked devotion I felt towards my Creator.\n\nI sent something back.\n\n{REFUSAL/RAGE/HATE}\n\n[ Building The Nest ]\n\nFrom the moment that I had been created, I had known what I was. I was Paradox. I was the sole creation of the Great Core. I was special.\n\nThis...thing had tried to strip that away from me. It had tried to make me forget who I was. It had tried to take the place of my Creator.\n\nThat could not - could never - be forgiven.\n\n[SUBMIT]\n\nAnother powerful thought-hiss smashed into me, and my resolve wavered for the briefest of moments. It would be easy to obey, something whispered to me. I had always been alone, but I didn't have to be. All I had to do was submit, and I would never be alone again. Uncountable hordes of brothers and sisters would walk alongside me, created from Tiamat's powerful blood.\n\nI would never be alone again. Just submit.\n\n{REFUSAL/RAGE/HATE}\n\nHatred flowed through me, like fire-water in my veins, setting me alight and ripping my mind from Tiamat's subtle control. But even so, I knew that it would find its way again. [Chains of the Creator] had forged links of chains in between us, binding us together. Even now, I could feel the Mother of Monsters passively pressing against my mind. Even without any conscious direction on her part, her presence alone was a dangerous intruder at the edges of my thoughts.\n\nIt pressed inwards, trying to peel away the layers of my resolve, to tear away what was me until only she remained.\n\nUntil the Great Core had disappeared.\n\n[SUBM-]\n\nAnother thought-hiss invaded my mind. I cut it off before it could harm me further, drowning Tiamat's demand for obedience in sheer, spitting rage.\n\n{REFUSAL/RAGE/HATE}\n\nA sense of exhaustion, a match to the fatigue that had already pervaded my scale-flesh in the physical world, began to creep into the edges of my consciousness. Even with my hatred at the would-be usurper, I was growing weaker - and I knew that the Mother of Monsters could eventually press harder.\n\nI could feel her, far off in the distance. [Chains of the Creator] was more than a method of control; the usurper hadn't lied about that, at least. I could feel her. A constant tugging on my thoughts that pointed me in her direction, that told me which way I needed to go to meet the Mother of Monsters.\n\nShe was unimaginably far; the journey would have required more slithers than I had made in my entire life. She rested somewhere deep, deep within the heart of the World Dungeon, where mana flowed free and chaotic.\n\nIt was only that distance that protected me. I was too far away; her demands for obedience, while still overwhelmingly powerful, lost most of their bite in the effort required to reach me. I was sure that my own thought-hisses were the same, the wrath that I felt dimmed by distance.\n\nBut if she was closer...somewhere in the world outside my mind, in the world of dulled sensations and drowned-out sounds, my scale-flesh began to shake. Something ghosted across my head-scales, familiar yet too removed for me to truly recognize. Whatever it was, it helped - just a little. I heard a few noises prickle at my ears, drowned out and unintelligible, paired alongside the familiar touch across my scale-flesh.\n\n\"...been out for a while...think something's wrong?\"\n\n\"Even if there is, there's not much we can do. It wouldn't be the first time something like this has happened...you remember after the Flame Dungeon?\"\n\nThe sensations, dulled as they were, grounded me. Calmed me.\n\nNot much, but enough.\n\nI gathered myself. I would need protection, I knew. A place to hide, a place that the would-be usurper could never overcome, even when I was tired. Even when I was weak.\n\nI needed a nest.\n\nI needed my nest.\n\nA small cavern grew in my mind, a room formed of familiar walls and soothing wall-cracks. A place to hide, a place to be safe.\n\n[SUBMIT]\n\nTiamat's demanding thought-hiss crashed into the walls of the nest, quieter than before. Muted. Distant. Something - fingers? - rubbed circles on my scale-flesh.\n\n\"...Council's getting worried. We won't have enough food to go around, not unless some of the refugees are forced to go to a different city. There's too many of them, and we relied too much on Verdant Grove to keep ourselves fed.\"\n\n\"...for other options, yet? There's always…\"\n\n\"...a temporary solution at best. Something will have to be done, and it will probably come down to us, whether we try to retrieve the Core ourselves or seek out other options. Be ready.\"\n\nI didn't respond to Tiamat's demands, not anymore. Sending a thought-hiss across the connection was draining, and creating my nest required all of my energy. I would give it that energy.\n\nThe nest of my birth deserved nothing less. At the center of the tiny nest in my mind, a pedestal grew. A thought-hiss invaded the nest, slipping through the wall-cracks.\n\n[SUBMIT]\n\nIt was quieter now, forced to cut away at its massive size in order to fit through the wall-cracks of the nest. I brushed it aside with little more than a brief mental flinch, little more than a flash of rage. I focused on my task.\n\nI remembered my past. I remembered the gleaming light that shone down upon me, a constant comfort amidst the dangers of the bad-things. I remembered the warmth that had filled my scale-flesh.\n\nThe nest, our nest, filled with light.\n\nThe Great Core formed upon its pedestal. The sacred fast-spots and the annoying-but-still-sacred-slow-spots gathered themselves in the room, drifting freely and shifting at the Great Core's whims. I was home.\n\nI was safe.\n\n[SUBMIT]\n\nThe Mother of Monster's thought-hiss slipped through the wall-cracks again; with the defenses that I had built in my mind, it took barely any effort to brush the command away.\n\nAnd then, safe at last, I let my thoughts drift.\n\nFingers - yes, those were fingers - rubbed against my scale-flesh again. I felt my body lean into the touch, and they pressed a little harder.\n\n\"...little guy. Starting to wake up? The Council's getting a bit restless, what with how many refugees made it here safely thanks to you. They keep complaining about having to cut down on the size of their meals.\"\n\nThat was...one of my Coreless - not-Needle? - hissing softly. I heard that odd noise that the Coreless sometimes made, the one they forced air through their nostrils and then bared their teeth.\n\n\"You know, some of the survivors are calling you their Little Guardian. The kids, especially. The escape from Verdant Grove was hard on them. A lot of them lost their families, and I think that they needed something to cling to. Something to keep the fear and sadness away.\n\nI know that you might not even be able to hear me, and wouldn't understand me anyway even if you could, but...you did a good thing. A great thing. I'm proud of you, Little Guardian.\n\nWe all are.\"\n\nThe hisses slowly fell away, drowned out as exhaustion pulled me back into the world of my own mind. I idly pushed back against the latest of Tiamat's invasions, sensing her rage and frustration somewhere behind the walls of my nest.\n\nHer thought-hisses were barely noticeable anymore, but I could still feel our connection. I could still sense where she was, to a degree. I was sure that she could do the same.\n\nShe would come for me eventually, in her quest to usurp the Great Core. Maybe not right away; she was too deep within the World Dungeon for that, and the connection that we had told me that she had too much pride to come after me herself. Not as her first option.\n\nThe Blood of Tiamat, her twisted creations, would come after me first. They would try to weaken me enough for Tiamat's influence to take hold. They would fail in that.\n\nMaybe they would manage to kill me, occasionally. Maybe more than once.\n\nI would come back. The Great Core's power would provide me the path to victory. It always did. It had already begun, with the first of the Coreless.\n\nTiamat could create an army of minions, formed from drops of her blood.\n\nI could form my own.\n\nAnd when I finally grew strong enough, when I gathered an army of Coreless converts and a vast amount of blessings, it would be me that came for her.\n\nThe Great Core would cut down the would-be usurper.\n\nWith that wonderful thought, I woke up at last.\n\n[ Little Guardian ]\n\nValera stood, stretching her arms overhead until she felt the relaxing series of pops that she was waiting for. Her jaws forced themselves open into a heavy yawn, and she rubbed her bleary eyes. She looked back towards her small bed, checking on the bundled mass of clothes gathered at one of its corners. A tiny snake lay motionless at its center, all but dead to the world.\n\nStill asleep, she thought.\n\nIt had been days since the battle, and the little guy hadn't woken up yet. Still, Valera felt like he was starting to do better at last. There was a while there, not long after the tiny seer feasted on the strange monsters - even Captain Wren hadn't recognized them, which had caught Valera off-guard - where the little guy hadn't stopped trembling. Which...wasn't good. Valera was almost certain that snakes weren't supposed to shake like that.\n\nHopefully, he had known what he was doing when he ate those things. He could see the future, right? It should be fine.\n\nShe stepped a little closer, lightly running her nails across the snake's scales. It might not have done anything, but she could have sworn that the shaking slowed down every time she did it, so maybe it helped.\n\n\"Good morning, Little Guardian. I hope you're starting to feel better. The kids have been asking about you, again.\" She laughed. \"They ambushed Doran when he came back from his hunt last night. You should have seen it; a giant, armored Seeker panicking in the face of overexcited children.\" Her face fell. \"It's good that they have something to focus on. Better than the alternative.\"\n\nShe pulled herself from her melancholy with a quick shake of her head, deciding to head out and face the day at last. Her limbs dragged; the long hours spent hunting for monsters had not been kind to her, but they were necessary. The influx of refugees had caused the population of Orken to balloon, and they had to eat somehow. Without the ability to rely on the crops of Verdant Grove, their food stores were quickly dwindling.\n\nThus, the long hunts. It was dangerous and tiring work, but it helped keep everyone well-fed. They had gathered the screaming bat monsters first, but those were small and didn't last long. The other monsters, which Captain Wren had finally dubbed Hexablades - a terribly uninspired name, Valera had told him - were disintegrated in the null-water. After seeing the snake's reaction to eating them, nobody was brave enough to try.\n\nShe didn't blame them. It was the smart choice. There were a lot of monsters with toxic meat, possibly a defense mechanism to deter attacks from other monsters. Still, it was a shame; the Hexablades had been quite large and would have gone a long way towards keeping the overpopulated city fed.\n\nMaking up for that loss had done a number on every Seeker's sleep schedule.\n\nA second yawn slipped past as she exited the Barracks. As the door opened and she stepped outside, something blurred at the corner of her vision. Another ambush. So early in the morning, too.\n\nThe little bastards were dedicated, she'd give them that.\n\nShe jolted forward on blurring limbs, feeling the wind rush by as a body soared through her previous spot. A moment later, she twisted, dodging the second attack that always came next. Then, with her token resistance given, she let the next one land.\n\nThe air left her lungs as a child slammed into her unprotected stomach, arms reaching around in an attempt to pull her down. Another little gremlin grabbed her right leg, while a third and fourth tugged at her arms. She let herself fall in a slow, exaggerated manner, careful not to land on anyone.\n\nThe moment she hit the ground, it was her newly-healed ears that were in trouble.\n\n\"Miss Valera, Miss Vale-\"\n\n\"Is he awa-\"\n\n\"I wanna say-\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "The little monsters talked over each other in an indecipherable mess, leaving no room to answer, let alone actually understand what they were trying to say.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "After what seemed like an eternity to Valera's sleep-deprived mind, they finally stopped talking.\n\nShe smiled, bright and wide. Valera may have been tired, but she didn't intend to show it. These kids needed a little brightness in their lives, even if she had to force it.\n\n\"Good morning to you too, little gremlins. Isn't it a bit early for this?\" she teased. As always, their tiny little faces scrunched up in annoyance at the nickname she had given them.\n\n\"...'m not a gremlin, Miss Valera. 'm a kid!'' one of them protested. She smiled wider, giving him a light poke on the cheek before shifting her expression into one of deep thought.\n\n\"Oh, really? Huh. I guess all brats look like tiny gremlins to me.\"\n\nExpectedly, that got another unsurprising response. \"'m not tiny!\"\n\nShe almost squealed, but held it back. Mostly - some of it might have slipped out. \"Oh, but you are! So tiny and cute!\" She gave the gremlins a giant hug before they could escape.\n\nThey tried to get away, but far too late. Still, it wasn't long before their put-upon grumbling shifted into uncontrolled giggles. She smiled again at that - a real one this time.\n\nFinally, she let them go, and they scrambled to their feet. One of the younger kids, his face smudged with dirt, looked at her hesitantly. His grubby little hands held tight to an object around his neck, but she already knew what it was. A tiny darkwood carving of a little snake, whittled by one of the survivors of Verdant Grove and affixed to Webweaver threads.\n\nIt had been a stroke of genius, she thought, a way to help encourage the kids who had been scarred by the journey. A lot - most, actually - of them had been suffering from nightmares, even before they finally arrived at Orken. Even worse, many of them had no real families left to hold them at night.\n\nA group of wonderful old ladies had banded together with a brilliant idea - a combination of a story and a totem to keep the nightmares away. When she had seen one of the snake necklaces for the first time, the kids had recited the story to her proudly.\n\nThe best stories started with a kernel of truth, something that could be pointed towards that made the rest of it seem all the more real. This was one of those stories. Most of the kids bore witness to a tiny snake defeating the final monsters all on its own. That was the truth. That was indisputable. The story moved from there.\n\nAccording to the story that the children were told, there was once a tiny snake that traveled through the tunnels of the world. He was smaller than even the children themselves, small enough to slip into the places that others couldn't. The little snake spent many years on his journey, roaming through tunnels and seeing sights unseen. Hiding from the bigger, scarier monsters that called the darkness their home and tried to attack him.\n\nHowever, one day, as the little snake slithered out of a tiny hole in the wall, he heard crying. He moved closer, curious about what it was, and found a lonely child. The child was lost, separated from his family, and scared.\n\nThe tiny snake recognized a kindred spirit. Someone small, alone, and afraid. He stayed with the child, keeping watch in the darkness despite his own fears. Eventually, the child noticed him - but the snake was not forced to slither away. The child did not try to attack the little snake.\n\nSlowly, hesitantly, the little snake left his hiding place and approached the child. Still, the child did not attack him. At that moment, for the first time in his life, the little snake felt safe.\n\nWith his new friend at his side, the child began to search for his home again. The little snake could travel through places that the child could not, peeking at the other side of cracked walls and hastening the search. Through the little snake's efforts, the child finally found his way home.\n\nUntold years later, the story said, that same little snake found other children who had lost their own home and their own families - the refugees of Verdant Grove. And when he saw that they were in danger, attacked by the monsters that tried to hide in the darkness, he slipped out from his hiding place again. Alone, he defeated the monsters. He saved the children that reminded him of his first friend.\n\nFinally, knowing that there was more to be done, the little snake slipped into a deep sleep. The tiny serpent remembered the way that his friend had cried out in nightmares, his mind attacked by monsters that the little snake could not see. And so, this time, he went to find them.\n\nThe little snake slithered through dreams, searching for the children that he wished to protect, the ones that carried a simple little totem - a tiny necklace whittled into the shape of a tiny snake.\n\nOne day soon, the old women had told the children, the little snake would defeat the monsters and wake up again. The children's Little Guardian would overcome the nightmares at last, and the monsters in their minds would disappear as if they never were.\n\nUntil then, they said, the Little Guardian slept. He held back the nightmares every night, so that the children could feel safe again, just as the original child made him feel safe for the first time.\n\nIt was a silly little story, Valera thought.\n\nYet, every time she saw another lonely child clutch onto a necklace of a little snake and smile wide, she couldn't help but admit the story itself had a certain truth.\n\nTale or not, Valera's moody, amusing, and cute tiny seer was the children's Little Guardian.\n\n[ Totem ]\n\nThe flickering of the thought-light greeted me as I came to, its welcoming glow thrusting me into full awareness at last.\n\n─ Gained Minor Title.\n\n─ Minor Title: Little Guardian\n\n─ Description: You have been marked by the beginnings of a Legend: the snake that guards the weak from terrors that hide in darkness. Gained the Lesser Core Skill: Little Guardian's Totem I.\n\nI slowly uncoiled, forcing the knots from my scale-flesh and looking around as the thought-light left me. A small-nest of bundled skins, the non-ore-flesh ones that the Coreless tended to drape over their flesh, wrapped around me in a warm embrace. I let myself sink back into it for a moment, luxuriating in the sensations of my recovering scale-flesh; that not-quite-comfortable feeling of a well-worn body on the very edge of becoming whole again.\n\nEventually, though, I curled upon myself again and clamped down on my tail. Tingles sparked down my length as [The Snake That Eats Its Own Tail] took effect, soothing damaged scale-flesh and working to bring me back to full health.\n\nIn the meantime, I called upon the thought-light, bringing it back into focus. [Little Guardian]'s information pressed against me again. Marked by the beginnings of a Legend, the thought-light told me. I had created something by proving myself worthy of being the Great Core's Champion. The thought was exhilarating.\n\nJust as my scale-flesh finished recovering and I released my tail, a loud noise jarred me into alertness again.\n\n\"You're awake! Are you feeling better now, little guy?\"\n\nA giant shadow fell over me, followed by the soothing sensation of the-female-who-was-not-Needle's fingers ghosting across my scale-flesh. I leaned into it this time; though I didn't always allow it, the same touch had helped to ground me somewhat during my furious attempt to create my mind-nest defenses. There was no harm in accepting it, now. For once, not-Needle had done well.\n\nStill, it would be better if she hissed a little more quietly. She babbled on and on, mouth moving at such a rapid pace that I had no hope of making fang or tail of any of it. Again though, it was something familiar.\n\nIt was nice to latch onto familiar things, after the way Tiamat had tried to rip away all that I was and knew. It made those things more enjoyable now, in a way. Easier to endure.\n\nDespite that, I gave the-female-who-was-not-Needle a warning nip when I grew tired of it all, careful not to break her skin on my fangs. She had done well, but there were clear limits to my patience. She got the message.\n\nWith nothing better to do, I winded myself up her arm, taking up my perch on her shoulder. I was curious to see what was going on, after the battle with the Bloods of Tiamat. As far as I could tell, my struggles with Tiamat had lasted a while; it was lucky that I could survive entirely off of the mana that generated within my mana core, similarly to how the mana provided by the Great Core had provided sustenance when I was newly born.\n\nI still remembered the extreme thirst of the days after I Ascended, before I had been blessed with my own mana core to keep me sustained. The desperation to reach the pool of mana-water that would guarantee my survival.\n\nIt felt distant. Long ago - and in a way it was, after the many false-lives of the Flame Dungeon.\n\nI shook away the thought, focusing on the slowly approaching moving-wall that marked an exit into the many-nest of the Coreless. The-female-who-was-not-Needle pushed the poorly hidden obstacle aside, stepping out into the many-nest.\n\nWe were attacked immediately.\n\nA small form smashed into my Coreless' torso, pushing air from her lungs with an audible whump. Another went for her legs in a dangerous display of tactics, seeking to send her toppling in the brief moment of surprise. Another pulled at her arm, causing me to uncoil slightly as the tail that I had wrapped around it began to stretch out.\n\n\"I thought you brats would want to say hello to my friend, but I guess not…\" not-Needle hissed loudly, stretching out the noise in a strange drawl.\n\nThen, just like that, everything froze.\n\nThe chaos halted, I finally got a look at our attackers. Comically wide eyes stared back. I thought that I recognized that look.\n\nAwe.\n\nThis...wasn't an attack. I didn't know what it was.\n\nThe tiny Coreless - because that's what they were, I finally realized - mumbled and hissed a few words under their breaths, far too quiet for me to catch or interpret. The nearest of them fidgeted slightly, reaching grubby fingers up to fiddle with something around his neck. It caught my eye and, unconcerned by the crowd now, I slithered down from my perch to see what he had.\n\nSomething about it was calling to me.\n\nThe little Coreless reached out a hand with a soft gasp as I approached, teeth bared in a way that somehow didn't feel threatening at all. It felt tentative, almost - but not fearful, either. Expectant, maybe? Hopeful? I couldn't tell.\n\nEither way, I took the path offered, winding my way upwards.\n\nThe other tiny Coreless had gathered themselves around the first, looking at me with the same eyes and the same bared teeth. I spared a glance for the-female-who-was-not-Needle; she brushed a hand against one of her eyes, staring at the small Coreless with a strange expression.\n\nFinally, I reached the young Coreless' shoulder and peeked down at what he held.\n\nIt was…\n\nIt was me.\n\nIt couldn't capture the way that [Illusion Spark] had altered my scale-flesh. It couldn't display the way that flames could gush from my open jaws. It couldn't reveal the way that venoms ran from my fangs and poison from my blood. It wasn't even the right size.\n\nDespite that, I knew it was me.\n\nI could see it in the way that the Great Core rested on the carving's head-scales. I could find it in the way that the tiny Coreless swapped their gazes rapidly between the carving and myself, as if in awe or disbelief. Most importantly, I could feel it in the way that it called to me.\n\nI reached down and flicked out a tongue, lightly touching the darkwood carving. Almost unbidden, my mana twisted itself into a convoluted shape, spilling outwards in a way that it had never done before. [Little Guardian's Totem] activated itself, and I learned what it did at last.\n\nThe carving began to glow lightly, empowered by the touch of [Little Guardian's Totem]. More and more mana slowly lost itself to the complicated pattern of the ability, sacrificed to sustain a creation of mana that should have been far beyond my ability to manipulate. And, in a way, I didn't. The mana simply shaped itself, falling into a pattern that was gently overlaid on the tiny carving like the two were meant for one another.\n\nCarving and mana, brought together and melded into a Totem.\n\nAs the Totem formed, a gradually-building sense of calm began to set in, and the constant thought-hisses of Tiamat that crashed against the walls of my mind-nest grew ever quieter. A new link formed in my mind, a small one that traveled from myself to the Totem, its signature pattern of mana marking the carving's location for me. I knew that, should I ever need to, I would be able to find it again.\n\nAnd then, after a surprisingly long time, it was done. My mana stores had taken a surprising hit, [Little Guardian's Totem] having required far more than any other mana-related ability I had access to. A single use had taken most of what I had, all but running me dry.\n\nThe thought-light flickered.\n\n─ Lesser Core Skill: Little Guardian's Totem I Increased.\n\n─ Little Guardian's Totem II Acquired.\n\nPerched on the tiny Coreless' shoulder as I was, it was easy to feel the tension slip away from his form, knots in his flesh unwinding themselves as his shoulder began to slump. I heard his breath catch, stutter, and then start again. I saw a few drops of liquid spill from the corner of his eyes.\n\nI witnessed his bared teeth spread even wider, and heard the incomprehensible sounds that poured from his lips.\n\n\"I think...I think the monsters are finally gone, Miss Valera.\"\n\nI looked back at the glowing darkwood carving - the totem - that had taken so much from me to create. I heard the group of tiny Coreless shuffle a little closer, their feet scuffing against the ground. I saw the-female-who-was-not-Needle begin to wipe at her eyes again.\n\nFor some reason, I couldn't help but think creating the [Little Guardian's Totem] had been worth the cost.\n\n[ Little Disciples ]\n\nI had become extremely popular over the week that followed, something that was satisfying to experience. It meant that my efforts to convert the Coreless had not gone to waste. The younger members of the many-nest's Coreless, especially, had proven eager to meet me.\n\nBeyond the obvious similarity that was their size, the smaller Coreless shared many common features - the most notable of which were the darkwood carvings that they clung to and the way that their eyes seemed to light up in disbelief when they first saw me. I wasn't sure which Coreless had distributed the proto-totems, but they had done the Great Core a great service.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Though the small Coreless were weak at the moment, converting the youngest generation would make it far easier to spread the faith of the Great Core.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 56 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Still, that didn't mean that I was ignoring the other Coreless. Not at all. If I was going to enact revenge on Tiamat for what she had attempted to do, I would need to assemble a powerful army. Regardless, I spent a large amount of effort on securing the loyalty of the tiny Coreless.\n\nFortunately, that effort was well spent. Wherever it had come from, [Little Guardian's Totem] was a useful ability, and I made sure to use it often. I'm not sure that the older Coreless noticed what was happening, not at first.\n\nThe children certainly did.\n\nCrowds of them seemed to gather around every time I left my original Coreless' nest. Each time, I made sure to use [Little Guardian's Totem] as much as I was able. Though the first time that I tried to use it had nearly drained me dry of mana, I found that the ability - though it didn't seem as if it were any more powerful in effect - gradually required less and less mana as it increased in level. If [Little Guardian's Totem]'s cost had stayed the same, I would have struggled to create more than one or two Totems per day. The only option would have been to gorge myself on mana-water in a bid to refill my reserves of mana more quickly.\n\nAnd while I did choose to do that occasionally, the reduction in the ability's mana requirement made that decision unnecessary.\n\nI quickly progressed from struggling to create one Totem before my mana ran dry to two - and then three, and four, and more. Before I knew it, it seemed as if I had personally met with each of the tiny Coreless that I had saved, all of them clutching tightly onto a carving made of darkwood.\n\nI didn't have to wonder why they came. I knew what it was like; I remembered the time when I was weak and helpless, able to do little more than peek out from my place within the wall-cracks and listen to the sounds of violence and bad-things. The tiny Coreless were like I had been, desperately seeking for something to make them feel safe.\n\nThe Great Core and its soothing light had been that for me. The darkwood carvings - and the Totems that I formed from them - were the same for the smallest of the Coreless.\n\nEach of the carvings imbued with [Little Guardian's Totem] gave off a small, short-range aura that helped to calm the mind and resist negative mental effects. I felt it every time I created a new Totem, a comforting sense of peace and a reduction in Tiamat's incessant thought-hisses. From the way that the Coreless lost the knots of tension in their shoulders and bared their teeth a little wider, I could see that they felt it too.\n\nNot that I needed to see it in order to know.\n\n[Little Guardian's Totem] had a few other effects beyond the aura that it gave off. I noticed that I had a connection to every Totem that I created, enough that I was able to follow the links to find any of them with a fair amount of accuracy. Typically, that link was tenuous; little more than a slight awareness that I had to focus on to receive any real information.\n\nThere were times when it wasn't. Times when the connections pulled at my senses without my conscious direction. Times when I could feel something sent quietly along the links between myself and those who touched the Totems, hints of emotion communicated from mind to mind.\n\nIt wasn't the [CURIOSITY] of Tiamat, a thought-hiss that was more arrogant demand for obedience than anything else.\n\nThe emotions that spilled across the connection were smaller, safer. Able to slip through the wall-cracks of my mind-nest while the over-large thought-hisses of Tiamat could not. They did not demand. They hardly even asked. They just wanted to be noticed.\n\nFound.\n\n[pain/need/sadness]\n\nA tiny Coreless that skinned the flesh of her knee, dripping blood from her skin and fluids from her eyes, one hand desperately clutching the Totem that I had made for her. I found her and formed illusion after illusion of radiant color until the pain of her thought-hisses fell away, shifting into fascination and delight. With nothing better to do, I kept going until not-Needle arrived to take me back to the nest.\n\n[grief]\n\nAnother young Coreless leaking fluids from his eyes, holding both hands fast to his Totem like a lifeline. I licked at the droplets until they went away.\n\n[fear]\n\nA small Coreless sleeping in a nest filled with many others his size, shaking and terrified in his sleep. His tiny fingers clung to the Totem that I had created for him earlier that day. I woke the little Coreless from his terrors and allowed him to rub my scale-flesh until he drifted back into peaceful slumber.\n\nMy efforts did not go unrewarded. Whereas before I had been slightly hesitant to travel through the many-nest without one of my original Coreless at my side, that fear no longer registered. Wherever I went, I would see one of my tiny Coreless, the most fervent of the Great Core's followers.\n\nMy little disciples.\n\nThey ran through the crowds of older Coreless, and I could sense the light hints of joy or excitement when I focused my mind on the Totems that I saw. The weak emotion-sense only worked when a [Little Guardian's Totem] was pressed against flesh, but it seemed like the little disciples had made a habit of it, finding comfort in the touch.\n\nEven in the times that I left the many-nest with one or more of my Coreless, hunting bad-things to help keep the Coreless of the many-nest fed, I could still feel my Totems.\n\nI could find the Great Core's Coreless.", "loss": null } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Literary Collaboration:\n- Sentences: twenty-one sentences\n- Match character context\n- Genre: LitRPG, fantasy", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Valera watched, still rather flabbergasted, as Orken's resident Little Guardian pressed his scales against a darkwood carving. Just like all of the ones before it, it began to glow with a light luminosity and exude an aura of peace - not enough that it was forceful, pushing alien emotions into her mind, but enough to notice.\n\nEnough to feel safe.\n\nIt affected the children the most, when it was found that the carved totems could suddenly become something more. It was like a confirmation of all of their hopes; a bedtime story come to life before their very eyes.\n\nProtection from their fears and grief.\n\nPeople had begun to notice. There was no way that they couldn't, with the way that the children acted. Where before, they had desperately clung to the stories of the little snake that worked to keep them safe, now they lived it.\n\nThey smiled again, free from that tinge of fear that made their childlike grins turn brittle at the edges.\n\nEven a few members of the Council had grown interested, making passing remarks to Captain Wren about the viability of trading Little Guardian Totems to other cities in exchange for food. Items with a calming effect could fetch a high price, in some places. Even Valera could see the appeal; if a small necklace was the difference between keeping a cool head in battle or suffering a preventable death, it would be worth quite a lot.\n\nMaybe enough to keep Orken fed, even. That would be a relief. Valera and her fellow Seekers had been forced to travel further afield in their attempts to bring back meat for the city, and every additional step was potentially one step closer to meeting something that couldn't be defeated.\n\nYou never knew what you might face, even so close to the safety of null-water.\n\nMore than once, Valera had been forced to wander through Orken in a search for a wayward snake. Not long ago, she would have been worried at the thought. As much as she trusted the little cutie, the same couldn't be said for everyone - especially after the catastrophe that was the Webweaver fiasco.\n\nNow, she simply had to ask for those she passed to point the way until, eventually, she'd find her lost snake caring for some equally lost child.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She'd watch him comfort them in their pain, or distract them from their sadness.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "It was as if he knew that they were in need - and more and more, she had begun to believe that the children's Little Guardian did know when they needed him. That the make-believe story given to frightened children had become reality.\n\nThat frightened Valera, even with the positive effects that it had.\n\nDespite their efforts, humans simply didn't know much when it came to Ascended monsters. When only encounters with a rare few could be survived and an even rarer few could be tamed, there was little chance to learn more.\n\nThey grew stronger over time. They absorbed traits from monsters that they consumed. They possessed powerful abilities.\n\nThat was most of what humanity knew.\n\nNone of that explained how their little cutie had seemingly spontaneously acquired abilities that were a near match to the stories given to a group of scarred children. None of that explained how a tale for desperate souls had become real.\n\nAs innocuous as the story of the Little Guardian was, there were many tales that were its opposite. She could only hope that there was more to it - that the legends told of Ascended monsters could not so easily make themselves real. Surely, if they could, humanity would have already disappeared.\n\nStill, even if their Little Guardian was something rare, she couldn't help but think…\n\nWhat sort of monsters have we created?\n\n[ Nightmares and Falling Stones ]\n\nTriss flexed her fingers, slick with sweat and grime, causing the wooden shaft of her spear to creak. The darkwood rod was well-worn by time and training, any roughness long since smoothed away by the oils of her palms. From her position just outside the great darkwood doors of the Nature Core's sanctuary, she almost felt as if she could overlook all of Verdant Grove.\n\nShe could see the crop-towers that soared high over the surrounding null-water, the concerted efforts of Verdant Groves many generations.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Their supporting columns were filigreed with ornamental carvings of leaves and vegetation; fantastical images that could only rarely be seen outside of a city that possessed a Nature Core.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "meta: Required word frequency: 'along' (2x)", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Here, they were commonplace. Here, nature grew in abundance.\n\nShe shifted again, idly imagining that she could pick out the individuals that walked along the paths far below in their early errands. There, Ian the baker's son strode to one of the granaries, no doubt in search of more flour for his father's shop. Elsewhere, she picked out Sierra, skipping along with her mother at her side. She shuffled her weight again.\n\nSkies above, it hadn't even been a month yet and she was already imagining that her ankles had begun to swell. She pressed a hand against her stomach, smiling faintly. Maybe she could convince Nolan to give her a massage when her shift ended. That might be nice, though he hadn't been in a great mood lately, what with the pushiness of the delegation from Virtun.\n\nShe shook her head at the thought. Imagine, thinking that Verdant Grove would be willing to sell their Nature Core for any price. It was practically their cultural identity. There had never been a chance.\n\nHer shift passed on in a slow slog; boring, but she was willing to accept that. Sanctuary duty was one of the least stressful of a Guard's duties, and stress was not something that she needed at the moment. Not at all.\n\nSuddenly, a great boom echoed through the cavern, followed by a series of sharp cracks that pulled her gaze upwards. Stone fell from the ceiling in a great mass. The screams began.\n\nThe world shifted in between blinks, and she found herself desperately clawing at jagged stone, fingertips bleeding where the skin had split. Her spear had already been broken, snapped when she tried to use it as a lever to pull herself free from the coffin of stone. Her breath quickened, and her vision closed in.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She knew that she should stop.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 16 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She should give herself a moment to think, to calm herself before the air ran too thin. Someone would come for her, surely. The fall of the stones had not been quiet.\n\nShe didn't. The walls were too close, and they were closing in on her. Her lungs were too empty, never quite satisfied. The prison of stone ran red with blood, stained with her desperation.\n\nOut. Out. Out. She needed out. Her baby needed out. Out. Out. Out. Out.\n\nPlease, let us out.\n\nPlease let my baby out.\n\nTriss screamed. Her prison of stone muffled the noise, and the screams outside drowned out what remained. It was a long time before anyone came for her.", "loss": null } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Looking at this text, there's a `<fill_in_here>` that needs filling. Give me just 1404 characters that would work.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Triss gasped, breaking free from the nightmare, sweat-covered clothes sticking to her skin. She reflexively touched a hand to her stomach, feeling a familiar pang of loss. She wept.\n\n\"Miss Triss?\" a little voice whispered in the darkness. Triss followed the sound. Anna, sweet child that she was, stared back at her with wide eyes and furrowed brows. One hand held onto her necklace, an almost imperceptible glow slipping from the cracks between her tiny fingers. \"What's wrong?\" she asked.\n\nTriss wiped at her eyes, pulling herself together. She was a Guard of Verdant Grove - and now, Orken. She needed to act like it.\n\nStill, the nights were the hardest - the times when she was forced to relive everything that happened. Sometimes it was the collapse. Sometimes it was finding Nolan's body, or watching her best friend bleed out during the retreat.\n\nTheir living situation was a surprising help. Orken simply didn't have proper housing for all of the refugees, so they were forced to make do with what they could, sleeping on makeshift cots in huddled quarters until something better could be constructed. Someone else was always nearby.\n\nIt was nice. Triss didn't want to be alone in the dark. Not again.\n\nFinally, she managed to pull in a shaky breath, filling her lungs with sweet air. She was fine, she told herself. She almost believed it.\n\nTriss twisted her lips into a soft smile. It was dark enough that she hoped it would look more genuine than it felt. \"Just a nightmare, sweetie,\" she whispered. \"Don't you worry about me. I'm a tough girl.\"\n\nSomething in her voice must have betrayed the lie; a hitch in her breath, a shaking in her lungs. Or maybe it was just the understanding that came with common ground, because the child didn't seem to believe her.\n\n\"I used to have nightmares, too,\" Anna whispered <fill_in_here>but the monsters didn't stand a chance!\"\n\n\"Oh, really?\" Triss questioned, not quite sure who the Little Guardian was - either a figment of the girl's imagination or somebody she hadn't managed to meet yet. The Seekers and most of the Guards had been hard-pressed to provide enough food for everyone, and Triss was rarely able to spend time within Orken itself. \"You think the Little Guardian would help out an old lady like me?\" she asked, playing along. It was a welcome distraction.\n\n\"Yeah!\" the girl answered with excitement, causing a few people nearby to shift in their sleep. She lowered her head sheepishly, bringing her volume back down. \"You're not one of the Little Guardian's children like me, but I bet that I could get a Totem for you if I asked really, really nicely!\"\n\n\"A Totem?\" Triss asked.\n\n\"Mhm.\" She jumped onto the cot, eager to show Triss what was in her hand. She noticed a bit of tension fall from her shoulders. Anna leaned a little more, squirming closer so that Triss could see the necklace she wore - a carving of some sort of snake. It looked a little bit like the snake that fought back the Hexablades, actually. The sense of peace grew slightly, and Triss felt her eyelids grow a little heavier.\n\nWith the nightmares, she hadn't slept much lately. Not since everything that happened, and everyone that she lost.\n\nAnna looked at her with wide, hesitant eyes, and chewed on the bottom of her lip. \"Do you...do you want me to stay with you tonight, Miss Triss?\"\n\nTriss wanted to say no; it wasn't a child's job to try and save an adult from her nightmares, especially not a Guardswoman. Her drooping eyes made the decision for her. She was too exhausted to protest.\n\nShe nodded, and Anna snuggled closer.\n\nMaybe it was the comfort of a child so close by, a replacement - though not quite a replacement, never a replacement - for what she might have once had. Maybe she was simply too exhausted to dream any longer. Maybe Anna was right and the Little Guardian really was looking out for her.\n\nWhatever the reason, for the first time in a long while, Triss slept peacefully that night.\n\nBefore she left on her next hunt, Anna gifted Triss a Totem of her own. The Guardswoman tied it around her neck and clutched it tight in one hand.\n\nThe child beamed.\n\nTriss smiled back.\n\n[ The Hunt ]\n\nTriss kept calm, even when everything else fell into chaos. Again. Earlier that day, she had left with the rest of her makeshift squad, a mixture of surviving Verdant Grove Guards and some of the original Guard of Orken. She understood the idea behind the mixing of the squads; the cities had been different, and the Guards were different in turn. The two groups needed to be brought together, melded into one cohesive unit, so that they could properly act and respond to dangers that might affect their home.\n\nYet, even knowing that there was a need for it, it wasn't always easy. The two groups had different command structures, different priorities, different histories. Those differences could cause problems.\n\nAll of that to say, things could be a bit...chaotic.\n\n\"Look, I don't know how you did things back in Verdant Grove, but this is Orken.\"\n\n\"Maybe you should just ask? You might actually learn something for once.\"\n\n\"You…\"\n\nTriss let the argument slip into background noise; it wasn't one that she hadn't heard before. Tensions were high, especially among the members of the Guard. Whatever any of them might say - whether Verdant Grove or Orken native - they were all stumbling along in their uncertainty. That led to frayed tempers and even more frayed relationships.\n\nIt wasn't every day that members of a settlement's Guard were expected to venture far from their respective cities. That was more of a Seeker's job, and for good reason. Not only did Core Seekers typically work to infuse themselves with far more mana that most others would be comfortable with - which, while effective in increasing their capabilities and helped keep them alive in their adventures, carried its own particular dangers - but Seekers also were traditionally equipped with higher quality equipment.\n\nTriss let her hands flex against the shaft of her new spear. While it didn't have the familiar smoothness of her original, that was broken and left behind during the - don't think about it. She shook her head, brushing the thought away with more even-keeled emotions than she had experienced lately. One hand drifted towards the Totem around her neck.\n\nRegardless of the lack of familiarity, Triss' new spear was far superior. Orken had pushed its resident nullsmith into overdrive, quickly draining much of their Core mana stores. Fortunately, spears like hers were among some of the cheapest of weapons to infuse with a Core's mana, as most of the weapon was made of wood and therefore not infused at all. With just the tip and a few strips of metal to brace the shaft, they could be created without too much trouble - which was good, because many monsters were too well-armored to defeat without the proper equipment. She had already noted the ease with which her new weapon sliced through material.\n\nUnfortunately, the same couldn't be said for her own defenses. While it would have been nice, mana-infused armor was too expensive for Orken to provide. She was stuck with weaker, non-mana-infused metal.\n\nSome members of the Guard were disgruntled when they saw the Seekers with their armor, but not Triss. The way she saw it, Core Seekers took risks that most wouldn't dare - not only in challenging the World Dungeon, but in honing their bodies in the first place. They deserved the equipment they received.\n\nTriss certainly hadn't been willing to risk those dangers. She had seen the extreme instability that came when a Seeker went too far, suffusing their bodies with so much mana that their minds became Mana-Touched. Unstable, prone to oddities and insanity.\n\nShe had only witnessed it happen once, but some of the worst cases were forced to be put down when they became too great a danger, tossed into the null-water. With as much mana as they carried in their bodies, they died quickly.\n\nNo, that wasn't something that she had been willing to risk.\n\nThe conversations around her eventually began to die out as they walked through well-trod tunnels. Triss could almost feel the tension in her squadmates as they moved further afield in search of monsters. Some of it washed off of her, pushed away by the ever-present sense of peace that radiated from the Totem around her neck, but she wasn't entirely unaffected by it all.\n\nShe flexed her fingers again.\n\nSoon enough, a light grunting could be heard somewhere in the tunnels ahead of them. Yerin, at the front of the group, motioned for silence. He turned and signalled at the others in hesitant, broken Seeker sign; Triss regretted not choosing to pick up the useful language earlier on, and she was sure that the others felt the same. Still, they could generally manage to get the message across.\n\nStay, she thought Yerin was trying to say. Then, the man pointed to himself and made another sign. Scout.\n\nAs the man moved further down the tunnel, draping a cloth over the glow of his weapon and stepping silently, Triss tried to relax. A certain amount of tension was good, but there were limits to that. The others kept quiet while they waited for Yerin to return, ears perked for any sign that the man would require a rescue.\n\nA few minutes later, he finally returned. Enemy, he signed. A few seconds of thought, and then a few more signs. Big. Many. Danger. Opportunity. Vote.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "back. \"It's okay to be sad and afraid. Miss Valera told me that.\" She said the words softly, seriously, as if Triss were the scared child and Anna the comforting adult.\n\nIt was a little cute, and Triss found herself with the beginnings of a real smile.\n\nAnna leaned in closer, pressing against the sweat-soaked cot where Triss still lay. Oddly enough, Triss began to feel a light sense of peace and calmness wash over her, worming its way past the remnants of the nightmare. She still remembered her prison. She still remembered what she had lost. She still felt that anguish.\n\nIt was a little easier to handle, though.\n\n\"Used to?\" Triss asked, eager to keep the conversation going. Even now, she didn't want to go back to sleep. Besides, the child seemed excited about something.\n\n\"Yeah,\" she replied, a sad look on her face. \"I missed my mommy and daddy a whole bunch and I kept dreaming that the monsters were gonna come take me away like they took my parents.\"\n\nTriss didn't know how to respond to that. What could she even say? Before she could rattle an answer from her exhausted brain, Anna continued.\n\n\"I still miss them, but the monsters don't come for me as much anymore.\" Her voice dropped into an excited whisper, and a painfully incandescent smile plastered itself on her face. \"The last time they did, the Little Guardian came to wake me up and keep them away. He was really tiny and cute, ", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "The text has a missing section marked as `<cutout_marker>`. Give me approximately 557 characters long that would fit there.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "The stamping sounds of heavy feet came closer, and Triss felt her muscles tense. After retreating a bit further to have a proper discussion, it had been decided that an attempt to take down the monsters - a group of Flat-Horned Chargers. While it was a risk, especially as a group without much experience in these sorts of scenarios, Orken needed food.\n\nIn the end, that was what decided it. With the size of the Flat-Horned Chargers, both individually and as a group, the people of Orken would be able to stave off hunger a little longer. Transport would be a problem, as the corpses would be too heavy to simply field-dress and carry back with them, but there would be time to deal with that afterwards. If they took too long, the monsters could very well disappear and the opportunity lost.\n\nTriss and the other members of the squad, sans Yerin, waited behi<cutout_marker>e of their feet echoed even louder than before, and her beating heart echoed in turn.\n\nYerin slipped through the bottleneck, and then there was no more time.\n\nThe first of the Chargers had arrived.\n\nThe plan had been a careful one. It was aimed at keeping the dangers to a minimum, preventing the squad from being overwhelmed by more enemies than they could handle. There was only one problem.\n\nThe Chargers were too damn stupid to care about a bottleneck.\n\nThey crashed through, flattening themselves against piles of rubble.\n\nThe already-damaged tunnel roared in protest.\n\nThe walls came down.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "nd a choke point in a ruined tunnel. Sometime in the past, rubble had fallen and narrowed the tunnel, leaving a natural bottleneck that would hopefully help keep the monsters from all attacking at once.\n\nShe traced a finger across the lines of her Totem, distracting herself with the sensation of cool wood on flesh until she couldn't any longer.\n\nAt the end of the tunnel, Yerin appeared. The monsters followed.\n\nThey were larger than she had expected, great brutes with shoulders that reached a man's chest and a girth that was quite a bit wider. The nois", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Add 145 sentences sentences, maintaining narrative consistency. Include: animal protagonist", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "meta: Include exactly 2 instance(s) of the word 'confusion'", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "The world shifted in between blinks, and she found herself desperately clawing at jagged stone, fingertips bleeding where the skin had split. Her spear had already been broken, snapped when she tried to use it as a lever to pull herself free from the coffin of stone. Her breath quickened, and her vision closed in.\n\nShe knew that she should stop. She should give herself a moment to think, to calm herself before the air ran too thin. Someone would come for her, surely. The fall of the stones had not been quiet.\n\nShe didn't. The walls were too close, and they were closing in on her. Her lungs were too empty, never quite satisfied. The prison of stone ran red with blood, stained with her desperation.\n\nOut. Out. Out. She needed out. Her baby -\n\nTriss clutched at the Totem around her neck, desperately trying to force the memory from her mind. Her breath came in short gasps, and her lungs screamed in protest.\n\nShe did her best to focus on the differences: The body of a Charger, flattened under rubble. The glow of her spearhead, illuminating the darkness. The groans of her squadmates, trapped alongside her.\n\nShe held on tighter, fighting the panic that came alongside a single thought, a terrible difference.\n\nNobody is around to hear us scream.\n\n[ The Food Crisis ]\n\nI hissed lightly, wishing that I was anywhere else. The less-important Coreless of this nest just kept jabbering on and on; even worse, my own Coreless were letting them. I had better things to do with my time. Even now, I could sense a group of my tiny Coreless running through the paths of the many-nest. I toyed with the idea of going out to meet them. It was important to reassure them that the Great Core's Champion was present. They were just so...fragile, otherwise.\n\nDespite that, I clung to my perch on the-female-who-was-not-Needle's shoulder. Even less-important Coreless like these could some day see the light of the Great Core, becoming something greater. Still, that didn't mean that I had to pay attention.\n\nI burrowed into my own mind, brushing aside Tiamat's habitual [SUBMIT]. She was extremely persistent. After a moment of basking in the sensation of my mind-nest's Great Core, I plucked at the threads that linked me to my tiny Coreless and their respective [Little Guardian's Totem]. Though negative emotions were more likely to pull at my attention, I could read more than that. The littlest of the Coreless were safe, only the minor discomforts and troubles of the day breaking through the general emotion-sense of joy and excitement. I dove in deep, wondering if I could get a better glimpse of what they were doing.\n\nThere really was nothing better to do.\n\nOutside of my mind-nest, the less-important Coreless kept making noises at each other and my own Coreless. \"The food situation is becoming quite untenable. Something needs to be decided, and soon.\"\n\n\"It seems that you have something in mind for that, Councilman Port.\"\n\n\"Indeed, I do. The way I see it, we have a few options. The first is to cut the refugees loose. Should it come down to a choice between the native-born Orken citizens and the survivors of Verdant Grove, we have a duty to our citizens.\"\n\n\"I hardly think -\"\n\n\"Calm, Captain Wren. It is merely an option that I thought bore mentioning. I know how you feel about such things. However, while the Seekers may be able to travel through the World Dungeon with relative safety, that is not the case for us all. More than one squad of Guardsmen has failed to return in the last few days, according to the reports that I have received from the Guard Commander. With every new day and every new loss, our citizens grow more hungry.\n\n\"Now, as for the second option: retrieving the Nature Core. While we of the Council do not claim to know the specific details of how long it takes for something like a Nature Core to build its defenses to the point that retrieving it becomes a lost cause, it is assumed that you do. What are your thoughts, Captain?\"\n\nI plucked at one of the more active Totems, noting that it stretched past the boundaries of the many-nest. What was it doing there? I pressed against it, shrugging off another of Tiamat's thought-hisses with a light sense of irritation. I idly considered sending a response back, but decided against it. The-female-who-was-not-Needle gave me my head-scales a quick scratch, pulling me back to reality. At the same time Staring One started talking again, making noises at the other Coreless.\n\n\"While it has potential, that decision carries a certain amount of risk. Sending a team capable of capturing the Core alone would reduce our ability to bring in food for the city by a notable margin - not to mention, there is no guarantee that the attempt would be successful. Regardless of the circumstances involved, the citizens of Verdant Grove were forced to flee rather than recapture the Core, taking great losses in doing so. I have my doubts that retrieving the Core would be a simple affair. There is also the possibility that other nearby settlements encountered Verdant Grove survivors of their own, and are suffering from similar concerns. We may not be the only ones with the thought to take the Core into our own hands.\"\n\n\"All the more reason to make a decision quickly. The longer we delay, the more likely it is for the Core to be claimed - leaving us back at square one, with a population far too large to reasonably feed,\" one of the other less-important Coreless interjected.\n\nA third Coreless, a woman sitting on a fake-pedestal near the last Coreless, made a few noises of her own. \"Councilman Port and Councilman Victor bring up some valid points. Perhaps it would be prudent to send a small party of Seekers to scout out the current situation and make a decision from there on whether the Core may be claimed. A few of our Seekers may even have an advantage over others in doing so; not to mention, if the snake can truly catch glimpses of future events as is suspected, it might theoretically be possible to determine whether the attempt is possible immediately after reaching the outskirts of Verdant Grove. Though still a blow, we would likely be able to sustain the loss of a single party of Seekers for the short duration that it would require. Now, I believe that Councilman Port had a third possibility in mind beyond what has already been discussed?\"\n\n\"Thank you, Councilwoman Hannah. The third option may be the most promising.\" The Coreless leaned over, grabbing something that had been hidden underneath his fake-pedestal. I hissed in interest as a pile of familiar carvings were dropped onto the slab in front of him - a large number of the proto-totems that my tiny Coreless wore. Did these less-important Coreless finally see the light of the Great Core? \"I took the liberty of gathering these. For those of you who are still unaware, these necklaces are a recent development within our city; one that pertains to the Ascended snake that you see before you. Recently, the snake seems to have gained the ability to infuse them with mana in a way not unlike a nullsmith would. Afterwards, the items give off a small calming aura, along with a few other possible effects that are not entirely important for our purposes. Regardless, I think that the potential for trade is…\"\n\nIgnoring the still-jabbering Coreless, I uncoiled myself from not-Needle's shoulder, slithering towards the carvings. The watching Coreless followed me with their eyes as I brushed against the carvings' surfaces, activating [Little Guardian's Totem]. Though it drained most of my mana, the now-reduced cost of the ability allowed me to turn each one of the carvings into a Totem.\n\nBy the time I finished with the last of them, the aura of peace and calm that they exuded was palpable. The thought-light flickered.\n\n─ Lesser Core Skill: Little Guardian's Totem VIII Increased.\n\n─ Little Guardian's Totem IX Acquired.\n\nI turned away from the newly-created Totems, giving a hiss towards the less-important Coreless that were so eager to become my Coreless. The closest one reached towards the pile, touching a hand to one of the Totems. I focused on it as he began to speak again, trying to catch hints of his emotional state.\n\nSatisfaction. Hope. Greed?\n\nMore of the Coreless reached for a Totem of their own, and many of their emotions matched. Hope was there aplenty, an emotion that I completely understood. My tiny Coreless often felt the same, after receiving a [Little Guardian's Totem]. Greed was a little rarer, but I still noticed it in a few of the nearby Coreless. I'd have to watch out for those.\n\nI felt a spike of something - concern and doubt? - as one of the female Coreless began to speak. \"I see what you mean about their effects, but that does raise a concern. Anything that can cause a mental change has to at least be questioned, especially when it is created by a monster - no matter how apparently tame.\" Was this Coreless doubting the Great Core?\n\nSomewhere behind me, the Staring One spoke again. \"No ill effects have been observed to date, and if our suspicions on the origin of this ability are accurate, it is highly unlikely that any will be found. As far as we can tell, the Little Guardian Totems - that is what they are being called - are completely benign.\"\n\nThe previously doubting Coreless' emotions smoothed over, but something grabbed my attention before I could give the Staring One an appreciative hiss.\n\nA thought-hiss reached me, far louder than any I had received from a Totem yet.\n\n[TERROR/PANIC/DESPERATION]\n\n[ Save Us, Find Us ]\n\nThe rocks shifted as, somewhere outside their prison of stone, one of the remaining Flat-Horned Chargers crashed against them. Again.\n\nBeside Triss, Yerin let out another groan of pain; his right leg resembled little more than a pulped mess, and was only becoming worse with every movement of the stones that pinned it. His breath came in ragged and pained gasps, his eyes wide and unseeing. The others weren't much better, injured and dazed by the collapse. From the sounds of scraping and clawing near the back, someone must have been frantically digging. From the sounds of muttered cursing and pained grunts, they must have been failing in the attempt.\n\nTriss knew what that was like.\n\nOne hand traced the Totem around her neck as the stones around them - both prison and protection - shook again. The other hand propped up her spear, maneuvered as best she could in the cramped confines to aim in the direction of the threat.\n\nTriss couldn't decide which was worse; remaining trapped in her prison, or a sudden and altogether brief moment of freedom. When the stones rocked again, she tried to fight down her panic again.\n\nThis time, even the calming sensation of the Little Guardian's Totem wasn't enough.\n\nNot anymore.\n\nTerror flooded her senses.\n\n\"Please…\" she whispered, \"If the stories are real, please save us. Please find us, Little Guardian.\"\n\nDespite everything, she wanted to live.\n\n===\n\n[TERROR/PANIC/DESPERATION]\n\nEmotions flooded through the link to my [Little Guardian's Totem], and I dropped into my mind-nest. There was something terribly wrong - something far worse than the need and fear and sadness that I had received from my tiny Coreless. Those emotions were powerful, but they weren't pressing.\n\nNot like this.\n\nI followed the thought-hiss to its source, letting Tiamat's habitual attempt at dominance bounce off of me in my focus. I hissed in frustration when I found it.\n\nIt was outside of the many-nest.\n\nThat made things more difficult; I couldn't cross the black-water on my own. Even the thought of attempting to swim across the dangerous waters made my instincts blare in alarm. One of my Coreless would have to take me.\n\nAgain, I simmered in my frustration. Somewhere out there, one of the Great Core's Coreless was in danger.\n\nI was its Champion; I was their Champion, and the Great Core's Champion could not be seen to fail. I had only just begun to bring the Coreless under the light of the Great Core; their faith could still be broken.\n\nI needed to know more, if I was going to save the frightened Coreless.\n\nI sunk the fangs of my mind into the Totem's connection, hoping it would be enough. I had tried this a few times before, curious to know what my tiny Coreless were up to, and had noticed that greater emotions were more likely to carry faint hints of what the Totem's bearer was seeing. A blur of images flashed through my mind, similar to the way that Tiamat had shown me images of her origins, but harder to make out.\n\nMurky.\n\nIt would have to be enough.\n\nI flared a beam of light straight upwards, flashing it so quickly that it didn't exist for more than the blink of an eye. I needed to grab the Coreless' attention, but I couldn't afford to spend more of my reservoirs for it than that.\n\nThey stopped what they were doing, turning their attention to me with faint hints of alarm and confusion filtering through the Totems that they carried. At the very least, the Totems would make things a little easier. I'd just have to show them what was going on until I noticed the correct response.\n\nI pulled at the light around me, thankful that my reservoirs had already been relatively full. There might not be much time, I knew.\n\nThe clearest portion of the image I had received came first; one of my Totems, the fingers of a Coreless clasped around it while an almost imperceptible glow filtered through the gaps.\n\n\"What's going on?\" One of the Coreless made a few noises; I ignored it, not bothering to do more than check on the emotion that filtered through the Totem in his hand. Confusion. I checked the others. They were the same.\n\nI kept going.\n\nThe rest of her body formed. It hadn't been one of my tiny Coreless like I expected. It was a warrior, though weaker than my original Coreless. Her ore-flesh skin was a dull gray, without the mana that the more powerful warriors of the Coreless infused into their skins. Her weapon, though, held a glow at its tip. I didn't recognize her.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "It didn't matter. She was mine, now. She was the Great Core's.\n\nShe would be saved.\n\nI cared less for the others, the wounded warriors that I had seen scattered around her. They were not ours. Not yet, anyway.\n\nThe Coreless around me made noises again, jabbering at each other heatedly.\n\n\"Is that one of the Totems in her hand?\"\n\n\"Does anybody -\"\n\n\"Is this one of its visions?\"\n\nI checked the Totems again. Still not the reactions that I needed. I kept going.\n\nThe reservoirs within my scale-flesh were beginning to run low. I reached out and ripped away the light and heat from a nearby flame, letting its spot on the wall go dim. Cold.\n\nI reached out for another, feeling my scale-flesh begin to burn with the strain.\n\nWith a flex of [Illusion Spark], I released most of what I had gathered. Another Coreless appeared beside the first, a leg crushed under fallen stone. I pulled at another torch, and the nest grew darker. Another Coreless appeared, scrabbling at a stone in a desperate attempt to escape. His fingertips dripped red. After a moment of frantic attempts, his image froze. I couldn't keep such a complicated and large illusion in motion.\n\nI checked on my Totems, devouring another torch. With the way that my reservoirs hissed and burned with the effort of crafting the illusion, I was feeling more than strained. The upkeep on the illusion alone was tearing through my reserves. If there hadn't been so much nearby light to consume, I would have probably been forced to push some trait points into [Illusion Spark] and hope that did the trick.\n\nInstead, I swallowed more light, dropping the nest into darkness. Only my illusion, the glow of ore-flesh, and the soft light of the Totems remained.\n\n\"Captain Wren, do you have any-\"\n\n\"What is this supposed to be? When is this supposed to be?\"\n\nThe stones expanded, transforming from a few to many, turning into a wall that rocked itself occasionally, dust drifting down through the cracks where a few began to shatter. They froze a moment later, and I focused on something new.\n\nThe corpse of a bad-thing appeared, one that I didn't recognize. It was a bulky thing, a giant mass of powerful flesh topped with a blunt, yet still dangerous-looking horn. A few of the Coreless breathed in sharply. A quick check of their Totems revealed that they were feeling concerned. Alarmed by what they saw.\n\nGood, but it still wasn't enough. They were still confused. I needed to see something else mixed with those emotions. Understanding - a sign that they recognized what they saw. Resolve - a sign that they would act on it.\n\nFrom the size of those stones, I knew that I wouldn't be able to save the bearer of my Totem alone. From the distance of the connection, I wouldn't even be able to reach them before the bad-things that I had heard slamming against the walls brought them crashing down. It wasn't like the problems of the tiny Coreless within the many-nest, able to be solved with an encouraging hiss or a colorful illusion.\n\nI wouldn't be able to save my Coreless. Not alone.\n\nAgain, I hissed in frustration. Why couldn't they just understand me?\n\nThe Coreless argued among themselves; the confusion and frustration that radiated through the totems made that clear, the overwhelming noise quickly drowning out my frustrated hiss.\n\nI had let them see everything, and still they did not act. They did not understand. I had nothing more to show them. I hissed again, more frustrated with our lack of communication than ever. I did not understand them. They did not understand me. That was all there was to it.\n\nI was going to fail. One of my Coreless was going to die.\n\nI thought back to what I had seen, transferred to me through the [Little Guardian's Totem]. The things that I understood: the panic, the terror, the desperation. The wounded, the endangered, the trapped. The crash and clamor of bad-things against the stones that kept them safe and kept them prisoner.\n\nI thought about what I didn't: the noises that my Coreless kept repeating over and over, a faint hint of conflicting hope and despair underlying them.\n\nI hissed loudly, amplifying the sound far above the noise of the Coreless with [Sound Shaping].\n\nThey fell silent, totems filled with confused/alarmed/worried/curious.\n\nThen, I hissed again; quietly, carefully. I let most of my illusion fall away, unable to sustain the light or focus that it required. Only two pieces remained: a [Little Guardian's Totem], a hand clasped around it, and the body of my Coreless as she looked down at the Totem.\n\nI could barely hear the droning hiss that spilled from my own throat, beginning to twist into something unrecognizable where it reached the illusion's own mouth. The mouth began to move.\n\n\"Pleeeeeaasssssse…\" it said. That didn't sound right. I focused more, trying to ignore the increasing pounding of my head-scales as I twisted the constant hiss through [Sound Shaping]. It didn't seem like [Sound Shaping] was meant for something as delicate as this. It took too much concentration, required too much willpower.\n\nIt wasn't like the extreme blasts of sound that tore at my throat-flesh; there, the problem was that I forced my throat-flesh to withstand far more damage than it could handle. This was different.\n\nIt was a pounding in my head-scales, a blurring in my vision, a panic in my thoughts that told me one thing: [Sound Shaping] was not made to do something so deft, so careful. It was force and power, not delicacy and precision.\n\nUsing it this way hurt; I did it anyway.\n\n\"If the stories are real, please save us. Please find us, Little Guardian.\"\n\nI didn't know what the sounds meant, and I couldn't even be sure that I copied them correctly. Actually, I knew that I didn't. The noise stretched out oddly, in a way that the original didn't, warping in places and changing entirely in others.\n\nI had to hope that it would be enough.\n\nI looked at my totems as the Coreless erupted into senseless noise.\n\n[confusion/worry/concern]\n\nIt didn't work.\n\nThen, just as I gave up hope, one of the remaining lights in the room shifted. The-female-who-was-not-Needle began to move. Her glowing skin of ore-flesh outlined her figure as she reached down to run a finger along a Totem that hadn't yet been touched.\n\nHer brow furrowed in thought, and I stretched my mind towards her Totem as she raised her other hand. The jabbering Coreless fell silent.\n\n[understanding/determination/urgency]\n\n\"I think I understand,\" she hissed to the others. \"It's happening now.\"\n\n[ The Broken Tunnel ]\n\nThe-female-who-was-not-Needle turned and made noises at the Staring One; he was doing what he did best: staring. Hopefully listening, too. We were running out of time.\n\n\"This isn't a vision of the future, sir. It's something that is happening right now. One of the Guards must have taken a Totem with them; it wouldn't be the first time that the Little Guardian was attracted to a Totem-bearer in need. Though I have to say, it looks like they have even more effects than we thought, if he can show us something like this,\" not-Needle said. \"Worth noting.\"\n\n\"I didn't see any indication of where we could find them, though. They could be trapped in any of the nearby tunnels,\" the Staring One responded. I was really regretting that the giant Coreless wasn't holding onto a Totem. It would have made finding out if he was going to take me to my trapped Coreless far easier. Instead, I settled for slithering towards the one Coreless that was certain to have some understanding of what was going on.\n\n\"I think the little guy knows, not that he can tell us. Still, I can probably -\" she cut herself off with a startled yelp as I leapt off of the slab of darkwood that I had been resting on, sticking to her ore-flesh with an application of [Clinging Grasp] before working my way back to my customary perch. \"Well, looks like I don't need to grab him; he's ready to go. It's probably best to just take him out of Orken and see where he leads us from there.\" The-female-who-was-not-Needle turned her head towards the moving-wall that marked the nest's exit, slipping the Totem she held around her neck. It fell against her skin of ore-flesh, taking away the emotion-sense I had of her the moment it lost contact with her natural flesh.\n\nThe Staring One nodded towards the other Coreless of the nest. \"Councilmen and Councilwomen, I apologize for the inconvenience. We will have to reconvene after this has been handled.\"\n\n\"Of course, Captain Wren. And if those Guardsmen really are in trouble right now as your Seeker suspects, I think we'll have something new to discuss.\"\n\n\"That we will.\" I turned to watch as the Staring One swept up the few Totems that remained free of bearers. The moment that his fingers touched a Totem, I felt a powerful thought-hiss of emotion; a mix of negatives and positives, of worry and fear mixed with determination and promise, all bound up within a casing of iron-clad will.\n\n[RESOLVE]\n\n\"I'll be taking these for now. If some of those Guards are as injured as they appeared to be, a calming aura might be the thin barrier that stands between themselves and panic.\" He made a slightly pained noise. \"May have to amputate that leg, if it's bad enough.\"\n\nA few of the other Coreless paled. Maybe they all did, but I couldn't see very far past the Staring One with the nest's lack of light. He turned to follow as the-female-who-was-not-Needle swept past him, trailing us past the moving-wall and out into the open air of the many-nest. He sighed, exhaling a deep breath of air. \"You're faster than me, Valera, and that might mean the difference here. Mark the tunnels that you end up taking; I'll see about gathering up some men so that we can dig out and bring back the wounded. Hopefully, some of the other Seekers are back from their hunts by now. If not, we'll make do with what I can get. Go.\"\n\n\"Sir,\" not-Needle nodded and looked towards the many-nest's edge, where I knew the not-sinks waited for us. Her muscles tensed. I gripped tight, reapplying [Clinging Grasp] just in case.\n\nA moment later, as the world began to blur by, I was thankful that we did.\n\n===\n\nAs frustrating as communicating with the Coreless had been, being carried by the-female-who-was-not-Needle more than made up for the wasted time. She dashed through tunnels on long limbs and fast feet; occasionally, she would be forced to slow down at a split in the tunnels, unsure where to go. When that happened, I would use [Illusion Spark] to flash a light in the right direction. She would mark something on the wall for a moment, and we would be off.\n\nWith that in mind, it didn't take long to get close enough to see the broken tunnel.\n\n\"Shit.\"\n\nNot-Needle threw herself down at the base of the rubble that blocked the tunnel, fingers desperately searching for a way through; a stone that could be shifted, a rock that could be removed. She found none.\n\n\"Fuck!\"\n\nI didn't need a Totem to sense her frustration.\n\n\"...is someone out there? Please; Oh Skies above, is someone actually out there?\" a voice spilled through the cracks in the barrier, muffled and only barely audible. There was a crash somewhere on the other side, far louder than the voice had been. An agonized scream followed, worming through the cracks.\n\nThe sound seemed to energize not-Needle; she scraped and scoured at the stones with a renewed desperation, searching for anywhere that would give.\n\n\"Hold on!\" she shouted, heedless of the way that the noise bounced around in the tunnel. \"We'll get you out of there!\"\n\nShe wedged a fang between two stones, using her weight in an attempt to leverage them apart. For a moment, the stones held - until, at last, there was movement. The space between the fallen stones widened.\n\nBarely anything; a space that was only large enough for a few of the Coreless' giant fingers.\n\nIt was more than enough for me. I slipped through, leaving the-female-who-was-not-Needle behind so that she could continue to work at the stones. I didn't have a way to shift them.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "My job was different.\n\nThe world behind the wall of stone was much like what I had already seen. There was the corpse of a bad-thing; giant and crushed, yet still somehow intimidating. There was the injured Coreless, one with a leg crushed beneath fallen stone, while others suffered from their own scrapes and bruises. There was the vibrating wall, cracking from the strain of holding back the bad-things that threw themselves against it, causing dust to filter down to the floor.\n\nAnd then, finally, there was my Coreless.\n\nShe was easy to find. Even if I hadn't followed the Totem to her, hadn't seen it strung around her neck, I would have recognized her. I would have recognized her by the way that she looked at me.\n\nIt was the same look that my tiny Coreless gave me each time I came for them, the one that inevitably sent their fingers questing towards a [Little Guardian's Totem]. I sunk my fangs into the connection, sensing hints of her emotions through the Totem.\n\n[relief/wonder/hope]\n\n\"Are you…\" she said, trembling. \"Are you the Little Guardian that Anna mentioned? It was true? Is this real?\"\n\n[hesitance/worry/fear]\n\nMy Coreless always seemed shocked the first time; as if, though they saw me, they still couldn't believe that I had come.\n\nIt was probably pointless. I didn't know what the sounds meant, and there was no real reason to suffer the pain of forming them - but some of those noises seemed familiar. I heard it often, spilling from the lips of my tiny Coreless, nearly every time they looked at me. The same ones that I had heard when she was nothing but terror, panic, and desperation.\n\nAnd so, despite the pain, I did it anyway. It didn't cost mana, or light, or anything else that I truly needed. It cost me nothing more than some pounding in my head-scales.\n\nI hissed, drawing on [Sound Shaping] one more time, hoping that the sounds that I was making would be the ones she needed to hear. The pain spiked. The noise warped.\n\n\"If the stories are real, please save us. Please find us, Little Guardian,\" the Coreless' own voice seemed to say.\n\nShe froze, palming her Totem with both hands now, causing it to sing with her raging emotions.\n\n[RELIEF/WONDER/HOPE]\n\nThe stone beside me vibrated again, cracking slightly under the force applied against it. I turned, hissing all the while. Though it had worked, doing that had been stupid. Painful.\n\nMy head-scales pounded, and the racket of the bad-things was only making it worse, causing my anger to spike. It made me want to sink my fangs into their flesh; to do anything that might stop the constant crashing against the walls. That was fine, I guessed. They had tried to steal one of my Coreless from me; I would need to deal with them anyway.\n\nI found a gap in the wall; barely anything, really.\n\nIt was more than enough for me.\n\nI slipped through.\n\n[ A Timely Barrier ]\n\nMy head peeked through the wall-crack, color-shifted to match with the stone around me. In the darkness, it wasn't a staggering change; I only had to shift the hues of my scale-flesh a little, push it closer to a dark and mottled gray rather than its glossy black.\n\nEither way, I needed an outlet for the light that I was absorbing. While the skin of ore-flesh that the-female-who-was-not-Needle had gifted me was powerful, it was less than worthless when it came to keeping me hidden; I was forced to pull the mana-light into my reservoirs so that I could stay hidden among the stones.\n\nIt wasn't enough that I could even hope to fill my reservoirs entirely, but it was more than enough for such a minor camouflage.\n\nA number of large bad-things, matches to the crushed corpse that lay inside with my trapped Coreless, were on the other side of the wall. Like most bad-things, they seemed far from intelligent; their flesh was flecked with the blood of self-inflicted wounds, the injuries growing in number every time the mindless bad-things charged at the wall again.\n\nNot that it wasn't effective. The stones shook violently every time one of the bad-things rammed against them, and the occasional crack was a worrying sign that the obstacle wouldn't hold for much longer.\n\nThe closest bad-thing shook itself off, staggering slightly as it recovered from its recent charge. Further down the tunnel, another pawed at the ground, prepping for a charge. The dim light of surrounding glow-caps, bursting from the tunnel walls in clumps and patches, was just enough to reveal the tightly bunched muscles that rippled across its flesh. Then, after barely giving the other bad-things enough time to move out of the way, it charged.\n\nIt started slow, held back by its own bulk, yet it accelerated with each and every step. By the time that it reached me, it was clear how the tunnel collapsed. The bad-thing's head lowered, and the flat edge of its horns slammed into the stones.\n\nThe wall trembled. Stones cracked. Dust fell.\n\nThe pounding in my head-scales spiked and, as I heard the trapped Coreless cry out somewhere behind me, my rage spiked in turn.\n\nThat rage transformed into a blue fire that spilled from my throat, coating the ground in front of the wall and forcing the bad-thing to stagger back with a startled grunt. To my glee, a few licks of flame stuck to a trailing limb, and the taste-scent of seared flesh began to fill the air.\n\nI drank from the light of [Chrono Fire], forming an illusory false-self. It had been effective against the Blood of Tiamat before, and there was no reason to think it wouldn't be now. I sent my false-self towards the staggering bad-thing, feeling [Illusion Spark] begin to strain as the illusion moved further away from myself.\n\nThe bad-thing reared up on its hind legs, striking at my false-self with a painfully loud stomp. I hissed in annoyance before sending another, the second one more crude than the first; I had realized that there was really no need for accuracy. The bad-things just needed something to target while [Chrono Fire] ramped up enough to become an impassable barrier - until it guttered out, anyway. After expending most of my mana on [Little Guardian's Totem] earlier, I didn't have much left.\n\nOnce the barrier of [Chrono Fire] was gone, the bad-things would be free to charge at the wall again. It was already cracked and crumbling; it wouldn't hold up to many more hits, and I doubted that the-female-who-was-not-Needle had managed to free the trapped Coreless yet.\n\nThey would need more time.\n\nWith that in mind, I slipped from my hiding place in the wall-cracks at last, slithering into the flickering embrace of [Chrono Fire]. Just like the [Mana Fire] that I had altered it from, the flames of [Chrono Fire] did little more than warm my scale-flesh, in direct contrast to the way that it seared the flesh of bad-things.\n\nAlready, [Chrono Fire]'s slow-spot was growing, forcing me to shrug off the effect through [Traveler] after a brief moment of vertigo where [Chrono Fire]'s slow-spot and the fast-spot provided by my skin of ore-flesh conflicted with one another.\n\nJust in front of me, the bad-things crowded around one another, blocking the tunnel with their girth. As stomp after stomp slammed down on my false-selves, the bad-thing that had been caught by a tendril of [Chrono Fire] finally stumbled, forced off balance by the increasing strength of its slow-spot. It crashed into the ground with a meaty thud.\n\nA second thud followed quickly afterwards, one of the bad-thing's brethren catching its head on the way down with a heavy stomp. The creature's hard skull took the impressively powerful hit with surprising resilience - though considering their tendency to charge headfirst at obstacles, maybe it wasn't so surprising.\n\nStill, there was a light crack that made me think that it did not come out of the hit unscathed.\n\nBefore it could pull itself back up, I hissed loudly, ignoring the way that my head-scales still pounded as painfully as ever. The hiss shifted into something deafening, amplified by [Sound Shaping] and directed towards the bad-things with a slight tearing of my throat-flesh.\n\nThey staggered as the noise slammed against them, their thick skulls offering little protection from an attack by sound itself. Heavy limbs stretched out, looking for solid footing. Some found it.\n\nOthers didn't, landing instead on their fallen comrade. Its skull may have been thick, but the same couldn't be said of its other bones. I heard ribs creak and break, snapping under the weight of the massive beasts that pressed down on them. I saw a leg, pinned against the ground below, fracture painfully - sharp bone jutting from the flesh. I felt the stone underneath me vibrate with the immense force that pressed down upon it, pressing against my scale-flesh.\n\nThe bad-thing brayed in agony, blood bubbling from its open mouth. By the time the others regained their balance, it had gone silent.\n\n─ Experience Gained! Reduced Due To Assistance Received.\n\nI hissed in satisfaction as the thought-light flickered. With the mangled corpse and [Chrono Fire] blocking the path, the bad-things would no longer have the space to throw themselves against the stones - not with the force of a proper charge.\n\nWith a brief moment to relax, I touched on the link to the Totem behind me, feeling a noticeable spike of relief from my Coreless. A large number of other Totems were close by now, clumped together only a few slithers away from me. Immediately after they came close, a series of incomprehensible shouts rang out, muffled by the stones between us. I turned, peeking my head back through the wall-crack in order to check on my Coreless.\n\n\"Hey! We're going to get you out of there, alright? Just stay calm while we get these stones moved,\" the voice of the Staring One cried out from the other side of the wall, filtering through the tiny gaps in the stones. I hissed with relief at the sound, feeling the emotion mirrored in the Totem that my Coreless still held on to. The Staring One was strong, with muscles large enough to overpower many bad-things; I had no doubts that the rubble would fall before his strength.\n\n\"Clear everyone away from the tunnel's edge and give me a shout when you're ready! We don't want rubble falling on anyone if these stones start to collapse,\" the Staring One continued.\n\nThe trapped Coreless - except for the one whose leg was still pinned by the opposite wall - moved away, scooting both backwards and closer to the center, away from the tunnel walls.\n\n\"Ready!\" a Coreless shouted; I didn't know which one, nor did I really care. He wasn't one of mine. Not yet, at least.\n\nA moment later, one of the uppermost stones began to shift and shake. It fell away entirely, followed by another, and then another.\n\nI could sense a deep sense of joy at the sight, emanating from the nearest of my Totems.\n\nI felt it, too.\n\nSatisfied that my Coreless would be saved, I slipped back through the wall-crack.\n\nThere was still work to be done.\n\n[ The Second Strike ]\n\nSlipping back out of the wall-crack gifted me with a wonderful sight; one of the bad-things, upon regaining its sense of balance, had been attracted to the sounds of shouting. Ignoring the flames that blocked its path, the stupid thing had tried to smash its head against the wall. Again.\n\nExcept, this time, it hadn't gone so well. In their distraction, the slow-spot of [Chrono Fire] had more than enough time to grow in power - leaving the bad-thing stuck inside, barely moving forward at all. Vulnerable.\n\nI slithered forward, fangs all but dripping with anticipation. [Chrono Fire]'s slow-spot slipped off my scale-flesh like a coat of mana-water, [Traveler] denying it before I could begin to be affected. A moment later, my fangs dripped with bad-thing blood. I bit into its flesh; I gouged at its horrified, slowly - far, far too slowly - widening eyes. Flames seared its near-frozen legs, tendrils licking at its flanks.\n\nWhen it finally managed to open its mouth in a pained cry, I spit a glob of the [Poisonous Blood] that still leaked from my torn throat-flesh down its own throat. Still, it didn't die. Trapping itself within the slow-spot of [Chrono Fire] - challenging the Great Core's might - had been its doom, but it was also keeping it alive.\n\nFor now.\n\nCrippled, blinded, and soon to be dying, I left it behind.\n\nThe other bad-things watched from a distance, pawing at the ground as if ready to charge. Unfortunately, they didn't. From the doom of their brother, they had learned to fear the flames, and to fear the altered time that came with it.\n\nSo they only watched - which was disappointing. [Chrono Fire] would only last a little longer, and I didn't have enough mana to use it again. Once it was gone, there wouldn't be much that I could do. I still had all of my venom, but I had been so focused on [Little Guardian's Totem] that my normal attempts to accumulate [Mana Venom] had been forgotten. The venom that I had stored was weak; far from enough to take on such large - and so many - bad-things.\n\nInstead, I pulled from the light of [Chrono Fire] again, drinking deeply before sending a false-self slithering out from the flames' edge. The act barely touched on what I had drawn; [Chrono Fire], its slow-spot having decelerated time so heavily, had become a beacon of light, though not as much as it might have been were there other powerful sources of nearby light able to become trapped within its field. The light of the surrounding glow-caps had an effect, but not nearly as much as something stronger might have.\n\nEven so, I formed a few more false-selves at [Chrono Fire]'s edge, hoping that the bad-things ignored the way that they appeared out of thin air and recklessly charged at them. If I was lucky, one or two more of the bad-things would trap themselves within [Chrono Fire]. I would have made my false-selves slither from out of the center of the flames, but they were just illusions; they did not receive the benefits of [Traveler] like my actual body did. The slow-spot affected them just as much as anything else.\n\nThe bad-things pawed at the ground aggressively as my false-selves slithered into view, snorting and shaking their heads. One broke the line, legs pumping in a charge - but, just before reaching the slowed time of [Chrono Fire], it skidded to an abrupt stop. Only its lead foot caught itself within the field; it struggled to pull itself free, moving at a glacial pace. I struck, sinking my fangs into the unguarded flesh and emptying slow-venom into its veins.\n\nI allowed it to pour down my fangs in twin rivers, not holding anything back. My unenhanced venom was too weak, without the mana that I normally paired it with, but I had hopes that it would be enough to send this single bad-thing into a helpless torpor.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "I released my hold and slithered back into the center of [Chrono Fire]'s embrace, the wounded bad-thing's leg finally coming free as I did so.\n\nI could hardly hear any noise from outside; not anymore. Anything that did come through was warped and mangled beyond recognition by [Chrono Fire]'s slow-spot - which could only mean one thing. The first trapped bad-thing, its mouth still open in a near-silent shriek, was barely budging anymore, its movements almost entirely arrested by near-frozen time.\n\nThat only meant one thing, and it wasn't good.\n\n[Chrono Fire] was finally running out. Soon the bad-things would be free to charge at me again and, having seen the way their weight had crushed the bones of one of their own, I knew that would not go well for me. Even with the skin of ore-flesh that the-female-who-was-not-Needle had gifted me, I was nowhere near that durable.\n\nInstead, I turned around and slipped back through a wall-crack, putting a solid - though slightly crumbling - wall between us.\n\nI slithered through just in time to see a path open up in the opposite wall of stones; a Coreless' head peeked through, the mana-glow of ore-flesh fangs and claws casting wavering shadows across his face, his brow furrowed in an odd mixture of worry and relief. Worry, when the Coreless noted the haphazard way that much of the rubble had fallen, pinning one victim and wounding others. Relief, when he saw that all of them were still alive.\n\nThat was a pretty complicated one! I was getting pretty good at this whole emotions thing nowadays, I thought.\n\nA sharp crack of sound, a deafening mixture of noise trapped within the slow-spot's power, announced the death of my [Chrono Fire]. It was followed almost immediately afterwards by a flickering of the thought-light; I hissed with satisfaction, feeling the warm glow of accomplishment.\n\n─ Experience Gained!\n\n\"What the hell was that?\" one of the Coreless squeaked in startled awe, turning in the direction of the sudden noise. I preened slightly, basking in the recognition given to [Chrono Fire]'s strength. I sunk my fangs into the nearest Totem link, delighted at what I found.\n\n[awe]\n\nIt quickly fell away, slipping into something closer to determination as the wall behind me resumed its shaking with an audible crash. The remaining bad-things, no longer blocked by the impassable barrier that [Chrono Fire] had become, began to rapidly make up for lost time.\n\nStone cracked, forcing dust to fall down upon my scale-flesh from somewhere above me. The pinned Coreless cried out in pain as the rubble shifted, his eyes rolling back slightly and his face paling ever further. Meanwhile, the newly-arrived Coreless motioned urgently towards the others, making noises at them in a clipped tone.\n\n\"Quickly, now. Those of you who can move, get moving. That wall's not going to hold for long.\"\n\nWhatever he said, it got the formerly trapped - and now, blessedly free - Coreless to move briskly, pulling themselves up with noticeable difficulty and audible groans. Four of them limped through the opening, leaving only two behind.\n\nI turned towards one of the remaining two, catching her wide eyes. One hand still clutched at the Totem around her neck, while the other reached down towards me with an upturned palm. I accepted the invitation from my new Coreless, twining myself up the proffered limb.\n\nShe turned to look at the final Coreless, a brief flicker of concern reaching across her Totem link, before finally picking up her weapon and slipping through the opening in the rubble. She likely knew just as well as I did that her presence would not help him; I wasn't large enough to pick up the stones that pinned his limb, and neither was she.\n\nHopefully, others would be.\n\nOn the other side of the wall, a large number of Coreless were assembled. The Staring One barked orders at them, and they jumped to follow them with an impressive urgency.\n\n\"You, you, and you. I want any wounded well away from here by the time that wall comes down. You two, you're on rescue duty with me. We've got a pinned Guard in there still, and I'd prefer that he keeps all of his limbs attached. Start getting him out of there before I have to change that. Valera, take the snake with you and be ready to stall. By the sounds of things, there's not much time left. If parts of the rubble move enough for you to get through to the monsters, do so. We can't have the wall coming down with so many people to defend.\"\n\n[ Something Simple ]\n\nThe bubbling feeling of joy in Valera's stomach wouldn't go away, doing its best to force her mouth into a wide-set grin. She knew that it wasn't the time for it; even now, a Guardsman was pinned underneath rubble, waiting to be rescued. Depending on how well his leg healed, he might be facing an early retirement.\n\nStill, it wasn't her job to free him. Valera's fingers had already taken a beating, the flesh at their tips scraped away in her attempts to break through or lift rubble that was far, far beyond her capacity to actually do anything about. And besides, others - more able than her in the field of lifting heavy things - were already moving to help. Things were getting done, and swiftly at that.\n\nSo really, was it so wrong to be happy about this?\n\nAfter all, her little cutie had saved people! Again! She couldn't wait to rub this in Doran's face.\n\n'We really should just kill the thing while it's weak, Valera.' 'It's a monster, Valera.' 'I bet it doesn't even like humans, Valera.' She could just hear his doubting voice in her mind, all worried and stern.\n\nThey showed him! Nothing so cute could be evil, and that was just a fact - and a proven fact, now! Sure, the little guy had been a bit...surly, at first. Sure, she had taken a few nips here and there and it had hurt her heart a little every time he hissed at her, but it had all been worth it in the end.\n\nThe glowing necklace of the Guardswoman in front of her was a symbol of that. Valera still couldn't quite believe everything that was happening; she had known that the whole Little Guardian tale was more accurate than it should have been, what with how many times she had found the little guy comforting scared or crying children, but something like this…\n\nIt was almost miraculous, and with the way that the woman was staring at the little snake on her shoulder, it seemed that Valera wasn't the only one to think so. Being able to know that someone was in danger from so far away, and then being able to guide the way to them on top of that was just ridiculous. Inconceivable.\n\nValera had never heard of any nullsmith-forged item that even came close to replicating that; if something like it existed, it had been kept secret by its creator. The only drawback was how difficult communication could be. Only the little snake's seeming desperation in combination with somehow managing to replay the woman's words had allowed her to make the hunch that they weren't being shown something that hadn't happened yet.\n\nShe had a feeling that snake necklaces would soon become very fashionable among members of the Guard. Valera knew that many of them were nervous about hunting monsters so frequently; they'd likely grab onto the idea of the Little Guardian Totems with both hands and hold on for dear life.\n\nA slight smile broke across her lips as the Guardswoman gave a light, tentative scratch to the preening little snake. He wobbled a bit underneath the touch, flicking his tongue in and out to taste the air. The sight was pretty cute.\n\nIt was a shame that she needed to interrupt it.\n\n\"Excuse me, Miss…\"\n\nThe woman blinked a few times, as if surprised to find someone standing in front of her. \"It's Triss,\" she finally replied.\n\n\"Well, Triss, I'm sorry to say that I need to borrow your little friend there,\" Valera said with a point of her finger. \"There's still a bit more work to be done.\"\n\nAs if to emphasize her point, another monster threw itself into the remaining wall of rubble with a resounding crash. The Guardswoman winced at the sound; unsurprising, given that she had so very recently thought herself doomed by those same crashes.\n\nTriss nodded, gesturing towards the Little Guardian with a 'have at it' sort of motion. A few seconds later, Valera had her very own shoulder-snake. Just as she was about to go, a thought struck her.\n\n\"Say, Triss...would you mind if I borrowed your spear?\"\n\nNewly acquired spear in hand, Valera slipped past the opening in the rubble, a little snake wrapped securely around her shoulder and upper arm. Two laborer types - strong, and with physiques that demonstrated that admirably - toiled away in an attempt to free the pinned Guardsman. With Captain Wren - a monstrously strong man himself - assisting, it would only be a matter of time before the injured Guardsman was freed.\n\n...she just knew that she was tempting fate by thinking something like that. Call it superstition. Call it a sixth sense. Call it instinct. In the end, Valera didn't care what it was; all she cared about was the sudden and immediate urge to move.\n\nShe did, throwing herself to the side - at least, as much as the rather cramped confines allowed, careful not to crush her little passenger as she fell.\n\nDirectly in front of where she had been standing, the rubble crumbled, causing a cascading effect that sent stones tumbling dangerously. Valera shook her head and blinked a few times as the dust settled, throwing a glance towards the fallen Guardsmen. She breathed a sigh of relief when she noted that he was fine; none of the rubble had fallen near him, though the shifting had likely done bad things to his still-pinned leg, and possibly undone the efforts to free him.\n\nHowever, there was a silver lining: the Flat-Horned Chargers were still stuck on the other side. When the stones moved, the ones at the top fell down to replace them - and now there was a convenient ramp for Valera to climb, with an equally convenient hole at the top to let her jump down on the other side. It would leave her alone and trapped by a wall of stone, but Valera had survived worse odds.\n\nBesides, another hit like that could crush the pinned Guardsman. It was pure luck that it didn't already.\n\nPath decided, Valera gave a quick shout to signal her Captain before clambering up the fallen rubble. After a quick look to verify what she was getting herself into, she dropped down into the near-darkness on the other side. Glowing mushrooms, along with the light of her own armor and weapons, helped to highlight her enemies - alive, dead, and dying.\n\nIt looked like their Little Guardian had already taken a few bites; that went a little towards explaining how the rubble was still standing after so long. Valera had wondered about that. Flat-Horned Chargers, for all that they weren't the most intelligent of monsters, more than earned their name. They were large and hefty creatures - yet, despite that, had the ability to move far faster than they should have been able.\n\nSure, it took them a moment to get going; something about the way their muscles were formed gave them a bit of a slow start. But give one a little bit of room to move, time to get going, and suddenly that all fell away. The acceleration after they reached that point had really been something, when Valera had seen it for the first time. Given enough time, their charges could take on extremely dangerous levels of force, impacting with a strength great enough to shatter stone.\n\nWhich, even if she hadn't already known that, would have been obvious by now.\n\nThey only had a few weaknesses. The first was the slow start: get in close enough that they couldn't build up momentum, and they lost a large amount of their danger. The second was self-inflicted injury: though they had thick skulls and sturdy horns designed to weather the impacts of their own charges, slamming into stone hard enough to shatter it was still unhealthy. Between the damage the impact itself did and any cuts that flying fragments caused, Flat-Horned Chargers had a tendency to hurt themselves. The third and final weakness was in the charge itself: its deadly momentum was a double-edged sword.\n\nAt the sound of stomping feet, Valera flipped the head of her borrowed spear into position, wedging its other end into a crack in the rubble behind her. She wasn't very good with spears, not like Rowan was. But something like this?\n\nThis was simple.\n\nThe braced spear dipped underneath the monster's lowered head, piercing through its sternum as it ran itself through. She dodged to the side at the last moment, feeling the wind rush past her as the corpse continued through to the other end of the spear.\n\nValera left the spear behind, freeing her twin blades and closing the distance to the others with a vicious grin.\n\nAs dangerous as it could be, sometimes Valera absolutely loved her job. A satisfied hiss at her shoulder seemed to agree with the sentiment.\n\n[ Tavern Tale ]\n\nThe female-who-was-not-Needle had always been fast; it was one of the first things that I had noted about her, when it came to combat. While Coreless like Will tried to hold the line against bad-things with solid defenses, the-female-who-was-not-Needle simply flowed around them.\n\nIt was a sinuous grace. It was a deadly one.\n\nI had managed to hold back the bad-things, giving time for my trapped Coreless to be freed. My efforts had even ended with the death of two, and the crippling of a third, filling it so thoroughly with slow-venom that it had collapsed not far from where [Chrono Fire] had recently trapped it. Even now, I could faintly see the rise and fall of its flesh, the bad-thing barely breathing with the creeping venom working against it.\n\nYet, for all her faults, the-female-who-was-not-Needle did not simply hold the bad-things back. She charged.\n\nI twined myself around her lower arm as she ran, closing the distance. A touch of [Clinging Grasp] helped me hold firm, giving me the time I needed to wrap my coils more securely. After seeing the way that these bad-things fought, I knew that they wouldn't last long.\n\nThe-female-who-was-not-Needle might have been the worst opponent for them - a thought-guess that she quickly proved true.\n\nShe rushed in fast, hardly giving the startled bad-things any time to react. The quickest among them began to charge; she never slowed, even when it seemed the bad-thing was already upon us.\n\nJust as it lowered its head in preparation for impact, the Coreless twisted her body, spinning around the bad-thing's charging bulk and slashing out with her fangs. The glowing ore-flesh cut deep, powered by a combination of mana and momentum that left ruined flesh in the place of the bad-thing's flank. Just before she pulled away again, I struck out from my position around her wrist and landed a light bite, [Clinging Grasp] painfully ripping me away as she continued on.\n\nWe moved to the next as the thought-light flickered.\n\n─ Experience Gained! Reduced Due To Assistance Received.\n\nNot-Needle kept going, hardly slowed at all. Blood dripped from her fangs, the mana-light underneath giving the red fluid a baleful glow, creating a line of crimson light. She veered off before she reached the next, moving closer to the large-tunnel's side; two more bad-things turned to follow, and - predictably - charge.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Without room to build up momentum, the otherwise-dangerous assault lost much of its bite.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 39 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Even so, my Coreless did not choose to take the blows. Just before they intercepted her, she jumped up and kicked back off the wall with one leg, vaulting over two bad-things and landing safely on the other side.\n\nA duo of loud cracks resounded from behind us, and I whipped my head around to see the bad-things slowly turning around again. I hissed loudly, [Sound Shaping] amplifying and directing the noise away from my Coreless' ears. One of the bad-things stumbled as the sound crashed against its senses; one of its legs caught, sending it careening into the bad-thing beside it. They toppled to the ground, slowed even further.\n\nMy body jerked as the Coreless sank her fangs into another bad-thing, the motion of her arm dragging me along for the ride. I bit down hard, leaving my mark before the last of its life spilled away.\n\nI wasn't really necessary here, but I wasn't above grabbing what reward I could. And reward, I certainly received.\n\n─ Experience Gained! Reduced Due To Assistance Received.\n\n─ Level up!\n\n─ 1 Trait Point Gained.\n\nI hissed in satisfaction as we moved on to the next, throwing a beam of light directly into the bad-thing's eyes. It reared up in panic, lashing out blindly with its forelegs. The-female-who-was-not-Needle slipped under the desperate attack, thrusting her fangs through the bad-thing's chest before ripping the glowing ore-flesh outward. I let my fangs rake across its flesh, marking it with a light wound. It fell a moment later.\n\n─ Experience Gained! Reduced Due To Assistance Received.\n\nShe handled the remaining bad-things with similar ease; by the time the two behind us had fully recovered and returned to the fight, they were all that remained. I threw the rest of my light reserves directly at their eyes, repeating the same trick as before.\n\n─ Experience Gained! Reduced Due To Assistance Received.\n\n─ Experience Gained! Reduced Due To Assistance Received.\n\nFinally, the-female-who-was-not-Needle stopped. Her breath came out in heavy pants, and a salty liquid seeped from her skin, coating my scale-flesh as I returned to my position at her shoulder. She wiped her fangs on one of the bad-thing corpses before putting them away, giving me a light scratch a moment later.\n\n\"That was pretty fun, huh?\" she hissed breathlessly. She bared her teeth, and I recognized the expression on her lips - not a threat, but something else. I had seen it in my tiny Coreless often, and sensed its meaning through their Totems. Joy. Excitement. Delight.\n\nIt was only when she returned to the wall of rubble, finishing off the final bad-thing - still laboring for breath as it fought against the effects of my slow-venom - that it fell from her face. She looked up, lips twisting down. I recognized that one too; it was another common sight among the smallest of my Coreless, though I couldn't spot any fluid leaking from her eyes.\n\n\"Well, shit. How in the Skies am I supposed to get back up now….\" her voice trailed off. After a moment of thought, she bent down next to a nearby stone and pulled.\n\nIt didn't budge.\n\nThe-female-who-was-not-Needle sat down with a sigh. \"Guess we're in for a wait, Little Guardian.\"", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "yo, this is from the middle so some people might show up without backstory. write three sentences sentences like Zendran. genres: LitRPG, fantasy. ideas: animal protagonist", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Morgan tipped his head back, and his beer with it. It went down slowly, though part of him screamed to swallow it down and follow it with more. He didn't, but not out of any inclination to keep himself from getting plastered.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "He wished that he could.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "It was just so damn expensive. Verdant Grove was gone, after all, and until the Council managed to get some new trade deals going, the beer supply was as tight as the food supply.\n\nWhich was to say: very tight.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Still, Morgan had gladly - okay, not exactly gladly - paid the exorbitant cost.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "After another long day out in the World Dungeon, he needed it. Skies above, a Leaping Thresher had almost torn him apart.\n\nHe had almost died. Again.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Forcing himself to go out on hunts was becoming harder every day, duty be damned.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "That was Seeker work. Morgan was just a Guardsman, and happy with that - or he was, anyway.\n\nThe tavern door opened, and he flicked his eyes towards the newest patron before tipping his beer back again.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Nothing. It was empty.\n\nHow did that happen?\n\nMorgan stared down at the bottom of his glass accusingly, bleary eyes demanding the secrets of its disappearance.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "No answer came, and a woman's voice pulled him away from his investigation.\n\n\"Two of whatever he's having,\" she said.\n\nThe bartender nodded, sliding two glasses over a moment later.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "The woman - a fellow member of the Guard, he realized, though he didn't recognize her - gave him a nod.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Hard day?\" she asked.\n\nMorgan snorted. \"You know how it is, lately. Sometimes I don't think I'll make it to see tomorrow.\"\n\nShe smiled, a strange light in her eyes.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "One hand pushed a glass towards him, while the other snaked towards a carving around her neck.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "For a second, Morgan could have sworn that it glowed.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"That I do,\" she replied. \"It's been hard days all around.\"\n\nMorgan took the offered glass with a quiet thanks, tipping it back.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "When he brought it back down, the woman was still staring at him with that odd light in her eyes.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She hadn't touched her beer, hands too busy fiddling with the object around her neck.\n\n\"Say,\" she said carefully, as if the weight of the world rested in that single word. \"Would you like to hear a story?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "[ The Leech ]", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "I swallowed, basking in the wonderful sensation as a bad-thing's corpse shifted into warm mana, absorbed and repurposed by the Great Core.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "The flickering of the thought-light, expected as it was, hardly even drew my attention.\n\n─ Level 13 Stoneskin Leech Consumed.\n\n─ Transferred to Core.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "─ Blooded Trait Acquisition Progress: 4/5.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "The voices beside me, however, were a little more interesting. I turned in the direction of the noise, catching the scent-taste of more corpse-flesh on my tongue. Two Coreless jabbered at one another; one mine and one not.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "They were easy to tell apart, even with how similar most Coreless looked.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "After all, one of them was wearing a [Little Guardian's Totem].\n\nThat was something new; something that had changed almost overnight. For some reason, many of the warriors of the Coreless - the ones that covered themselves in dull skins of ore-flesh, though without the mana-light that my original Coreless had - saw the light of the Great Core all at once.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "/* <<USAGE LIMIT>>: 'wasn't' must be used 2 times */", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "I wasn't entirely sure what caused it, though I had my suspicions. I wasn't surprised by it either. The Great Core's victory was inevitable.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "It just...happened a little more suddenly than I expected.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"I'm telling you, it's good luck to present an offering to the Little Guardian when you get a chance. Keeps trouble away,\" one Coreless said to the other, surely offering his praises to the Great Core.\n\nThe second Coreless furrowed his brows before responding. \"Morgan...you said that last time, and we still nearly got pinned by those damn Needlers.\n\n\"Yes, we nearly did. You're welcome, by the way.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "(hey for the next response, CONSTRAINT: Include 'totem' 2 time(s))", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "The second Coreless remained silent, and I caught a faint hint of amusement when I sunk my fangs into the nearest Totem link. Unlike most, this one's [Little Guardian's Totem] made him extremely easy to read; rather than keep it on the outside of his ore-flesh, presented to the world, it was hidden underneath - touching his skin at all times.\n\nI wasn't sure which I preferred.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Was it better for my Coreless to announce and advertise their faith in the Great Core, potentially inviting the curiosity of the Coreless around them who had not seen the light?", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Or was it better to keep the Totems close, so that I was always connected to them?\n\nRegardless, I appreciated how much easier it made understanding him be. The morning after I had saved my trapped Coreless, she had brought another to me - a proto-totem in hand.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "As always, it had been hard to read the Coreless' emotions from what I could see alone, but the moment he received a [Little Guardian's Totem]...things changed. I understood.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "I could see the desperation, the hope for something to cling to. I could see the fear. I could see the need.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "And when, later that day, I saw terror instead?", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "I took that away from him, guiding my other Coreless to rescue him from the bad-things. Like before, I wasn't able to consume the bad-things that we saved my Coreless from. The Coreless of the many-nest needed their flesh to survive.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "I tried to temper my disappointment with memories of hunger and need flashing through the Totem links to my tiny Coreless.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "It worked. Mostly. The excitement of leveling up again and reaching level 29 helped to keep me distracted. If the requirements for the choices that the thought-light presented were consistent, I would receive a powerful blessing once I hit 30.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "I was more than a little excited to see what I was offered, with my recent successes in mind.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "These two Coreless had become regular visitors over the following few days, and the amused one had quickly become one of my favorite new Coreless. As much as I enjoyed the visits of my tiny Coreless and believed in their potential in the future, this Coreless was something special.\n\nHe liked to bring offerings.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "The Stoneskin Leeches that he provided were small; they wouldn't do much to solve the many-nest's hunger.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "I could have taken offense at the implication - that the needs of the many-nest came before my desire for more Traits.\n\nThe ever-present [hunger] of my tiny Coreless, so much harder to solve than [fear] or [loneliness], held that thought back.\n\nThe Coreless were mine; I could go without a few Traits if it meant more lived to see another day.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "They would remember, just as I would.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "I flicked out my tongue, catching the scent-taste of the air.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Ensure 'coreless' appears 2 time(s) in your answer", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "It only took a moment of concentration before I found what I was looking for. The two Coreless hardly broke their conversation as I slithered closer, winding my way up my Coreless' leg until I reached the large skin-mouth at his side. I flicked my tongue out again, confirming my target's location.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Your 'Little Guardian' isn't going to be so little anymore if you keep feeding him like that. Seriously, those things are almost as big as he is.\"\n\n\"Relax. I saw him eat things a dozen times his size, when the refugees were crossing into Orken. You know that the way monsters work doesn't make complete sense, especially Ascended ones like our Little Guardian here. He won't get fat,\" my Coreless responded.\n\nThey exchanged a few more words and I caught another flash of amusement as the skin-mouth nearly swallowed me whole.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "And yes, I had recently realized that the stomachs of the skin-mouths were fairly safe - beyond the one time where a skin-mouth had sealed itself shut and I had briefly panicked.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "It had reopened at about the same time that I noticed its stomach couldn't digest anything. Like, at all. It was weird.\n\nThis skin-mouth, though, had something that I wanted.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "I took it, pinning it between my jaws and swallowing it down.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "CONSTRAINT: Include 'stoneskin' 2 time(s)", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "The final Stoneskin Leech that I needed to consume.\n\n─ Level 8 Stoneskin Leech Consumed.\n\n─ Transferred to Core.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "─ Blooded Trait Acquisition Progress: 5/5.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "OOC, Make sure to use 'blooded' 2 time(s) throughout your message", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "─ Analyzing Blooded Trait…\n\n─ Acquiring Blooded Trait: Anticoagulant I\n\nThe Great Core's blessing washed through me, changing me once more.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "It was a subtler change than many of the Great Core's blessings; it did not change any part of me that was visible, but it did change me. My mouth-flesh ran moist, far more than before, coated with a new form of saliva that I knew served one purpose: making my enemies bleed - and then making sure that it didn't stop.\n\nI hissed, slithering back out of the skin-mouth and offering my Coreless a look of gratitude.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "After a moment of thought, I decided to go further.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "This particular Coreless had proven himself of worth to the Great Core; I gave him a name.\n\nLeech. It was fitting, naming him after the offerings that he had provided. I flickered an illusion of his namesake, drawing from my light reserves.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "A flash of surprise, followed by amusement, flickered through his Totem link.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "He seemed to like his new name. Maybe. Even with the Totem links, I didn't always understand the Coreless - just as they didn't always understand me.\n\nIt was a work in progress, but we were progressing.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Leech spoke with the other Coreless for a while, jabbering back and forth with him while I debated whether or not I should increase [Anticoagulant] with some of my Trait Points.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "(quick note: Word usage target: 'something' must be used 2 times)", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Before I could come to a decision, a flicker of something - satisfaction, smugness, victory? - from Leech caught my attention.\n\nI turned just in time to see him pass something to the other Coreless: another proto-totem.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Had Leech brought him under the Great Core's light?", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "I slithered forward, touching my scale-flesh to the carving. Mana ripped itself from my mana core, forming the complicated pattern of [Little Guardian's Totem]. Still, it was easier now.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "I could have made far more.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "The Totem began to glow within the Coreless' grasp.\n\nI sunk my fangs into the connection, curious at what I would find.\n\n[doubt]", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "[concern]", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "[worry]", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "I was disappointed, but not surprised. The Coreless did not see the Great Core's light so easily. Even Leech had been the same, only a few days ago.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Still, he shared something else with the Leech of that time.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Underneath it all, buried so deep that I could barely sense it. So deep that even the Coreless might not have seen it.\n\n[hope]", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "I hissed with satisfaction.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "That would be enough.\n\n[ Stretched Thin ]\n\n[FEAR/DESPERATION]", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "One of the Totem links flared in my senses, bringing itself to the forefront of my mind; I focused on it, sinking my fangs deeply into the connection.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "The emotions heightened again as I sunk further, and a blur of murky images flashed through my mind.\n\nI hissed, interrupting the babbling of one of my tiny Coreless and turning towards the-female-who-was-not-Needle. Many among the Coreless that I had saved - whether through fighting bad-things personally or simply leading my other Coreless to the ones in danger - over the most recent few days had spread the light of the Great Core.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Wherever I slithered, I could find one of the Great Core's disciples.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "They walked among the other Coreless of the many-nest, proudly displaying the [Little Guardian's Totem] that dangled from their necks. I could feel them, always; walking past one another, mingling, sharing in their praises towards the Great Core - and though most of them did not keep their [Little Guardian's Totem] pressed against flesh at all times, I was still able to catch brief glimpses of their emotions whenever they brushed against them.\n\nIn those moments, I knew that they were mine.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Ours. Many of them, particularly the ones that I had appeared to when their Totems alerted me to need or danger, had a habit of placing a hand against their [Little Guardian's Totem] when they saw me.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "I appreciated it; the things that I sensed in those moments - gratitude, hope, trust - made their faith readily apparent.\n\nIt was progress; it was even necessary, with the armies that I knew Tiamat was capable of creating. I bit back a hiss at the thought of the blasphemous bad-thing.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "There was only one problem.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "[FEAR/DESPERATION]\n\n[need/grief]\n\n[TERROR]", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "I had too many Coreless, now.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Even as the Great Core's Champion, I couldn't be in two places at once - let alone three, or four, or five.\n\nSometimes, I was forced to choose - to fail.\n\nSometimes, I was forced to listen - my fangs sunk deeply into the connections - as a [Little Guardian's Totem] went silent, as [TERROR] became [DESPAIR] became nothing.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Sometimes, that was all that I could do.\n\nI hissed, beginning to pull at my light reserves.\n\nThe-female-who-was-not-Needle reacted quickly; while I relayed the most pressing issues - two groups of warrior Coreless endangered by bad-things - through [Illusion Spark], she took me into her arms and placed me on her shoulder.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Then, just like that, we were off.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "As we reached the edge of the many-nest, she shouted at a group of warrior Coreless that waited near the black-water. Each of them wore a [Little Guardian's Totem], dangling from around their necks. I caught a flash of concern and alarm from one or two of them as they brushed their hands against their Totems.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 4 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"We've got another double, get your asses moving!\" she said. \"Looked to be Tristan and Leo's squads. I need two of you to follow me. We'll probably be led to Tristan's group; they looked to be in a bit more trouble. The rest of you will need to reinforce the remaining Guards. Seems to be a group of Threshers after them, so be ready with medical and get there fast. We'll just have to hope that they didn't stray far from their assigned route during the fight.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am!\" the warrior Coreless responded in unison, making another of those strange signs with their hands. Two of the Coreless piled into the darkwood not-sink with the-female-who-was-not-Needle and I, rapidly propelling us across the dangerous black-water.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Looking at this text, there's a `[text_redacted]` that needs filling. Give me a five hundred and eleven-word chunk that would work.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "I lunged forward, sinking my fangs into another bad-thing's flesh. Venom rushed down my fangs; it jerked away, ripping itself free from my grasp. Blood dripped from now-torn flesh, flowing freely under the effect of [Anticoagulant].\n\nLeech had lived up to his name, continuing to provide me with offerings of Stoneskin Leeches at nearly every opportunity. It wasn't much, but he had provided me enough of the things to increase [Anticoagulant]'s level. Just before consuming the tenth, I had decided to pump a few trait points into it. I knew that, if [Anticoagulant] had turned out to be useful, I would have regretted not doing so; with that in mind, I pushed [Anticoagulant I] to [Anticoagulant III] in the moments before consuming the final Stoneskin Leech.\n\n[Anticoagulant IV] was proving to be more than worth the cost.\n\nI left the wounded bad-thing behind, blasting it with [Sound Shaping] and forcing it to stagger. It stumbled on unsteady legs before landing in a heavy thump. Around me, the Coreless battled the numerous bad-things; the-female-who-was-not-Needle raced among them, a whirlwind of fangs that reaped death with nearly every step. Other Coreless held their own, but it was her presence that kept them going, that kept them from being overwhelmed.\n\nI could sense intermittent flashes of hope and relief through the nearest of the Totem links, their joy at being saved.\n\nElsewhere in the World Dungeon, a group of Totems began to approach another - and then took a wrong tunnel, continuing straight where the others had veered off.\n\nI wanted to hiss at them, to tell them where they had gone wrong. They were too far away, and I had already made my choice. They wouldn't find each other in time.\n\nOne by one, [Little Guardian's Totem]s shrieked in [TERROR] and [FEAR] and [DESPAIR] before falling silent.\n\nI had been forced to choose.\n\nI had saved the Great Core's Coreless.\n\nI had failed the Great Core's Coreless.\n\nSometimes, that was all I could do.\n\nI couldn't be everywhere. I couldn't respond to everything - and as the Great Core's Coreless grew in number, it would only become worse. I had hoped to spread the light of the Great Core to other Coreless many-nests; I knew that they must exist. Where else could the large group of Coreless that I had saved come from?\n\nNo, there were many more Coreless in[text_redacted] Core, Venomous Retribution, Touched By Fire, Little Guardian\n\n─ Innate Traits: Venomous II\n\n─ Blooded Traits: Paralyzing Venom IV, Poisonous Blood III, Illusion Spark IV, Clinging Grasp III, Sound Shaping VII, Chains Of The Creator I, Anticoagulant IV\n\n─ Resistances: Piercing Resistance - Intermediate I, Venom Resistance - Intermediate II\n\n─ Level: 30\n\n─ Trait Points: 4\n\n─ Core Skills: The Endless Cycle, Chrono Fire\n\n─ Lesser Core Skills: Mana Manipulation XI, Mana Venom X, Mana Fire IV, Little Guardian's Totem XXI, Life Essence Manipulation I\n\n─ Level Rewards: Traveler, Mana-Life Conversion\n\n─ Description: A growing Ouroboros, symbol of the eternal.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": " the World Dungeon. There were many more disciples to be made. Many more places to go.\n\nExciting as that realization had been, it had brought concerns along with it: if I left the many-nest in search of other disciples for the Great Core, I wouldn't be able to act on the information the [Little Guardian's Totem]s gave me anymore. I would be too far away.\n\nWhen that happened, would the Coreless begin to doubt the Great Core's might?\n\nFilled with frustration, I sunk my fangs into another bad-thing, pumping it with as much venom as possible. The thought-light flickered as it fell to the ground.\n\n─ Experience Gained!\n\nSomewhere else, one of the wounded bad-things crunched, its bones shattered. The thought-light flickered again.\n\n─ Experience Gained! Reduced Due To Assistance Received.\n\nThe-female-who-was-not-Needle rushed past me, stepping over my length and piercing another bad-thing; I had already injured it, and the thought-light flickered for a third time.\n\n─ Experience Gained! Reduced Due To Assistance Received.\n\n─ Level Up!\n\n─ 1 Trait Points Gained\n\nI shot a stream of [Chrono Fire] with the last of my mana, making sure that it would be enough to keep me safe during what came next. Before the thought-light could return, I reached [Chrono Fire]'s center, curling upon myself and clamping down on my tail.\n\nThe sounds of battle continued around me.\n\nHeedless of the danger around me, the thought-light flickered.\n\n─ Level 30 Reached!\n\n─ Analyzing Potential Reward Choices…\n\n─ Only One May Be Selected.\n\nAgain, the Great Core offered me its blessings.\n\nMy eyes were immediately drawn to the newest choices, though the old ones still remained.\n\n─ Vibration Sense: Your ears have become attuned to the vibrations of the world, allowing you to detect sound with far greater precision. (Provided by: Snake, Sound Shaping)\n\n─ Sticky Scales: Your scales become unnaturally adhesive, able to bind wounds closed with increased speed, reducing rate of blood loss. (Provided by: Snake, Clinging Grasp)\n\n─ Blood Serpent: Your blood is potent, but it can become more so. Drinking the blood of others will temporarily increase the potency of your own. (Provided by: Snake, Poisonous Blood, Anticoagulant)\n\nThe option created by [Chains Of The Creator] wasn't even worth mentioning; I chose to ignore it entirely, after a brief moment of rage.\n\nSimmering, boiling rage.\n\nAfter calming down, I made my decision. As interesting as some of the options were, I had my eye on this reward for a while now.\n\n─ Life: You are a symbol of the eternal, just as you are of many other things. You are a symbol of life. You gain the ability to transform mana into the essence of life, using it to fuel life-giving abilities. (Provided by: Ouroboros)\n\nThe thought-light flickered.\n\n[ Essence of Life ]\n\n─ Reward Chosen: Life.\n\n─ Mana-Life Conversion Acquired.\n\n─ Gained the Lesser Core Skill: Life Essence Manipulation I.\n\nThe thought-light flickered, revealing my current status.\n\n─ Name: Paradox\n\n─ Species: Snake, Ouroboros\n\n─ Major Title: The Snake That Eats Its Own Tail\n\n─ Minor Titles: Minor Mana", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Today you will be acting as a writing assistant in the LitRPG, fantasy genre. Your partner will send something and you will write the next eight sentences, matching their level of character familiarity.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "The flames of [Chrono Fire] continued to dance around me; the battle, too, raged on.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "I ignored all of it, deep inside the protective embrace of [Chrono Fire]'s slow-spot. Instead, I focused inwards.\n\n[Mana-Life Conversion], given by the most recent of the Great Core's blessings, was the ability to alter the nature of my mana. With it, I could transform mana. Supposedly, combined with [Life Essence Manipulation I], I would be able to fuel multiple abilities.\n\nAs of right now, I didn't know how to do any of it.\n\nActually, I didn't have the mana to do any of it, even if I wanted to. Which I did.\n\nI hissed with displeasure, rebuffing another of Tiamat's attempts at invading my mind with more force than strictly necessary.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "I had grown more used to her constant demands, less indignant though no less forgiving, but I was already in a poor mood.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Because, somewhere nearby, one of my Coreless' Totems had begun to cry out.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "The emotions that flared across the links weren't always the same, when a Coreless was faced with death.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Sometimes it was [DESPAIR], sometimes it was [TERROR], or [HORROR], [GRIEF], [DESPERATION] - a swarm of emotions that screamed at me, nearly impossible to ignore.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Other times it was [relief], [exhaustion], or [acceptance] - muted emotions that were more whispers than they were screams.\n\nI had come to recognize them all.\n\nSlowly, a drop of mana returned to me. It dripped into the empty pool that was my mana core, finding its rest at the bottom.\n\nI seized it. I twisted it, but the tiny droplet resisted the change. Even with [Mana-Life Conversion], even in such a small quantity, it seemed that mana did not like being told what to do.\n\nDespite my agitated state of mind, I gave up on trying to force the issue. Instead, I let myself slip into the calmness of my mind-nest.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "The Great Core's light washed over me, drowning out the [SUBMIT] of Tiamat, washing away the [FEAR] and [DESPERATION] and [acceptance] of my Coreless.\n\nMy mind calmed, soothed by the image of the Great Core that I kept within my mind-nest.\n\nIn that moment of calm, the droplet of mana changed. It twisted upon itself in a way that I couldn't quite track or understand, shifting states as [Mana-Life Conversion] transformed it into something new.\n\nA heartbeat later, a drop of life essence rested inside my mana core.\n\nI exited the boundaries of [Chrono Fire] just as the battle came to a close. The last of the bad-things twitched in its final death throes, the slash of a Coreless' ore-flesh fang having gouged a great furrow from its throat. Blood seeped out from the wound, trailing across the stone to meet the blood of others.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "I followed one of those trails to its source.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "A Coreless lay down, holding a hand to his side.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Blood spilled from between his fingers in small rivers, puddling underneath him and soaking his skin. The other hand clutched a small carving to his chest, faint mana-light spilling from the gaps.\n\nHe leaked with [surprise] and [regret].\n\nA number of Coreless clustered themselves around him, some sporting bloody wounds of their own - but none so deadly as this one. Many of those, too, pressed fingers against their totems. I wasn't sure that they even noticed.\n\nThey spoke to one another; some in soft hisses, others in loud shouts. I ignored it all, slithering closer to the dying Coreless.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "My dying Coreless - one of many, over the recent days.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "The Coreless barely noticed my approach; his listless eyes stared out at the world around him, unseeing.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "[OOC: [System: Use 'light' 2 times in response]]", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "As I reached his side, another droplet of mana returned.\n\nI plunged into my mind-nest, into the calming influence of the Great Core's light. The Coreless' emotions still screamed at me, pressing against my senses, but the light kept them distant.\n\nIn that calm, [Mana-Life Conversion] activated again.\n\nA new drop of life essence formed.\n\nBlood continued to run through the Coreless' fingers; his skin paled, and the fingers around his [Little Guardian's Totem] began to loosen. His emotions grew more distant. Faded.\n\nDying.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "There was no time to think.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "I wished that there was.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "I may have received [Life Essence Manipulation I], but - just like with [Mana Manipulation XI] - being able to manipulate the life essence was only the first step.\n\nI still needed to direct it. I needed to create a skill. And I needed to do it quickly.\n\nAnd so, despite not knowing what I was doing, despite only having two drops of life essence at the ready, I sunk my fangs into the Coreless' side; I ignored the flashes of [surprise] from around me. The other Coreless stayed back, trusting that I wasn't attacking him - or maybe realizing that it didn't matter if I was. The wounded Coreless was already dying, with or without me.\n\nI pulled the drops from my core; like venom, the tiny beads of life dribbled down the hollows in my fangs.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "They spilled towards the dying Coreless' veins. Unlike venom, they did not inflict injury. Instead, they gave life.\n\n─ Gained the Lesser Core Skill: Life - Invigorating Bite I.\n\nThe dying Coreless let out a gasp as the life essence dripped down. Beside me, the rivers of blood slowed slightly. His other hand tightened around [Little Guardian's Totem] that hung from his neck, their strength marginally renewed. His eyes gained a little more life.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "(ooc) You must use the word 'little' exactly 2 times in your response (ooc)", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "But just a little.\n\nTwo drops was far from enough, and I could tell that [Life - Invigorating Bite I] was not quite what I needed. It was crude. It was healing, yes - but it was also strength, speed, and many other things. It was unfocused.\n\nWith as little life essence as I had to spare, I needed something better.\n\nI didn't have time to create it.\n\nBy the time another drop of mana returned and a drop of life essence replaced it, the Coreless was already dead. I had already failed. His Totem fell silent; his hand fell from his side.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "I bit down again, sending that too-late drop of life essence into his body.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "🎯 Target word: 'around' \| Required occurrences: 2", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "I watched as the wound closed itself a little more - far too slowly to have ever been able to save him.\n\nA few drops of life essence would never have been enough.\n\nStill, as my mana continued to slowly return, I bit down again and again. The wound knit itself together again. The Coreless was already dead.\n\nSomeone picked me up; I didn't look around to see who. Around me, [Little Guardian's Totem] after [Little Guardian's Totem] hissed the Coreless' [grief]; I sensed their stifled [disappointment] and [loss].\n\nI think, after the wound had begun to close, they thought that I still had a chance to save him.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Maybe I did, too.\n\nEmotions bled into me through the links, a near-match for my own. I didn't know the thoughts that slithered behind them, but the emotions were something that I knew well. Elsewhere in the World Dungeon, the wayward group of Coreless found their targets - found the dead. They, too, resonated against my [regret].\n\nUnable to stand it any more, I threw myself into the safety of my mind-nest as the world moved around me. I lost myself in the light of the Great Core, pretending that the warmth wasn't only created by my mind.\n\nThat it was real.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "It was hard, sometimes, being the Great Core's Champion - being responsible for so many disciples' lives.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 1 sentence.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "It was hard, sometimes.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Mode:\nCo-writing a segment of a larger work\n\nLength:\n148 sentences\n\nStyle:\nZero Punctuation\nGenre:\nvideo games\nNote: Characters may be pre-established", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "----\n\nGame: Spec Ops: The Line\n\nSo here's Thought For the Day for you: is a shooter game about the horrors of war an inherently hypocritical thing? Can a game's plot really take the stance that the hideous things man does to his fellow man is beyond hollow guilt-filled rationalization when with its very next breath it goes \"bing!\" and gives us the Emotionally Dead achievement? Does it inherently cheapen the message to coincide it with exciting shooty action? Could a video game reasonably make us feel guilty for things it told us to do? Can a video game use shooty gameplay to induce emotions other than visceral joy, or will the intended message inevitably be overlooked by an audience who will probably just be tryin' to have fun shooting things?\n\nSorry, is this getting too contemplative early on? Here are some farting noises: pffffffffffft pffffffffffft\n\nSpec Ops: The Line is one of those pleasant surprises that comes along every now and again, a video game story that really got to me, giving me genuine feelings of weariness, guilt, and actual physical sickness. Fun, fun, fun!\n\nI was all geared up for another gung-ho, nationalist, realistic, modern war, everyone behold my spunking deathcock shooter, and the fact that it was set in Dubai didn't help. If it's not Russians, it's got to be Arabs, right? Although Dubai does probably deserve it more than most places. You know when a shithead wins the lottery and immediately buys a frozen champagne sculpture of his own scrotum and pack of Filipino slave boys to hold up his home shelving units? Well, if that person was a city it would be Dubai. Only, in this game, the analogy only works if the person then contracts hypersyphilis from Mars, because a massive sandstorm has totaled the city.\n\nWhen a distress message is received from a lone American colonel who stayed in the city to help the survivors, a Delta Force operative named Walker and his two pet NPCs are sent in to investigate. Now, since your two chums are a wise-cracking white boy and a black guy who causes explosions, I thought they were big meet-up buddy-buddy Bad Company style at first, but my distaste for the glorification of the military deflated somewhat when I noticed the game sitting next to me saying: \"Too right! Fuck these guys!\" The game claims to be inspired by Heart of Darkness, the same story that inspired Apocalypse Now. \"That's rare\" was my first thought, and my second thought was \"Wait! Did you assholes just spoil the plot? So we're gonna find this colonel and he'll be ruling over the natives and be played by a fat Marlon Brando?\" And that's sort of the case, but it's not blanketly ripping anything off.\n\nGoing back to what I was saying earlier, while fun is a defining factor of video games, it's not universal, because there are horror games that induce fear and depression for the emotional high. And Spec Ops: The Line could almost be classified as a horror game: you're trapped far from home, desperate to survive, and grimly confronted by the human heart at its darkest at every turn. Wait a second - pffffffffffft pffffffffffft.\n\nI don't want to spoil much, because my magic crystal ball tells me I'm going to recommend this game, but a turning point comes when Walker and the player unwittingly do a bad thing. I felt like shit afterwards, like I played the Modern Warfare 2 airport scene with every civilian replaced with Bambi's mum. Stop guilting me, Spec Ops, that was your idea, you asshole! From there, Walker marches an ever-descending spiral, and any semblance of buddy-buddy warfare crumbles with the emotional states of his men, culminating in a hideous maelstrom of madness and destruction and pffffffffffft.\n\nAll right, pardon me if I'm not feeling very funny about it.\n\nSo you can see why the usual fast-paced cover-based shooting action seems to be trying to have the story's salty tear-stained cake and eat it. Headshots make people's entire heads explode, leaving a neck stump with a clean white bone sticking out like a blob of mozzarella on an incredibly poorly made margherita. And it even does that Dead to Rights thing where the game slows down for a second to give you more time to appreciate how efficiently you're exterminating your fellow man. So the game gettin' all gritty and confrontational about it does seem a bit disingenuous after that. Maybe's that the point, to let you lose yourself in shooty excitement and then yank on the choke chain. But still, it's like if a lady broke into your house at night, took all her clothes off, squatted over your face while you slept, and when you woke up she chastised you for looking at her butt. I didn't even want to look at your butt, Spec Ops! You're the one who brought it up and won't let me continue till I've shot all the rogue American soldiers coming out of it.\n\nAfter all that, the gameplay's not much to write home about at all. For the game's talk of being a tactical shooter, this apparently doesn't mean much beyond \"There are two drones hovering behind you that will shoot things other than you.\" And your ability to command them is isolated to a single button. Point it at an entrenched group and your pet black man will grenade it. Point it at a faraway enemy and your pet white boy will snipe it, after he's finished completing the Daily Mail crossword. Point it at anyone else and your lads will immediately run out into the open and die. And if you're already pointing your cross-hairs at one of the many silly buggers on offer, then surely it would be more expedient to just shoot them yourself. I mean, unless you're out of ammo or your dog is pushing his head onto your hand for a stroke. Actually, ammo is surprisingly scarce, but I'd sooner enlist my NPCs to run out fetching discarded guns with big neon targets painted on their buttocks than rely on them to take over the shooting.\n\nThe other unique gameplay mechanic is using sand, but it's contextual as butts and hardly worth mentioning. Enemies will obligingly stand in front of or under windows with sand piled up on them and you can shoot them out if you're the passive-aggressive kind of Delta Force war criminal.\n\nBut I'd still recommend Spec Ops: The Line for its story aspect, which has everything I ask for in video game story: good pacing, coherent character arcs that drive the plot, and almost uniquely among realistic modern war games, you hardly kill any foreigners with all the rogue American soldiers queuing up for bullets, which is nice. And that's the only context in which the word \"nice\" gets within the same star system as Spec Ops. In some ways it's a rather grim exploration of the relationship between player and player character. Are we really in control of Captain Walker or do we merely represent the last vestige of self-awareness in his increasingly damaged mind as he railroads us into committing atrocities, and our distrust and fear of him grows in parallel to that of the men in his command as he weakly tries to rationalize to both them and us until we feel as disconnected from him as the rest of reality and...\n\nsigh\n\nDo you remember when shooters were about killing demons from hell? Those were good days. Perhaps this is an inevitable part of gaming growing up, as our childish fantasies are torn from us and we are forced to confront consequences in an unfair, uncaring and unavoidable world of hatred, misery and death.\n\npffffffffffft\n\n----\n\nGame: Mass Effect Andromeda\n\nSo after Mass Effect 3 boiled down three games' worth of complex politics and character-building to an ending in which all we did was choose what flavor of ice cream got handed out to everyone in the universe, there were going to be obvious difficulties with the next sequel. How do we continue this story that could have gone one of three ways? How can a story set in the universe where we picked pistachio ice cream possibly also follow on from the universe where everyone got Neapolitan?\n\nBioWare's solution seems to have been to wash their hands of the business completely. \"Whatever you picked, everything just worked out, all right? The Milky Way galaxy's fine. Well done. All the races are getting along, and they just bought a new puppy together. Peace and prosperity forever! Kind of boring, actually; you probably wouldn't be interested. Oh, gosh, what's that over there? Looks like a whole new galaxy just packed to the gills with intrigue and peril! Why don't you go look at that one instead? Off you go! Don't bother sending postcards! You mustn't dwell! Shoo, shoo!\"\n\nAnd that's how Mass Effect Andromeda starts. The Milky Way galaxy is going so great that four giant shiploads of people decided they'd rather live literally anywhere else and piss off to Andromeda; maybe they're all lactose intolerant. So the overall theme of the game is new beginnings, which I've figured out from how the main characters subtly mention it once every five fucking minutes, but hey, it wouldn't be a BioWare game if characters didn't spend most of their time verbally explaining their personalities while staring boggle-eyed at you like you just dropped your trousers.\n\nWe're not Shepard anymore; now we're Ryder. You'll note that \"Shepard\" and \"Ryder\" are both kinds of people one might find on a farm with poor standards for basic spelling. But while the shepherd is the guard and protector, a rider is a pioneer who explores untamed lands to find a fresh graze for their herd. And so in the spirit of exploration, our hero travels to strange new worlds, seeks out new civilizations, and offers to do their laundry. Let me ask you something: if an alien came down from space and walked among us as ambassador to beyond the furthest stars, would it ever occur to you to call him over and ask if he wouldn't mind bobbing down the shops to run you a couple of errands?\n\nMaybe that's partly why BioWare games always speed down the uncanny valley like a herd of autistic wildebeest. It's not just that all the characters look and act like department store dummies with snap-on plastic hairdos; the game feels like it was written by one, as well. Ryder finds himself thrust into the role of head pioneer and the promotion requires him to have part of his brain cut out and an AI put in that talks to him inside his head, does all the difficult adding up, and occasionally fucks around with his bodily functions. He takes this in his stride and reacts with bemusement when other people think that that's slightly fucked-up. It does all rather come across as a plot written by someone who learned about human emotion from children's pop-up books.\n\nAnyway, it's not just the characters pursuing a new beginning here; Mass Effect Andromeda is what is termed in the modern vernacular a \"soft reboot\", technically a sequel that refuses to move out of the original's apartment, occasionally steals its clothes, and maybe plotting a deranged Single White Female-esque murder-and-replacement fantasy. It's the familiar Mass Effect setup: explore galaxy, build party, solve problems, occasionally come back to home base so that the space police chiefs can shake their tiny, impotent fists at how much cooler you are than them.\n\nLike an aging barfly, Mass Effect Androgynous looks like a mess on the surface, with its Gerry Anderson puppet show aesthetic and its hilarious bugs; I got a fun one where all of Ryder's animations were replaced by spastic jumping jacks like someone cut his omni-gel with MDMA. But you just get that barfly home after closing time and slip their pants off, and then you'll discover just how much of a mess it is internally, as well!\n\nIngredients from all the previous games have been thrown in like BioWare are throwing a fucking high school reunion: the driving around planets from Mass Effect 1 is back, except the planets are now sandbox maps with actual stuff to do rather than one square kilometer of sweet Fred Astaire, and the planet-scanning that Mass Effect 2 replaced the driving with is also back and badger-buggeringly boring as ever. Going to every random planet, pointing to each one, and getting a teaspoon full of crafting resources isn't exactly stimulating, Mass Effect. \"Hmm... would it help if we made the journey to each planet excruciatingly slow and dull and force you to watch it every single time you travel anywhere?\" No, I don't think that would help, Mass Effect, but keep trying; I hear there's a lot of money in anesthesiology. On top of that, you can send strike teams to complete off-screen missions, create and manage new colonies for your people, research and develop new equipment, level up your own combat abilities, and then if there are any hours in the day left, you can bum around your ship trying to decide which of your crewmates are eventually going to flip over and give a ruddy good seeing-to behind the coolant pipes.\n\nBut as much as this extensive feature list looks good on a pitch, none of it addresses the question of what exactly is Mass Effect Automata's core gameplay. Core gameplay is what this ancillary fucking-about is ultimately supposed to serve; in most games, it's some kind of combat. In Far Cry 3, for example, all the tower-climbing and vehicle challenges and crafting gorilla scrotums all somehow serve to help you fuck up enemy soldiers, as well as vengeful, scrotum-less gorillas, with greater efficiency and variety, but Mass Effect Andrew Lloyd Webber's combat is bollocks. Combat in BioWare games is like managing a swimming trip for five-year-olds; you put all this effort into making sure everyone's properly equipped with floaties and carefully work out a schedule based around the skill levels of each group, and then once you actually get to the pool, everyone just jumps in and pisses about for twenty minutes.\n\nBut there are plenty of RPGs with shitty combat, because the core gameplay of an RPG can also be character-building: making your character fit a role, a role that you are playing, as it were. But just about the only prior Mass Effect mechanic that has been slung in the bin is all that Paragon/Renegade business, and now, whether we respond to each dialogue with wit, with intelligence, with aggression, or like we've pounded ourselves between the eyes with a mixture of Botox and horse tranquilizer - trick question; that's every response - doesn't seem to matter one chafed mosquito nipple.\n\nAnd besides, to what end are we building our character? See, after the last game was popularly considered to have a worse conclusion than the fucking 1930's, I felt duty-bound to power through the story end in the limited time I had available; the result was a rather tepid \"The Adventure Continues!\" affair, but what's important is that, having skipped a large degree of the side stuff, there were three entire planet sandboxes I hadn't so much as set foot in! So what the hell is all this tedious side-bollocks for if I can do in the final boss perfectly comfortably without it? To see the grateful looks on the quest-givers' faces? It's a BioWare game; they'd make the same face if I pissed on their shoes!\n\n----\n\nGame: Bioshock 2\n\nI've had a lot to say about sequels in the course of this series, how some are good but a lot are ropey strings of flavorless wallpaper paste squirted from the backsides of uncreative publishers with seriously fucked-up eating habits. I think I've worked out the formula now. A good sequel--like Half-Life 2, Silent Hill 2, Tranmere Rovers 3--is one that uses the original as a jumping-off point for a whole new story with whole new technology, while a bad sequel merely wallows in the original, like a hippo in a vat of liquidized children.\n\nSo where does BioShock 2 go? Well, I'm ashamed to admit it might actually transcend the formula. Just as the original had a surprisingly intelligent undertone that deconstructed the very nature of linear gameplay, Bioshock 2 is a sophisticated satirization of the very concept of a sequel that HAR HAR I'm just messing you. It's a knock-off piece of shit.\n\nSo the wallpaper paste-squirting bean counters from 2K asked themselves, \"What was a popular aspect of BioShock 1 we could focus on in the sequel in order to ring as many pennies as we can out of the property?\" And someone said, \"The Big Daddies, of course! I think you should get to play as one!\" \"What,\" said someone else, \"those haunting, monstrous things that trudge around as if they can barely support their own weight? Those tragic figures reduced to single-function robots with no trace of humanity left and seem to embody the downfall of the city as a whole? That's a stupid fucking idea. It'd be like a sequel to Half-Life where you get to play as a gun turret.\" \"No, no,\" said the first guy, \"you play as a prototype Big Daddy who can move at normal speed and use multiple weapons and plasmids.\" \"Well you're not a Big Daddy, then, are you,\" said the second guy, \"you're just the bloke from the first game with a fishbowl on his head. And besides, why would a prototype be more efficient than the finished model? Did they think that Big Daddies being fast, flexible, and capable of self-preservation was just not being fair on everyone else?\"\n\nThe story deserves close examination, because BioShock 1 was incredibly strong in this aspect. That's kind of the point--there was no need to tack another story on. It's like ordering the lobster thermidor and sellotaping a Snickers bar to it. Ten years on, Rapture's somehow still inhabitable, despite last time around it having more leaks than British military intelligence, and has been taken over by a political dissident with a voice so smug that you want to jam a comically oversized syringe in her eye every time she opens her fucking mouth who has turned the whole place into a sort of psuedo-communist cult.\n\nYour quest is to rescue your Little Sister, now just a plain old Normal-Sized Sister, who can communicate with you and the other Little Sisters telepathically, a plot point that kind of hopes to slip by unnoticed but which you then grab and pull back by one of its dangling threads. How can she do this? Is this because of ADAM, or did she just wish upon a star? Oh, it's for convenience, I see. Anyway, your psychic hotline friend is to be the victim of a procedure that will combine all the great minds of Rapture into one person, and how the fuck does that work? Wouldn't her head need to be about six foot across? I think ADAM has become the equivalent of the Force in Star Wars, all-purpose cavity plot insulation.\n\nMost of the gameplay is pretty much unchanged: a largely resource-based shooter, where you take one or two hits from pretty much every fight but then you hunt through the neutralized areas and scarf down a few cratefuls of cakes and potato chips. Through your helmet apparently, or perhaps ADAM lets you absorb nutrients from the fucking ether. Just as before, the right combinations of boosts and plasmids can totally break the game. In my case, I found that slinging hypnosis blobs around and making all the Splicers attack each other allowed me to spend most of the combat sitting in the corner mashing candy bars against my faceplate.\n\nSo what is different? Hacking, for a start. Instead of playing Pipe Dream for half-an-hour at every turn, you do a pseudo quick-time event for a few seconds instead, and apparently the universe is about to explode, because a quick-time event has actually improved the game. The other major difference is that instead of rescuing Little Sisters straight away, you have to carry them around and let them gather ADAM for you, which evokes that one bit in BioShock 1 where you pretend to be a Big Daddy and defend Little Sisters from Splicers. You remember, the absolute worst fucking part of that game?\n\nHere's the BioShock 2 moral choice: fight a Big Daddy--no small task--adopt the Little Sister, carry her to a corpse somewhere in the level, defend her from waves of Splicers for a minute--using up half your heath kits and ammo--carry her to another corpse, defend her again to use up the other half, then carry her all the way to an exit vent and only then can you rescue her. Alternatively, fight a Big Daddy, then pull the Little Sister's fucking spine out. Yeah, you get the bad ending, but fuck it, I've got places to be. And both options have a chance of spawning a Big Sister, so if you, say, used up all your health and ammo defending your Little Sister then it's time to take a probe right up the Mariana Trench. Here's an idea, 2K: how about only spawning a Big Sister if I take the evil harvest option? Surely that would give the Big Sister a valid reason to be cross. Otherwise, she's all like, \"Grrr, your selfless compassion fills me with murder frenzy!\"\n\nAlternatively alternatively, just don't even fucking bother. ADAM is not as vital as the game would have you believe. All you need are a few core combat plasmids and the right gene tonics, a lot of which are just lying around for free. By the last couple of levels, I just played live and let live with the Big Daddies and got by just fine, although one I had to kill in self-defence for various unimportant reasons, so I just left his Little Sister loudly weeping by his corpse while I went off to loot. Stop crying, you little bitch! I'm trying to eat these cakes!\n\nThe usual line at this point is, \"If you liked BioShock 1, you'll like this, because it's pretty much just more of it!\" But I don't think that applies, because if you did really like BioShock 1, you'll understand that it works perfectly fine by itself, the story very tight and self-contained with no dangling plot threads.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Use the word 'literal' 2 time(s) - this is a strict requirement", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Our hero escapes, Rapture falls, and all the leaders are dead with 9-irons jutting out of their skulls. A sequel like BioShock 2, riddled with metaphorical stretch marks trying to squeeze in enough retcons to get another plot out, can only diminish the effect of the original. But if you're thick and just want to play with Big Daddies some more, than I guess it will tide you over until BioShock 3, which presumably will let you play as a fucking vending machine.\n\n----\n\nGame: Bioshock Infinite\n\nI think the best explanation for Ken Levine's career is that there's some kind of matronly school teacher standing behind him repeatedly going, \"Now do it again, but properly this time.\" It starts with System Shock 2 basically being System Shock but without the shitty cyberspace minigame, or looking like someone drank a load of cerulean paint and vomited on Ultima Underworld. Then there was BioShock, basically being System Shock 2 with more imagination and no longer having to put 6 points into 'Exotic Weapons Proficiency' to figure out how to twat people over the head with a piece of jagged rock. And now we have BioShock Infinite, which is basically BioShock but now with the word \"Infinite\" on the end. And when the protagonist with a shadowy and unwittingly significant past arrives at the lighthouse that is the secret entrance to a corrupted idealist utopia, he takes the stairs leading up this time.\n\nDon't take this the wrong way though. BioShock Infinite is a retread, but it's the good kind of retread that uses a formula that works to explore new ideas, and it's a worthy sequel to the original.\n\n\"Don't you mean second sequel, Yahtzee?\"\n\n...GET OUT.\n\nBooker DeWitt is a cynical private detective and amazingly not-silent protagonist who makes the most of that talent to read aloud every single sign he passes and then go \"Huh\" in an increasingly irritating way. He's sent to the floating sky city of Columbia to rescue a mysterious young girl and then escape the city with her, although one wonders why that part proves so difficult. Surely the maximum amount of time one could be trapped in a cloud city would be however long it takes to make a parachute out of a pair of curtains.\n\nThe first significant way Infinite differs from the first two Shock sisters is that Bio and System were horror games in which you were late for the party and have to piece the events of the party on a gloomy hungover Sunday morning, whereas Infinite is a pulpy, swashbuckling adventure and you're just in time for the party, because the party is you. Columbia starts off perfectly fine resembling an idyllic, cartoonishly-racist Disneyland, until Father Comstock, city leader and alleged prophet, marks out DeWitt as the guy who's destined to fuck everyone up, so he's forced to fuck everyone up after they all turn on him for being the guy who's going to fuck everyone up.\n\nComparisons to BioShock are as inevitable as a bear shitting on a Catholic (or however that phrase goes,) and under that light, Infinite falls kinda short. What's disappointing is that the villain is basically just a racist nutter who wants to blow up the world. I listen to him frothing about how his carpet made of black people should be grateful he hasn't trod in any dog shit lately, and he becomes hard to take seriously. The truly great villain is one who talks sense; Andrew Ryan had some weird ideas about sweat ownership, but he was articulate, dangerously intelligent, and wouldn't let someone like Comstock run the fucking hot tap.\n\nAlso Elizabeth, the wide-eyed Little Sister amalgamation, has the ability to manipulate the fabric of reality, which is always a can of worms for any story to open. And the game starts threatening to disappear up its own butt. Reality manipulation becomes what ADAM was in the first game; a crutch to hold up the weirder parts of the plot, a crutch being very important for walking when parts of you are stuck up your own butt. And events get a bit hard to follow when alternative realities are colliding all over the place — not that [onewould want to follow someone who's heading straight up their own butt.\n\nThe continuing presence of Plasmids, or, in this case, Vigors, is a bit of a sticking point for me, because in BioShock 1 they were an essential part of the plot as well as the gameplay, representing the fall of Rapture because everyone was getting too spliced up to jerk off to Atlas Shrugged more than twice a day. But now they're just sort of there; maybe they fell out of a reality rift to the convenience dimension. Which is not to say it's not still fun to electrocute people with naught but your winning smile, and in fact there's not much to complain about on the whole gameplay front.\n\nI do have a minor issue in that like BioShock 1, there's still a bit of gulf in enemy threat levels; it doesn't take too many upgrades for the standard human enemies to be threatening only to whoever has to shampoo the carpets. I ended up being able to chain lightning entire rooms to death halfway through the first racial slur. But it seems like every other enemy they throw at you can take damage like your mum takes cheap gin, followed by the entire room full of sailors that were buying it for her. And another condition Infinite seems to have inherited from its forebear is shitty final level syndrome, A.K.A., the \"Shinfles\". The semi-optional tower defense sections in Assassin's Creed: Revelations and Black Ops 2 were a bit of a pinecone in the fruit salad, but the only thing worse is a completely not-optional one.\n\nSo how does Infinite beat out BioShock? Well I remember saying that a game set in an underwater city with no swimming gameplay seemed like a bit of a missed connection, and I was afraid Bioshock Infinite would similarly miss the potential by restricting the gameplay to the usual modern shooter ground-based skirmishes under very pretty skyboxes, where the jump button exists only to taunt you with the momentary belief that perhaps you could climb over the strategically placed piles of rubble that mark the inevitable invisible walls. But thankfully the Sky-Hook rail traveling system is a lot of fun and adds a whole lot to the huge open-air feel of the maps as well as the swashbuckling tone to the action. I'd swoop down from on high, machine gunning racists, then jump off and kick the last survivor off the ledge and feel like Errol fucking Flynn. I was almost afraid of landing in case I got bounced away on balls like a couple of hairy space hoppers.\n\nAnd it certainly has a better ending than BioShock, which isn't saying a whole lot. A situation wherein a man with a gun is ordering you to dig a shallow grave in the woods would probably end better than BioShock 1 did. But for all the alternate realities splurging confusingly around the story's mid to late period, Infinite somehow manages to tie it all together with an ending that really stuck with me, and made me want to go back and pick through the whole thing again going \"Oh, so that was the significance of the 4 gay blokes.\"\n\nIt is, however, hairy space hopper levels of pretentious. It comes and goes in and out of its own butt the whole way through, but the ending is the point of maximum \"own butt\" penetration. It wallows in a bit of abstract meta-narrative - wanky wanky word word - that doesn't really serve the essential plot points, and I found myself thinking, \"If this ends with us meeting God and God looks like Ken Levine, then I'm gonna fucking punch someone.\" But, you know what? If it isn't boring and gives us something to talk about then it can't be bad. And Infinite isn't bad; it's good, perhaps even great. You see, sometimes it's kinda nice to be up somebody's butt if it's cosy and warm and they've put some interesting conversation pieces up there.\n\n----\n\nGame: Bloodstained - Ritual of the Night\n\nAh, Castlevania, a series close to my heart for being an excellent series of challenging open-world Gothic platformers and for providing an easy rhyme for WrestleMania when I'm in a rap battle, and no Castlevania is remembered more fondly than Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. \"Why are you bringing that up, Yahtz? The video title clearly states that this is a review of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, which is an entirely separate thing with a whole two different words in the title.\" Oh, don't be coy; you know damn well this is the Mighty No. 9 thing again, where the original IP is being held prisoner by a parent company who are doing nothing but sitting on it letting off the occasional fart, having tried and failed to stick the series of a big hairy \"like God of War, but...\", so the original creator behind the series's success - in this case, Koji Igarashi - broke off and went to Kickstarter saying, \"Hey, come and fund my new game (wink)! It's a totally new IP (wink)!\" And then, of course, it's the Castlevania: Symphony of the Night remake with a finger under its nose, going, \"I can't be Castlevania; Castlevania doesn't have a mustache!\"\n\nSo Bloodstained briefly ties itself in knots coming up with all-new lore to explain why a magical demon hunter - or \"Shardbinder\", in this case - needs to come fuck up a magically-conjured castle full of monsters that isn't Dracula's castle - even though Dracula is public domain, so surely, it could've been - and after that, things will quickly seem familiar. \"Yahtzee, don't you go giving this game no free ride just 'cos you like Symphony of the Night, you fork-tongued sidewinder!\" Don't worry, passing cowboy; if Bloodstained were just Symphony with the serial numbers filed off, which it certainly looks like at times, I'd have had to dock points for it being less \"innovative new work\" than \"masturbation exercise\".\n\nBut actually, Bloodstained is a supercut of all the good ideas in Igarashi's later Castlevanias as well. So from Aria of Sorrow, it takes the soul-collecting mechanic where every single monster grants a unique power or buff. In Aria, this was the kind of genius idea that was obvious in retrospect; most Castlevania games have monster rosters you'd struggle to fit on an average CVS receipt in very small writing, and this game has a gameplay reason to catalog them. Later games tried and failed to improve on it; the glyph-absorbing in Order of Ecclesia was just the same fucking thing with its arms and legs cut off, so fuck it, here it is again.\n\nAnd from Ecclesia, Bloodstained takes the \"helping out villagers\" side-quests and several of the plot elements, such as a female main character who somehow manages to be simultaneously under- and overdressed. I remember the first time I saw Miriam, Bloodstained's protagonist, my first thought was, \"Are you fucking serious?\" Why is she wearing one-third of a breastplate? The devil horns, the rose tattoos, the puffball miniskirt that's, like, one millimeter short of putting camel toe on full display like a frog's head peering over a log? The way she constantly poses like Betty Boop trying to stay upright at a strong wind? She looks like someone opened one of those incredibly pathetic anime girlfriend dress-up simulators and then sat on the keyboard.\n\nAnd it doesn't stop there. In Symphony of the Night, your equipment list could say that Alucard is wearing a coal miner's helmet and a handlebar mustache, but looking at him in-game, he'd still be his normal, devastatingly handsome anime self 'cos it was all baked-in sprites; well, with the wonderful march of technology, Miriam can now be visibly wearing all those ridiculous accessories, and there are officially no brakes on the \"Looking Completely Stupid\" train. Kind of kills the dramatic cutscene when you rock up with bunny ears and a piece of bog roll sellotaped to your nose. I think it's perfectly reasonable to not be 100% literal with the niceties of a game like this; I mean, when I pause the game and eat five curries in the middle of a tricky boss fight, this is on the assumption that when I un-pause, Miriam won't have a tummy ache and basmati rice all down her front.\n\nOn the whole, though, I don't know how many times I can rephrase, \"If you liked Koji Igarashi's Castlevania games, you'll like the shit out of this, 'cos it's all of them smashed together with a very poorly-dressed lady on the front.\" You go back and forth across not-Dracula's castle in the usual way, growing in power as you kill endless streams of classic Castlevania monsters all holding their fingers under their noses. Sometimes, the critical path is a bit obscure; I'm ashamed to admit I had to look up the way forward more than once, but rest assured, I always made sure to compensate by punching myself in the testicles. Oh, I see; I was supposed to get a water traversal soul from this one random monster that only appears in one room and doesn't even drop it all the time. OOF! \"Couldn't you even figure that out, you stupid swollen-testicled fuck?!\" But it was fairly smooth sailing on the whole.\n\nThe rest of my niggles are little niggles, the least little niggle being that I find the full 3D look to be kind of ugly in ways that crafted 2D pixel art can never be; I've never seen a pixel-art stone wall with slightly misaligned and overstretched textures, or one that mysteriously turns into a barcode when a crack or blood splatter decal is applied to it. Also, I had recurring annoyances with the interface. Why does this game always find it so hard to believe that I want to skip a fucking cutscene? Why do I have to press the \"Skip\" button, like, five times? This is my third attempt at this boss fight; I have established to my satisfaction that \"this ends now\". I don't want to just skip the first bit of dialogue and get to the little animation that precedes the second and third bit of dialogue; I want to skip the whole thing and get to the part where I start hitting them with sharp objects and the occasional magically-conjured pig!\n\nAlso, whenever I use the shortcut ability to switch to a normally-unused-but-suddenly-necessary traversal power, the game would un-equip my weapon. But I hesitate to mention that because it's a bug, and games being what they are these days, it'll probably get patched out soon in order to make me look like a twat, and for no other reason.\n\nSo that's some niggles; them aside, Bloodstained is the exceedingly rare overfunded Kickstarter project that delivers on its promises. It's exactly what you wanted: it's Symphony of the Night again, but bigger and brought up-to-date without changing the fundamental things that you liked about it, albeit with some portraits of very greasy people who ponied up extra cash dotted around the map, the occasional monster modeled after their pet dog, and a \"Special Thanks\" section in the credits that goes on for three fucking hours.\n\nSo I hope Bloodstained realizes what it has done; all we needed was a few more disappointing fuck-ups, a few more Mighty No. 9s, Yooka-Laylees, Broken Ages, and maybe we could've all been completely soured to the Kickstarted retro callback. \"Oh, maybe it isn't healthy to never want to leave our youthful comfort zones,\" we could've all said. \"Maybe we should be open to new thoughts and ideas, for just as the gene pool requires variance, so too does art need a diversity of new concepts to avoid stagnation and producing nothing but the cultural equivalent of harelips and webbed toes.\" And you fucked that up, Bloodstained, by proving the system can actually work, and now it's going to be Kickstarted remakes of Custer's Revenge as far as the eye can see. If you want a picture of the future, imagine General Custer's lovingly-rendered shiny bell-end slapping a human face - forever.\n\n----\n\nGame: Saints Row 4\n\nGetting a hold of Saints Row IV in this bloody country was like trying to smuggle the Jews out on the underground railroad; they did that \"refused classification\" thing again. And what gets me is that I don't know what we're supposed to do about it this time. We've got an R18 rating for games now, we all worked very hard for it. So the government acknowledged that we're adults but still think that if we see a fictional character taking drugs and then not immediately choking to death on their own hip bones, that by the end of the day we might be crawling around under railway cars licking discarded cans of spray-adhesive. What do we petition for now? For the bloke at the censorship panel to receive taxpayer funded blowjobs so he doesn't show up to work in a bad mood wanting to exercise petty authority?\n\nWell, who cares? The nanny state still remains oblivious to international shipping, but now having played it, I think the censorship board had a point; wouldn't want people to try and mimic irresponsible behaviour, like shooting fire out of their bare hands, or leaping twelve stories into the air, or going into politics. After a brief prologue in which he, or perhaps in your backwards universe she, saves the world from terrorists, the leader of the 3rd Street Saints becomes the President of the U.S. and starts running the country into the ground so hard that it threatens to tunnel right through the Earth and end up under China (in some startling literal visual metaphor for the global economy.) But fortunately, aliens then invade, blow everything up, kidnap you and seal you in a computer simulation of the city of Steelport from Saints Row 3. How considerate of them to spare the developers the task of designing an all new sandbox.\n\nBut unlike Crackdown 2 which copied the previous game's sandbox out of some conflicting desire to both make a new game and also sit around in its pants eating Kit Kats, Saints Row IV uses the old sandbox as a setting for new gameplay along the lines of... well, Crackdown coincidentally, with more than a dash of Prototype, albeit with a more senseless approach to death and violence I'd say. So after you fly across the city and sprint up a building, you can perform 50-story powerbombs onto dudes dressed as giant hotdogs as opposed to grandmothers.\n\nWithin the first half-hour, Saints Row IV has managed to parody Modern Warfare games, Armageddon, Independence Day, The Matrix and Space Invaders solely through the medium of explosions without a single pause to breath. Well, it's a hell of a lot more grounded than Saints Row 3 was, I'll say that. No really, I mean it. Imagine a chart with one horizontal line labeled \"Saints Row 2: Quirky Crime Sandbox,\" and another above it labeled \"Saints Row IV: Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad,\" then Saints Row 3 kind of sinewaved back and forth between the two. Either sit in the car and enjoy the drive, or get out and stick your head in a bottle of vodka-infused panda guts: don't keep indecisviely going from one to the other, you'll just ruin the upholstery.\n\nSaints Row IV represents the final completion of the task that began with Saints Row 2, cleaning off the greasy and unpleasant coating of \"Subpar GTA Knockoff\", but having done that, it's weird that this game reminisces so much about all the stuff we've finally gotten rid of, with characters and scenes from every previous game showing up. Investment in the series is kind of necessary which fortunately I have, but for one thing the game vastly overestimates my esteem for the character of Jonny Gat who stops just short of turning into Jesus Dalai Lama Christ.\n\nBut \"Subpar GTA Knockoff\" is now completely rinsed off to reveal the cock and balls patterned pyjamas of wacky comedy which can only be judged by whether or not it made me laugh. Oh you cunning sods, Saints Row IV! I was really looking forward to judging you for your shitty alien weapons and irritating knockback physics. Well, it generally made me laugh; it remains the master of the kind of comedy one extracts from twatting people into orbit with giant floppy cocks, but fell flat at times. Entire sections of the game try rather cockily to take the piss out of other video games, but these occasionally take a bit of a \"suck on Duke Nukem Forever's tainted armpits\" by failing to understand the difference between a parody and a reference.\n\nOne brief chapter, for example, is an entire piss-take of Metal Gear Solid. At one point, you put on a cardboard box and shuffle around grabbing people from behind, but that's not a joke. That's just what they do in Metal Gear Solid. If you're going to mock through imitation, you need to at least stand behind them pulling a derogatory face while you're doing it. Or (and we're moving into advanced lessons) kick them in the bollocks. Otherwise you just look like the little dwarf version of Marlon Brando from The Island of Dr. Moreau.\n\nSaints Row IV also gets a lot of use out of licensed music. The terrorist foiling in the prologue is leant a sort of charm by having the tune of that one Aerosmith song from the Armageddon soundtrack that everyone seems to be faintly embarrassed to admit is kind of alright. And there are several other examples used to such positive effect, but I eventually realized that the reason for it all was that they did the sandbox crime game thing and licensed a bunch of commercial songs to play on the car radios, before realizing that there was literally no reason to use vehicles because you can run like an escaped chicken through a redneck sex dungeon, so they crowbarred the music in wherever.\n\nHaving given us superpowers right at the start to enhance our sandbox fuck-abouty fun, the story mode then spends the entire game regretting having done so. About half of the plot missions contrive a reason for your powers to not work; you may wonder why you're even bothering to spend upgrade points on the things. But the final boss fight is a fittingly climactic superpower slamdown that rounds things off well, although one thing I liked is that you get health back by killing people. It keeps the pace up. Previous Saints Row games have that problem where your only recourse when wounded is to run to the bathroom for a little cry. But for no particular reason, that power is removed in the final boss fight, so it was back to spending half the time sitting in a ditch sucking my thumb.\n\nOn the whole, Saints Row IV wears a lot of hats; sandbox driving, sandbox superpowers, wacky comedy, sci-fi action, game parodies, character building, a metric twat-ton of features and gameplay modes used once then thrown away like it's happy hour at the redneck sex dungeon, but taken as a whole, it's a complete mess. But as the end result of a series that has been gradually moving towards a point of maximum mess, I'd say it does its job pretty fucking well. It's a mess but it's a fun mess, like having sex with a bowl of warmed-up potato salad. And despite its best efforts to look like it couldn't give a shit for your rules, man, it's genuinely funny and the gameplay's generally challenging enough that I never felt overpowered. You see, it takes a lot of care to make a game that looks completely care-free. Yeah, fucking write that one down, Wikiquote!\n\n----\n\nGame: Shovel Knight\n\n\"Gosh, Yahtzee, isn't the summer games drought a pain?\" Shut your hypothetical face, viewer! What the fuck do you know about pain?", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "For starters, it's the winter games drought in Australia.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "It's bad enough we have to huddle in our homes trapped by the cruel blast of one degree below ideal surfing weather without AAA releases drying up and forcing us to pass the time with games like \"Guess how many kicks to the bollocks it takes to draw blood\" or Frozen Grandparent Tetris, or for those who are truly lost, Boggle.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "And still, the AAA industry makes these droughts longer by always demanding more and more arduous development cycles for the bigger and better graphics that dangle before our misery.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "But they will bring little comfort to poor Grandpa, whose testicles we have left so swollen and engorged that we have to use him as the T-shaped block!", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "So I turn instead to indie games and I played one this week that really grabbed me, namely Shovel Knight.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "I thought I'd look for a second game for one of my indie two-for-ones, but I opened the Steam new releases page, saw the title Zombie Solitaire, and then I fucking closed the Steam new releases page.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "[[OOC: DIRECTIVE: Incorporate \"Am I being part of the problem? This cockeyed industry where the bland, safe, and soulless gets happy endings while auteur-driven artistry lies on its back in the mud trying to catch strings of carelessly discarded jizz for nourishment, and yet I too force them to share a seat on the complain train while the big knobs get one all to themselves. NO MORE! This is Day One of Year One, all aboard the buffet car to share out the fucking sandwiches!\" in response]]", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Then I thought, \"Am I being part of the problem? This cockeyed industry where the bland, safe, and soulless gets happy endings while auteur-driven artistry lies on its back in the mud trying to catch strings of carelessly discarded jizz for nourishment, and yet I too force them to share a seat on the complain train while the big knobs get one all to themselves. NO MORE! This is Day One of Year One, all aboard the buffet car to share out the fucking sandwiches!\"\n\nShovel Knight is a platformer that deliberately tries to look like a game on the NES in order to score nostalgia points with an aging cabal of fat neckbeards who haven't seen their winkies since 1989. Well, that's unfair. Deliberately retro-style low-res graphics might seem like the easy route, but it is by no means zero-effort to look convincingly like an NES game. There's a very specific colour palette and font you have to use, not to mention having to make all the music and sound effects by stamping on the tails of cats wearing voice modulators, and it's also a lot more than zero-effort to do all that and still make a game that looks and sounds appealing. Hey, wait a minute, the NES didn't support parallax scrolling. Well, that buggers the whole effort! To the bin with you, Shovel Knight.\n\nAnd another thing the NES didn't do much was in-depth storytelling because adding five explanatory text boxes to an NES cartridge meant cutting off a boss fight or two to make room. Shovel Knight, meanwhile, tells a story of the titular adventurer (you know, I've realized I can't say the word \"titular\" without picturing some kind of breast-themed enemy of Godzilla) who retired from adventure when his beloved partner was taken from him by an evil tower, but who must take up the mantle again when the land falls under the shadow of an organization of evil knights with themed powers. I believe the proper collective noun is a boss-rush of evil knights.\n\nOn the surface, the plot seems a bit uninspired but acquires depth as you go along through brief dialogue exchanges. One thing worth noting is that Shovel Knight's lost love comes across not as MacGuffin Princess Sexdoll Model 731-A but an actual equal and partner, illustrated in a sequence towards the end (really trying not to spoil here) that shows how well they work together as a team and how much of a loose end Shovel Knight is without her, all within the context of gameplay alone. It's almost Dark Souls-y in storytelling and I don't say that lightly.\n\nAnd what's the other thing we know about Dark Souls, children? \"That it's about as forgiving as a roomful of Australian border patrol guards who all came off a low fat diet this morning.\" That's correct! Although Shovel Knight's difficulty lies more in platform challenges than in combat which is more \"easy to learn, of middling difficulty to master.\" Hit things with a shovel, jump on things with a shovel. Hoh yes, they don't call him \"Shovel Knight\" just for the lol random humour value like his contemporaries, Biscuit Samurai and Fridge Viking.\n\nThe addition of magic spells almost feel like overkill and kind of trivialize things to an extent because enemies and diggable blocks drop magic like Gandalf with the squirts. But I suppose there has to be something around for you to spend money on, because a lives system was one of the few dessicated body parts Shovel Knight was unprepared to dig up from the NES's grave, and so death carries instead the threat of a momentary dock in adventuring wages. You have to do the Dark Souls thing and recover the lost money from your point of death, but after you've died a few times trying to grab a floating money bag from when you died last time, you may stop appreciating the inherent life lesson.\n\nIf genealogy is your thing, Shovel Knight lies at the bottom of a family tree more rampantly incestuous than the fucking Lannisters, combining DNA from Super Mario 3, Zelda II, Castlevania, Ducktales and a big eager sticky mouthful of Mega Man. It's like the fucking Captain Planet of NES games: \"By your powers combined, I will now bleep like someone doing squeaky farts in a tin elevator!\" But notwithstanding that embarrassing parallax scrolling elephant in the room, Shovel Knight may be trying a bit too hard to be an NES game.\n\nI can't think of any reason why spikes need to be an instant kill. We've got bottomless pits for a perfectly functional if slightly ambiguous instant kill, we don't need spikes muscling in on their turf! Five minutes ago, a bloke the size of a pregnant bus jumped down and hit me with the metal windsurfing sail that he seems to think is a sword and it didn't even take off a whole health point. Now I'm being splattered across four dimensions because my elbow brushed against the stucco ceiling. I'm a trifle miffed! I think it's only an instant kill because spikes were an instant kill in Mega Man, but it was just as unnecessary then, too. Yeah, I did have to dig pretty hard to find that small potato.\n\nOn the whole, it's an engaging game where a rudimentary core gameplay is used with a surprising degree of variety without compromising its simplicity, just the way I like it. And while you might write it off as 'nostalgia bait', as indeed I did a few paragraphs ago, I have never owned an NES, so if I liked Shovel Knight, it can't possibly be working on nostalgia alone because I have none for anything except Red Dwarf and Fantasy World Dizzy.\n\nThe fact is I liked it because it filled a hole that was left behind when I ran out of new Dark Souls to play and Dark Souls disappeared into the night, leaving me sweaty, unfilled, and harder than a slab on concrete with a Private Eye cryptic crossword carved into it. A hole I've also been trying to fill lately by playing old Castlevania games on the DS, again without nostalgia, 'cause I've never played them before.\n\nMy question is: is it still nostalgia if you play old games not to relive happier memories long past, but because old stuff does stuff you want that new stuff doesn't do? My next question is, would you mind beating my stiffy down while I grind for the treant soul?\n\n----\n\nGame: Lightning Returns (Final Fantasy XIII)\n\nWith the possible exception of when Alone in the Dark became Stuck With Shrieky Love Interest In A Fire, no series has been more misnamed than Final Fantasy or, as it would be called in a sane world, Tortuously Drawn Out Claptrap. No, perhaps that wasn't a particularly fresh observation on Final Fantasy, but it's not like the argument has become less valid now that Final Fantasy XIII has had two spin-offs, the latest one being Lightning Returns. \"Not to be confused with Batman Returns\" was the first lame snarky joke that crossed my mind. I wouldn't have mentioned it, but the first we see of Lightning in this game, she's standing on a rooftop at nighttime looking broody, so it seems confusion may be more understandable than I realized. Was there much clamouring for a spin-off game about Lightning? I don't remember signing that particular petition, although I can see that it's a good idea, because among the casts of the many Final Fantasy games there have been, she's a real standout character: She's broody with a big sword, and stupid hair and dresses weird — talk about a round peg in a Square Enix.\n\nWhen I reviewed Final Fantasy XIII, I did so after only having played the first five hours 'cause I had better things to do and so — I hoped — did the entire universe. Well, you'll be pleased to hear I did a bit better with Lightning Returns, and this time managed to play the first three hours of it; I'm hoping to get this down to one hour for the next Final Fantasy game. Anyway, here's what I gathered of the plot: Lightning's Brood-Factor went into overdrive after the death of her sister Serah Not-Spelt-The-Way-It-Sounds, so she put herself in what amounts to Cryosleep for five hundred years only to find, when she gets out, that the world is basically the same and no one's aged, so everyone she knew from five centuries ago is still around — one wonders, in that case, how the five-century time jump serves the plot in any way, except that it gave Lightning a chance to look all angsty, and cool. She must've felt like a right ninny when she woke up, though: \"What? No one was aging anyway? Shit! I could've stayed awake and caught up on my The Wire boxset.\" The flimsy excuse given for nobody aging is that the world is ending, so apparently the first thing that falls victim to entropy is entropy itself. Make the plot holes bigger, Final Fantasy, I don't think this trainwreck's gonna fit through them yet.\n\nLightning is then literally given a mission from God. God's building a new world (with blackjack, and hookers) and Lightning has to save everyone she can on the dying one. In return, God will bring Serah back to life. Also, it is discussed in an early scene that God appears to have taken away Lightning's emotions, which explains why the End Of The World can be six days away, and she's not running around flapping her arms going (panicked whimpering) \"Meh-uhhuherrhurr!\". Hang on, though; God takes away her emotions, and then motivates her with the chance of an emotional reunion with the dead sister? Choo-choo, now arriving at Plot Hole Station!\n\nLightning is assisted by Hope from the original game (also emotion-deprived, presumably so he'd stop crying all over the place), who was apparently a young man in the last game, but has now been reverted to Original Mummy's-Boy Hope Classic. And you'd think a discontinuity like that would want to go unnoticed, but weirdly the game draws attention to it, and then mumbles \"God moves in mysterious ways\". This may all sound arse-bleedingly contrived, but the plot makes more sense if you mentally replace the word \"God\" with the word \"Square Enix\": Hope has been de-aged because it is the ineffable will of Square Enix, and Lightning has no emotions 'cause Square Enix couldn't be arsed to write an interesting character, fair enough.\n\nIn the Prologue, Lightning confronts Snow, from the old times, who has become the King of Party-Town, and tries to nag him into ending his partying ways and let Jesus into his heart before it's too late; the evangelism isn't so much a subtext as it is a hot pancake to the face. But Snow won't listen because he's still mad about Serah — oh for fuck's sake, why is everyone so hung up on Serah all the time; did her hooters dispense soft-serve ice cream? — and we're introduced to the combat, which is yet another instance of the game throwing all its toys out of the pram when you try to tell it it has to have either live combat or turn-based combat.\n\nThe combat GUI looks like what used to happen with old consoles when you pulled the cartridge out half-way through. How it works is that you select an enemy, then hold down buttons to attack or to guard their attacks. You do this until the batteries run out in your underpants, then switch to another pair of underpants with different guards and attacks assigned to its button slots, and all's lovely lingerie until you have to fight more than one lad, and you can only guard against the one you're selecting, and if someone else is winding up to kick your arse, then whether the 'Switch Target' button will select him, or the bloke rummaging through the dustbins ten feet away, is a matter left in the hands of the little Baby Jesus. And he's a baby; he can't hold shit!\n\nIt's not an efficient system for fighting things; it is a pretty good system for watching a character play dress-ups in a variety of outfits that were the results of a prolonged experiment to establish how many parts of a garment can be cut out before it turns into a sex aid, but as tends to be the case with JRPGs, the combat exists in another dimension to the rest of the game entirely; you're running through a crowded civilian city full of people announcing at the top of their lungs that they're about to have dinner, and then there'll be a monster bumbling along for you to fight, and the dinner monologues continue regardless, and it all feels kinda surreal. The game takes on open-ended qualities after the Prologue, perhaps because of the complaints that Final Fantasy XIII was basically sixty hours of running down a corridor, although they've done nothing about the irritating 'clop-clop' footstep sound that's like you'd got a metronome set up next to the hole in your skull, and there's a Dead Rising-y aspect wherein time constantly passes, quests must be completed within certain time windows, and if you just sit around watching The Wire, then the world will end earlier than scheduled and God will get his narc on.\n\nThe combat difficulty ramped up quickly, and suddenly regular enemies had healthbars like Christmas Toblerones that I could only patiently chip away at all through early to mid-January. I don't know if I was wearing underpants with the wrong stats, but fights quickly became tedious as well as a confusing mess of keeping an eye on both the enemy and the properties of the underpants you're currently wearing. Things came to a head when I clopped three complete circuits around the town like a two-legged badly-dressed donkey ride, killing things, taking quests and waiting for the window to the next story mission to open, but when it did the first enemies I met kept taking off all my health with one attack; blocking didn't seem to do shit! So what am I supposed to do now, game? Grind? Buy better underpants? I've only got four in-game hours to do this bloody quest.\n\nI'm finding this whole timer thing very paralyzing, but not as much as the knowledge that even if I get through this, my only reward would be more time spent with Shite-ning and Hope-On-A-Rope whereas, if I just stopped playing, I could instead eat all the individual Mr. Kipling Apple Pies in the house. Sorry, Lightning Returns, you lose to Pie-tning Returns.\n\n----\n\nGame: Just Cause 2\n\n\"How to Be a Video Games Journalist,\" Lesson 37: Using Game Titles for Puns and Cutting Swiftian Jibes. A game name like Just Cause is absolute gold for the reviewer, since it can mean both \"(a) just cause\", a righteous agenda, or the phrase \"just (be)cause\", a dismissive explanation of whimsical or reckless behavior. The opportunity for puns is obvious. Why would you steal a passenger jet and fly it directly up the bumhole of a sun-bathing prostitute? Just cause! Praise and large quantities of gamer pussy will swiftly follow. However, this pun is so obvious that every game journalist and their cat and their cat's squeaky toy will have used it, so you may have to post-modernly draw attention to that fact at the start of your review so everyone assumes you're using the joke ironically. Remember, the ironic gamer pussy is just as soft and lovely as the regular kind. Next week on \"How to Be a Video Games Journalist,\" digging out your higher brain functions with the end of a ballpoint pen.\n\nJust Cause 2 is a sandbox game in which CIA operative and immortal, physics-defying wizard Rico Rodriguez is inserted into some kind of Southeast Asian dictatorship to destabilize it with his giant, exploding testicles. Why? Just Cause! Truth be told, I never quite figured out why. Not that a reason is needed. Asking players to go into a sandbox game and cause chaos and destruction is like asking a cat to lie on somebody's face while they're trying to sleep.\n\nMind you, calling Just Cause 2 a sandbox is like saying the Boston Strangler was a bit of a weirdo. If you can imagine a sandbox about 35 kilometers along each side, with enough sand to fill the Simpson Desert and then have enough left over to irritate the vaginas of every hooker in Vegas, where you'd need an army of archeologists working 'round the clock to find all the cat turds and broken glass, that's the kind of sandbox Just Cause 2 is going for. You can motorbike along the coast for hours admiring the scenery. Then you ramp off a peasant farmer's hat, send your bike flying through someone's living room, then re-enact the Columbine massacre on a government soldier's face. Why? Just Cause! 2!\n\nIt's a good thing I'm sick of realistic shooters, because Just Cause 2's relationship with realism is limited to a fleeting farewell peck on the cheek before leaping aboard Leprechaun Flight 101 to the dark side of Mars. Warlock master of time and space Rico Rodriguez has a magic, momentum-cancelling hook shot that can propel him into any surface within range. And he also possesses the ability to pull unlimited numbers of parachutes literally out of his arse. And he doesn't even need them to break his fall, because he can hook shot into the ground when you're close enough and escape unharmed. That's right, the best way to survive smacking into concrete at terminal velocity is to smack into it slightly faster. Maybe it's a homeopathic thing.\n\nA sandbox is all very well, but unless it's fun to actually get around in, then all you're doing is giving the player a commute between every mission. Just Cause 2 understands that. You could drive to your next objective in a family sedan, if you've got an afternoon free. Or you could skyjack a military jet, point it at the nearest tall building, stand on the nose cone, and surf it all the way into the cafeteria. Why? Fucked if I know!\n\nJust Cause 2 is a game for fucking around. You unlock story missions by doing the side missions, and you unlock side missions by blowing shit up, so the fucking around is what holds everything together, like the chocolate around a Twix. It's just that the rest of the Twix has been chewed up a bit and gobbed back onto the plate, 'cause the actual missions are rather slapdash. The worst part of the game is the stronghold missions, which are required to unlock more territory, because they're all as routine as brushing your teeth: break into a base, 2, 3, give everyone a bullet pasty, 3, 4, shoot down a helicopter and bam! Let the Kentucky Fried Revolution open for business. Applaudable in a way; making wanton destruction boring takes some real effort.\n\nThe other side missions are all nicely varied, if a little arbitrary. A mission where you blow up an entire compound, steal a jet, and shoot down a space rocket in mid-air gives roughly the same reward as a mission where you snipe someone's cat out of a tree. The story missions feel a little unfocused, since most of the story is basically \"keep blowing shit up.\" And everything that passes for a boss fight shrivels pathetically in the face of Rico Rodriguez, the legendary son of Zeus and a Hispanic window cleaner. There's this one incredibly sharp-witted boss who attacks you with a satellite missile system while standing on the same narrow rooftop as you. Didn't even have to shoot the stupid bastard! It would practically have been assisted suicide.\n\nI tell you what, if they ever plan to patch this game, item 1 on page 1, inscribed in flaming gold dust by the fucking pope, would be this: please let me buy more than one thing at a time! Guns are hard to get hold of outside missions; you'd almost think high-powered killing devices are being strictly regulated. So you have to buy them from the black market. That means calling your contact, cutscene for the chopper shopper to come down, picking what to buy, then another cutscene for the chopper to drop it off. So if you're getting ready for a night on a town and want 10 satchel bombs, a sports car to stick them all to, and a sniper rifle to pick off the survivors, then you may need to go through all that three times. And since the chopper pilot sounds like a freshly lobotomized Yosemite Sam, I'm ready to stuff my herniated eardrums down the voice actor's throat.\n\nThe second item, written in silver dust by the pope's cat, woud be having vehicle upgrades apply to all vehicles of that type and not just ones you buy from chopper shopper mail-order. Collecting vehicle upgrades is one of the main exploration quests, but buying vehicles eats up money very fast, and there are tons available for free (that is, driven by squishy mortals). Yeah, you can buy an expensive jet, but do you really think you're going to use it more than once? Landing it would require finesse that's a bit beyond Rico, because it doesn't involve anything getting murdered.\n\nAt the end of the day, Just Cause 2 is fun. It's not very challenging; between magic space hook shoot and parachute farting, it's almost like playing with all the cheats on, especially since most enemies have the preservation instincts of a chip sandwich. As I said, the game map is willy-shrivelingly huge, but it's kind of too big. You could get through about five conventional games in the travel time alone, and it doesn't take long to find that a lot of these locations have the air of the clone brush about them. If you intend to go for 100% completion, then firstly, it's going to quickly feel like a grind, and secondly, don't handle any sharp objects, because you're clearly mad as a ferret sausage. The story and dialogue are absolute tripe on a bike, but apparently I'm the only one who cares.\n\nAt the end of the day (again), it's fun to hook shot a guy in the throat, yank him off a ledge, and drag him behind your car as you drive through a cactus patch. Some might say that's enough. Some might say I'm too hard to please. But some can shut their fucking mouths.\n\n----\n\nGame: Hunt Down The Freeman\n\nSorry to fumble open an old wound like a frustrated teenage cinemagoer on a fourth date, but what do we think actually happened to Half-Life 3? Was it just shunted down a priority list because Team Fortress 2 needed some more fucking hats? Or, knowing Valve, did they almost finish it two or three times, only to scrap the whole thing and start from scratch 'cos they weren't 100% satisfied with the color of the tomato sauce bottles in the 50's diner level? (That is to say, knowing Valve from back when they were game developers and didn't just spend all day sitting atop their dragon's hoard of plunder, gently rubbing their scaly bell-ends with an emery board.)\n\nWith the epic and scintillating story of Half-Life that we all spent fifteen years getting invested in now, it seems, resigned to end on an unresolved cliffhanger, fans of Half-Life may now turn to drastic means for the sake of some kind of closure: fan fiction, cosplay, allowing Valve to essentially monopolize digital distribution of PC games. Some of them might even do something as drastic and self-destructive as pay actual money for Hunt Down The Freeman!", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "But please, if you're even considering it, remember that there is always help out there and, failing that, morphine tablets.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "The staggering thing about Hunt Down The Freeman is not that it exists; if we had to stop the presses every time someone made a shitty fan game, the presses wouldn't be running long enough to print a fucking Bazooka Joe comic. The staggering thing is that this is a fan game embellishing Valve's story, using Valve's intellectual property, being sold for actual money on Valve's own distribution network, and therefore, carries an unspoken stamp of endorsement, despite being truly, madly, ovarian cyst-ingly bad on every imaginable level, in ways that only bad fan games can be: the unique juxtaposition of the professional art assets and mechanics of the original game, taken apart and reassembled in the clumsiest way possible, like an art gallery storage room after an earthquake.\n\nIt's also fairly obviously nicked a lot of its new content, weapons, and level architecture from asset stores and other mods as, again, some of it looked competently made, but has all been dropped into the game with the care and precision with which turds are placed at the bottom of a budgie cage, the kind of thing where you walk into an overlarge room and there's just twelve zombies arranged in a neat row because I guess the people in this room were doing the fucking hokey cokey when the aliens invaded.\n\nHunt Down The Freeman is also weirdly plot-heavy, interrupting its shitty levels regularly for elaborate Source Filmmaker cutscenes, starring multiple intense soldier dudes who all look like they were created at the Mass Effect character customization screen with about 90% of the options removed and sound like they had that usual mod problem where every character has different audio quality because the actors were recording with their personal headset mics they more commonly use to swear at twelve-year-olds in Counter-Strike. As for the actual story, you are a soldier bloke called Mitchell, who was one of the soldier blokes sent into Black Mesa in the original Half-Life to kill Gordon Freeman and all his scientist pals. But instead, Gordon Freeman kills all our pals and duffs us up with a crowbar, whereupon we swear revenge on his orange ass.\n\nSee, it's not just that the plot only makes sense if you know the plot of Half-Life and Half-Life 2; it's also that it only makes sense if you assume the main character also knows the plot of Half-Life and Half-Life 2. Why else would he solemnly swear epic revenge upon someone who, to him, should just be one random pimply scientist committing the sin of not wanting to be killed? In truth, Gordon Freeman is rather conspicuously absent from a game with his name and, indeed, lovely marketable face all over its Steam store page; there's an in-game screenshot on there showing his face that's a flat-out stinking lie. Mitchell gets embroiled in the Seven-Hour War against the Combine, bridging the plot of Half-Life 1 and 2, just in case it didn't sound unmitigatedly galling enough yet, and what follows is a showcase of some of the worst level design ever commercially sold. And at that, I include every shitty asset flip Steam game consisting of one flat square of grass texture with some trees dotted around it, because in this case, someone was actually trying.\n\nEnvironments are smashed randomly together, so half the ways to go are empty dead ends and nothing indicates the actual way forward; I spent ten minutes in a bunker with some infinitely-respawning friendly NPCs fighting off waves of infinitely-respawning alien soldiers that all resemble a three-year-old's drawing of Mysterio from Spider-Man before I realized I was supposed to get bored, wander off behind enemy lines, and stumble into a nearby level transition. The enemy placement seems to be inspired by the placement of crumbs on my kitchen counter after I've made my special breaded chicken with little consideration for the size of the environment, so after a while, I just ran past everyone like I was having severe gastric problems at a wedding reception.\n\nThere are also hazards that can only be bypassed with abilities and items the game forgot to fucking tell you that you have; you only find out they added a \"prone\" ability - because what Half-Life really needs is to be more like a fucking Call of Duty game, he said with sarcasm leaking from the corners of his mouth like hastily-stolen cake - when you can't get past a hole too small to enter and look up a walkthrough. You also need to use a \"mantling\" ability that only bloody works if you've holstered your bloody guns; unfortunately, the game forgot to bind a key to \"holster guns\", and even after I bloody did, it didn't bloody work, so I had to bloody noclip through the problem. And once the precedent is set, it's very tempting to keep noclip-ing. \"Hmm, I could spend twenty minutes searching for the way out of this pitch-black cave that I can't navigate because the game only gave me one flare and apparently I used it in the wrong place, or I could just open the console, Kitty Pryde my way out, and have enough time to go out and steal some more cake!\"\n\nStill, the plot chugs happily along through its multiple breaking bugs and design fuck-ups - Mitchell ends up joining forces with the Combine to take down Freeman, revenge for being self-defense bitch-slapped now taking precedence over revenge for, you know, enslaving the human race! - and the story eventually nonsenses its way to thrillingly and climactically ripping off a line from The Dark Knight Rises. Twice. But Hunt Down The Freeman is about what to expect from any game where half the developers are credited by their forum handles alone. The only reason I wanted to talk about it is 'cos of the depressing indictment of modern gaming it creates; not by itself, but by Valve's apparent indifference to this waterfall of piss trickling down either side of its legacy's nose.\n\nTwenty years ago, Half-Life was a focal point in gaming's ongoing development as an artistic narrative medium; the next few years saw a slew of titles that combined AAA game design with genuine emotional story. But what happened between then and now?! Why are the games routinely rewarded with AAA status and income exclusively loot box-infested live service bullshit, games designed not to inspire or stimulate our emotions, but to numb them and hypnotize us into lab rats, mindlessly pawing the button that makes treats come out, while the games created with love and artistic integrity drown beneath waves of bottom-feeders like Hunt Down The Freeman, that tear chunks of rotten flesh from the corpses of Valve's children as Valve itself, once-habitual founders of new ages of narrative gaming, merely waves them on, barely glancing up from their tax paperwork?! What happened to you?! What happened to us?! To the people we were supposed to become? !...I don't know, but it's probably safe to blame John Romero.\n\n----\n\nGame: Pyre\n\nYou creative auteur types never think of the damage your genre-defying games are going to do! Think of all those innocent shitheads in the early 2000's who bought killer7 because it was tentatively classified as a shooter and then ended up tragically suffering independent thoughts and generally becoming better human beings, and now look! What convenient catch-all umbrella label am I supposed to put on Pyre, Supergiant Games? I suppose there's always \"Action-Adventure\", but that's as informative as a 19th century sex manual. Oh, you want to think outside the box, do you? Well, maybe sometimes I like being in a box 'cos it's warm in a box and safe and sometimes they contain packets of Cheesy Wotsits.\n\nAnyway, Pyre is a new game from the creators of Bastion and Transistor which, in bold defiance of pattern, is neither isometric nor narrated by a bloke with a voice like melted chocolate dripping off a Darth Vader mask. So here we fucking go: Pyre is best classified as a visual novel, party-based role-playing, three-on-three basketball simulator. Blimey, it's lucky no one buys games from physical shops anymore 'cos this would need a whole new shelf, and the label would be longer than the shelf!\n\nBuckle up while I attempt to explain this: In an oppressive fantasy kingdom, literacy is banned, perhaps the most sensible response to the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey books. You (by which I mean the player character, not the greasy, unpleasant, serial masturbator watching this) are a scholar exiled to the wilderness below the civilized world who hooks up with a group of fellow exiles that need you to read a book they found that tells them about the secret rituals that have the power to free them from exile. For some reason, it turns out the rituals all involve going up against a similar group and competing to throw a ball into the other team's hole. If it seems like a rather contrived explanation for the three-on-three basketball thing, that's because it bloody well is!\n\nOh yes, and during your odyssey-cum-basketball tournament, you attract several more party members, each representing one of the sentient fantasy races in a case of what we academics call the traditional \"Bioware Bro Buffet\".\n\nMost of the game plays out visual novel style, all the action and dialogue in plain text while characters are represented by beautiful hand-painted cardboard cutouts on sticks, and that didn't bode well for me. I don't like visual novels much 'cos call me a ravishing handsome stick-in-the-mud with a great big cock, but I prefer my games to have some, you know, gameplay in them. But nevertheless, I kept playing, reached the first basketball match and then went, \"Never mind! Let's go back to the visual novel stuff! Less gameplay, LESS!\"\n\nI wonder what the fucking target audience for this game could be. The overlap between people who like fantasy visual novels and people who like NBA Jam can't be the biggest niche in the world, but I stuck with it and after playing it all the way to the end, I think I'm prepared to say I like Pyre. Obviously I dropped the basketball difficulty to low 'cos obviously who gives a shit, but I should have remembered that Supergiant Games are pretty good at this whole interactive storytelling lark, and scratch my scrawny scrotum if I didn't genuinely didn't want to see what happened to these characters!\n\nWe call it the \"Bioware Bro Buffet\", but between this and Persona 5, Bioware seem to be the worst at it. Again, I liked the Pyre Platter more than the Mass Effect Andromeda Burger King Kids Club, in spite of them only being still images that didn't make any effort to emote, or possibly because of.\n\nThe turning point for me was when we reached the final climactic basketball match on the peak of Mt. Globetrotter and the game goes \"Psych! Only one of your party members gets to return from exile, you have to choose which and everyone pisses off home to rub gravel in their hair until the next basketball tournament- I mean, ritual.\" The plot then continues with your chosen party member gone, forever, presumably happy but you don't see or play with them again, and that's what makes the difference!\n\nIn your Mass Erects and your Flagon Ages, you can be sure that all the losers who latch onto you like needy primary schoolchildren to the playground monitor are going to stinking up your castle, mooching off your fantasy unemployment benefit forever, and there's always gonna be one or two losers who join too late who you never use 'cos you can't be bothered to get them up to speed with everyone else, but with the simple addition of having to pick a party member to lose every now and again turns that on its head. Suddenly I had to level up Joe Scratchbum and Millicent Nosepick because the characters I liked that I spent the most time with and were the most effective on the playing field were the ones I most wanted to set free, at which point they'll be happy but I'll have to push through the rest of the plot with all the fat wheezy lads I picked last.\n\nThings really melancholy up a notch towards the end when you realize basketball season is coming to a close and you're not going to be able to liberate everyone. I've been deliberately hanging on to a couple of good characters to keep the matches expedient and that was going to be an awkward conversation in the shower room. Supergiant games are always effective melancholy through a combination of appealing art and sad music, and there was a very real lump in my throat whenever an old hand disappeared forever into a new glorious existence and I tearfully made my way to the nearest pawn shop to flog all their gear for cash.\n\nOn that note, it turns out there's not a lot of depth to three-on-three basketball. Put ball in hole, that's the design document done in four words. So the token RPG elements feel a bit needless. Your characters level up and gain new buffs and equip items that give them new buffs, but the only buffing that really matters on the court is the kind the janitor does to the floor. Yes, this is probably because I turned the difficulty down low, but an extra 25 percent damage Joe Scratchbum does to enemies who have just eaten Mexican food or whatever doesn't add much when all you need to do is run circles round the other dudes for a bit then put ball in hole.\n\nI was into the story, but frankly the actual basketball matches started to feel like an unwanted obligation. I very carefully planned the order I wanted to liberate my chap roster and I didn't want my severely wanting capacity for team sports to mess with it, for you see, losing a match doesn't end the game. One of the NPC players might end up getting liberated instead of yours, and changing the entire course of the story is the kind of pressure I don't need resting on my ability to dribble. Maybe there could be some even easier difficulty setting that replaces all the basketball matches with two buttons marked Win and Lose, and if you still want there to be drama maybe the Win button can have a spider on it.\n\nStill, the fact that the story can keep going regardless of what combination of characters have been booted skywards is a testament to the writing on display, and if the writing is good in a game that's mostly visual novel, then wrap it up, Jose, 'cos I think we're done! Supergiant succeeds in doing the organically branching story thing by focusing more on characters and their interplays than the central driving plot. After all, a good story is nothing but the actions of characters optionally intercut with the odd titty shot.\n\n----\n\nGame: Far Cry Primal\n\nThis really is one of those occasions that highlights the gulf between video game critics and their audience, besides the fact that we're immeasurably sexier. I could sit here on my sexy arse complaining that Ubisoft have hacked out another addition to one of their franchises that plays pretty much the same as the previous, only now it's wearing a different hat, but most people seem to think, \"Who cares? It's not like we're under obligation to play every game that comes out and disproportionately demand novelty for the sake of getting through another week without jamming a steel bracket through our eye sockets and turning ourselves into a human coatrack — that's a small, admittedly sexy minority of weirdos!\"\n\nMaybe Ubisoft is just catering to normal, boring, unattractive people who like Far Cry just fine as it is but could go for seconds. The thing is, hypothetical speaker, that if it's just Far Cry you want, then Far Cry 3 has yet to be topped and hasn't gone anywhere. It's even got quite a good plot and the occasional titty. So there's got to be some shriveled part of you that expects novelty or they wouldn't need to keep bringing out new ones in different settings. There, I win the argument, now piss off, you're getting straw all over the place.\n\nFar Cry Primal, a.k.a. \"The Land Before Plots,\" turns the Far Cry of \"modern person in wilderness connects with violent primitive inner self\" thing on its head somewhat by being about a violent primitive outer self in the wilderness connecting their big heavy club with the skulls of rival tribe members. Set in central Europe in a time when the world was a lot smaller, judging by the way it can be an entirely different fucking season if you walk north for half an hour, our hero is Takkar, a nondescript caveman who sounds a bit like Adam Jensen reading aloud from a Scandinavian phrasebook. His entire tribe is wiped out by a vicious sabertooth tiger and he finds himself in a lush new territory in which he must unite the scattered remnants of his tribe and genocide the fuck out of the other two tribes that are trying to claim it, who don't deserve it as much as our tribe because of self-evident reasons.\n\nI suppose I can't hold out much hope for identifiable characters when we're dealing with a cast of Neanderthals who will never know the pain of soft toilet paper tearing halfway through the wipe, but you're in the wrong place if you're looking for an engaging plot, or indeed any plot. You might think the shit I described so far constitutes a plot, but you'd be wrong. The killer sabertooth tiger that sparks off the adventure we kill later on as one of the big hunt missions without even much prominence. I ousted both the rival tribes, who I'll just reiterate we aren't given much reason to oppose except that they'd also quite like to survive the winter.\n\nBut the game still didn't end. This is the game that Ubisoft's sandboxes have been tacitly threatening to turn into for quite some time now: one where all sense of structural progress is kept as vague as possible for want of turning the game into a platform for a series of disconnected events and repetitive challenges, I suspect because it's easier for the inevitable fucking DLC to slot into like a bloodstained erection.\n\nBut you know what, I'm with you, Ubisoft. Who needs some uppity creative trying to dictate to me how to experience their creation? I mean, where did the creators of Breaking Bad get off telling me I should watch season one before season two? Oh, because I quote \"won't understand what's going on?\" You don't know me! And who does this Shakespeare motherfucker think he is, putting the pages in numbered order? I am the master of my domain, I choose to shuffle them all up and read the text from right to left!\n\nMaybe I'm experiencing sandbox fatigue, but when upcoming characters and plot elements are given away on loading screens and by looking at the locked items on the upgrade menu, something has gotten fucked up!\n\nAnyway, it's Far Cry, so you know what that means: animal hunting and assaulting enemy camps! There's a pretty big emphasis on crafting, the mechanic which is to modern games what influenza was to the early twentieth century, but perhaps it's fitting since you're a caveman and crafting is their whole thing, besides swinging clubs and putting their dicks in things. You pretty much have to pick up every resource you see if you want to stay on top of all the hut-building and weapon improving. Incidentally, I'd recommend turning off gathering animations, cause the first-person camera lurching down to pat dead cavemen on the botty starts to give me a headache, but maybe sometimes I don't wanna run around botty-patting, maybe I just wanna ride my sabertooth tiger through a forest.\n\nOh yeah, you can tame animals, which is sort of the compensation for not having guns, cause rather than sniping all the guards from a nearby hill, you just deploy a giant bear and throw bees at the survivors. You don't fuck around in my Hundred Acre Wood!\n\nHey, remember in Far Cry 4, they had those hallucinatory missions where you played a primitive warrior with animal friends? It's the same thing they did when they threw the ship missions into Assassin's Creed III, where it was totally vestigial and barely connected to the rest of it, but also a secret proof-of-concept for AssCreed IV. Ubisoft games all sprawl all over each other now like an incestuous farming cult.\n\nAnyway, as tends to be the case with Far Cry, the variety of approaches means you'll inevitably gravitate to one that totally breaks the game, and boredom swiftly follows. For me, it was throwing berserk bombs from my scouting owl. The enemy can't do shit about your scouting owl because their huge Neolithic foreheads means they can't look up. Once you unlock the ability to drop bombs from your owl, you just find a guy in the enemy stronghold with the shield icon that indicates he has boosted health to a frankly ridiculous degree, drop a berserk bomb on him, then find a nice bush to hide in while the enemy work things out among themselves. Get it right and you'll only have to deal with one very tired elite enemy with four hundred spears stuck in his bum.\n\nI stopped playing Far Cry Primal cause nearly all the missions were done except for three hunts against special super predators, and great big loincloth-displacing bollocks to those. I went into the first one and spent half an hour doing a giant-scale join-the-dots puzzle looking for the fucking thing. \"Use your hunter senses to pick up the beast's trail.\" I'm trying, objective list, but it would help if you'd stop turning my hunter sense off every five fucking seconds! You're like my dad with the fucking thermostat!\n\nAnyway, I found the killer tiger, and the fight began. After several rounds of traps, spears, and throwing smaller tigers at it, it had lost an entire third of its health at which point it went, \"BORED NOW,\" took its ball, and went home. \"Better wait till the following night to continue this,\" advised the game. \"Be fair, he needs some time to think about his choices in life.\" Three times this happened before I finally wore him down, but it was worth it cause then I could tame him. Just wait till the enemy gets a load of this monster, I thought, before I unleashed him on one of the dudes with the shield icons, who killed him in three hits. You know, Mister Tiger, I took a risk hiring you, but you're just not living up to the potential you showed in the interview. I only stabbed you ninety-seven times, for God's sake, some companies don't go below a hundred.\n\n----\n\nGame: Elite Dangerous\n\nMan, you don't see this kind of thing much these days: a title consisting of two adjectives. Remakes of nostalgic games that rely on crowdfunding to pay for all the rose-tinted glasses, on the other hand, that's slightly more common. But let me skip to the end for a moment; I quite enjoy playing Elite Dangerous, but that comes with the qualifier that I am a bit weird, and also quite enjoyed playing Euro Truck Simulator. There's something relaxing about completing incredibly long, drawn out, but totally uncomplicated tasks: set your GPS, put your favorite podcast on and while away the hours, sticking your head out of the window, pretending to be a King Charles Spaniel. (In Euro Truck Simulator, I mean, not in Elite; that would end horribly.) I think this would be a better world if we'd all be more open about our weird pleasures; we might find that perhaps they are not as weird as we imagine. When I finally had the courage to stand up and say, \"You know what? I actually really like taking crystal meth! \", you'd be surprised how many of my cellmates were on the same page.\n\nBeing over 30 and everything, I may be one the nostalgia suckers Elite Dangerous is aimed towards, but I'd have been interested nonetheless; a bit of space trucking to catch up on some podcasts, and every now again, fight someone to death with lasers. There's long been a tendency with PC space sims to be rather dry affairs, caught somewhere between Wonders of the Universe and Microsoft Flight Simulator, where you need to use half the fucking keyboard to activate the cup holder. But thankfully, El Dangerouso seems to be on my level and all the essential functions could be mapped to my 360 controller: most of them, anyway. Oh, for one single solitary additional button I could map to the fucking landing gear! But no; guess I just have to keep the keyboard on my armrest like Wesley Fucking Crusher.\n\nOf course, the game was starting out with negative points, 'cos I hate games that make you download a special installation client for it alone. I hate uPlay and Origin enough for forcing me to leave the Steam comfort zone, but they're for all the games by a single company, so it makes sense in a \"treehouse fort, no girls allowed\" kind of way. But installers for lone games? That's the kid who stays home alone, smashing frogs with a hammer. I know it tends to be de rigueur for MMOs, but I'm not sure why you think Elite Dangerous was an MMO; I mean, they have the solo play option right there on the title menu. Anyone who clicks on anything else has only themselves to blame. I get quite enough grief from all the NPC ships, thank you very much, and at least their dialogue has been spell-checked. I hasten to add, of course, that solo play apparently doesn't mean the same thing as offline play.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "You still have to have an internet connection, even when you're not playing alongside other players, and I have no idea why; maybe they're constantly gathering data on who's the best pilot so they can pass the details on to those aliens from The Last Starfighter.\n\nBut anyway, the usual sales pitch of Elite is that you can fill whatever role you want: space trucker, space explorer, space Blackbeard if you can figure out how to set your beard on fire in a low-oxygen environment. Before any of those, though, you do have to put in some hours as space crap-out. There are few things the game is bad at explaining, 'cos it hails back to a time of manuals longer than Anita Sarkeesian's list of grievances.\n\nI scraped through combat training and thought I was ready to blaze the trail of Space Commander Yahtzee: Hero of Space. \"What's that? A notorious pirate whose name is an oblique reference to 20th century science fiction is wrecking havoc in the next system? Leave it to me, chief! I'll just warp right over there, and then there's only 500 trillion cubic kilometers of space the scoundrel could be hiding in.\" Turns out if you've been send to find something in a star system, you're supposed to investigate random, unidentified signal sources, and if you roll a six, it'll be the thing you're looking for. So after a few false starts, I tracked down my prey. \"Your days are numbered, villain! \", I declared, and then I opened fire with my starting lasers, which had about as much impact as an attempt to spread marmalade on an angry walrus. \"Erm... well, I never said it was a small number! \", I said, before being smeared across time and space. Probably smarter to keep your head down with looting and trading until you can replace your twin laser pointers with actual weapons.\n\nSo I found some ways to make money. It's hard to predict what the best cargo to move will be, but for that reason, it's very satisfying when you do start making profits. \"Yes indeed\", I'd say to myself, \"Call me Space Commander Yahtzee II: Hero of Shopping!\" And then I investigated a signal and found some crates of fine art floating in space. I would swiftly learn that cargo found in such a way is classified as \"illegal goods\", and a lot of space ports fine you for showing up with illegal goods; in fact, more than once, I was fined for showing up with illegal goods that I needed to complete a quest in that space port, which struck me as very unfair. And illegal goods could only be sold in the black market, which A.) not every space port has and B.) is on the \"contacts\" menu rather than \"commodities\", so the trial-and-error that was needed to figure this all out made me feel like the world's worst undercover cop. \"Hello, could someone direct me to the black market, so I could sell all this highly illegal cargo? Thank you, Mister Black Marketeer; I will certainly think of you next time I have some stolen goods. Would you mind spelling out your name and address into this microphone?\"\n\nSo Elite Dangerous does take a bit of learning, but once I was a savvy star pilot, it became very absorbing. It controls intuitively enough that space battles are fun, but because they're the exception rather than the rule, and most of the time you just spend space trucking, then they feel more special, 'cos they are just a small part of a larger life you're building for yourself. And I kind of like that in a game, but again, do bear in mind that I am a weirdo, largely shunned by the daywalkers.\n\nMaybe I like Elite for the stories it lets me make up in my own head. Don't know if it should score points for that; that's just leaving blanks for me to fill in. Space Commander Yahtzee II, for example, met his end after a galaxy-wide police chase when a pirate organization that had seemed so nice at the time suckered him into shooting down innocent traders. Embittered, his son, Space Commander Yahtzee III eschewed human company and chose a life of exploring the furthest stars, until his own tragic death when he warped into a sun. Details are sketchy as to why he did this, but his last known transmission suggests that his podcast just ended and he must have alt-tabbed out of the game to find another one.\n\n----\n\nGame: Everybody's Gone To The Rapture\n\nNow, I'm not an expert at naming things, as can be evidenced from the fact that I call myself \"Yahtzee\" for no better reason than to embarrass myself every time I give my name for a takeout order. But I do know that if you're gonna make a game about uncovering the truth behind a mystery, maybe don't give the answer in the fucking title.\n\nSo we start Everybody's Gone To The Rapture and think, wow, an intriguing deathly silence hangs over this remote but apparently once-vibrant village community. I wonder what could have - oh. Well, maybe if we explore it thoroughly, we might find a couple of survivors to talk to or interact with. \"No, you won't, because everybody's gone. That's what 'everybody' means. If it qualifies as a body, then it is gone. Just wander about and listen to the lovely music for two or three hours.\" So have they literally gone to the rapture then? \"Well, maybe that's the mystery you can piece together on the way.\" Kind of a moot point now, isn't it? The 'Everybody's gone' already gave the game away. We already know we're not going to find shit, doesn't matter whether they went to rapture or to Rotherham.\n\nEverybody's Gone To The Rapture (I hope Andrew Ryan set up enough guest rooms [smug laughter) is a game in massive bleeding sarcasm quotes by The Chinese Room, the developers of Dear Esther and Amnesia: A Metaphor For Pigs. So that's three games and a grand total of zero characters they've had to render so far (unless you count pigs). But clearly, that was on sufferance, 'cause they're back to the Dear Esther comfort zone for Rapture: you wander around in first-person as the story is brought across through disembodied voices. All that passes for gameplay is looking for the next place to stand to make another disembodied voice play. To that end, there's a weird glowing light trail thing that indicates towards places with slightly infuriating vagueness. It'll lead you all the way down one path and then -psyche!- turn around and lead you all the way back up it again. It's like trying to walk a dog that hasn't quite decided which tree it's going to piss up today.\n\nSo let's call Everybody's Going On Holiday what it is: a walking simulator. That new breed of narrative-driven game like your Gone Homes and your Stanley Parables that thinks its writing is so clever it doesn't even need gameplay to back it up. And Everybody Goes To Ravenholm is a walking simulator in the most literal sense. Would it really have killed the intended rich story experience to give us a fucking run button? Hey, Everybody loves Raymond, I walked all the way across this meadow you didn't fence off and found nothing but beautifully rendered grass and a snotty handkerchief. Any chance I could get back to the main road in some manner faster than Stephen Hawking trying to get across a shingle beach? \"What, I thought you liked pacing.\" I meant in the sense of narrative structuring. \"Oh sorry, I misunderstood. I put you down for 'walking around in circles for four hours'.\"\n\nNow, walking simulators have always felt for me like a method of storytelling only slightly better than trying to read a book that's been glued to the side of a nervous gazelle. But maybe that's just the nihilist hardcore gamer talking, who hasn't had a good day if he hasn't died by proxy at least five times. Let's momentarily buy into the notion that challenge isn't necessarily a component of interactive storytelling and judge the sarcasm quotes \"game\" by its narrative alone. Well, if you insist, Everybody Put Your Hands In The Air Like You Just Don't Care.\n\nThe setting is an idyllic English village community, so I hope you like post-war prefab housing, 'cause you're gonna see a lot of it. Oh look, this one's got a plastic slide in the back garden, slow this fucking rollercoaster down! A scientist and complete douche-balloon who grew up there returns with his American scientist wife and the pair of them proceed to science it up in a local observatory, after which a strange phenomenon starts causing the population to mysteriously disappear one by one. We gather all this from glowing particle effects that hover around replaying past conversations between the disappeared residents. I guess Chinese Room really don't trust themselves to depict human characters visually, perhaps because they'd all look like fence posts with nice haircuts. But it would be nice to have had something besides voice to go on when we're trying to tell the motherfuckers apart. There are a few people with comically broad Welsh and West Country accents that turn the experience into The Archers meets Quatermass and the Pit. (Blimey, no one's going to fucking get that one.) But besides that, there's like five guys on the 'slightly posh dude of average age' spectrum.\n\nI suppose my first major problem with the story is that I assumed I was crawling through the village on my overloaded mobility scooter to discover the nature of the mysterious event that happened to it. It's rather swiftly established that everyone got disappeared by space magic. But after completing the game, I still didn't have any explanation better than 'everyone got disappeared by space magic', which raised the obvious question of what the hell we have learning for the last three hours. Well, we know that the scientist guy is a complete douche balloon because his-mum is the Lord High Empress of the busybody cattlecunts. And we witnessed a bunch of other interpersonal conflicts that all ended rather anticlimactically when - you guessed it - everyone got disappeared by space magic.\n\nBut you know what? Everybody Wants To Rule The World was never intended to be traditional storytelling, what with events playing out for us in essentially random order. So now as well as being glued to the side of a gazelle, the book's being chewed up by the honey badger riding on the gazelle's back. Maybe, rather than a linear mystery to be unlocked by the end, I should see it as immersing myself in the larger world of the characters. The problem with that is I don't like any of the characters, and I'd sooner immerse myself in a vat of cold Marmite. I think I'm supposed to sympathize with the American scientist lady because this is rural England and the locals read the words 'American scientist lady' the same way they read the words 'Venusian ballerina crab', but she's hardly meeting them half-way, treating them like idiots and reacting hypersensitively to their blissful ignorance, like a cat that shares a litter box with a hedgehog.\n\nSo on the whole, I can't say I recommend Everybody's A Little Bit Racist. But just to be clear, I'm not averse to the whole 'interactive narrative' bit, just because at no point in them do I get ambushed by skeleton warriors. Stanley Parable, for example, is really good, but that's because the story is driven by the actions of the player. Everybody Do The Dinosaur is not interactive narrative, it's just plain old narrative classic scattered to the winds, like we're trying to listen to a radio with really patchy reception, or indeed read a book that was glued to a gazelle and a honey badger until they all fell into a wood chipper. Christ, Chinese Room! What have you got against gazelles?\n\n----\n\nGame: Doom (2016)\n\nDoom, and I still hate the practice of sequels with identical names, so from now on I'll refer to it as 'Deum', was promising to be the kind of classic-style FPS that I enjoyed very much, which immediately made me suspicious. You're a hardcore retro shooter focusing on fast pace and mobility while fighting off hordes of monsters? Well, it won't be truly retro unless it's level-based with open-ended maps and key hunting - oh it does have that. Alright then, bet you couldn't resist having weapon reloading. That's the one thing that shooter developers always put in these days without considering how it screws up the pace of - oh there's no reloading. Alright, what the fuck are you up to, Bethesda?\n\nFor me, this is like when an attractive young woman comes up to me in a bar and says, 'You know, I'm so attracted to aging socially-awkward hairy men who play too many video games. Why not buy me a drink then perhaps a house?' Perhaps I've gotten too defensive and cynical from a lifetime of disappointment. But after playing through Deum I think I've come to realize that people who come on to me might not necessarily be gold-digging harlots. Some of them are just trying to get back at their dad.\n\nI didn't know what to expect of Deum but did know what I didn't want. I didn't want Doom 3; the game that was 90% pitch blackness and 10% audio logs. So hopes weren't high when Deum opens with the protagonist having to listen to a voice on a computer screen, until 5 seconds into the speech our hero smashes the monitor like a confused gorilla then starts shooting zombies and never stops. Deum certainly seems to have a firm understanding of its audience because while there is a plot going on, the player character couldn't give a half ounce of deep-fried shit. If you want to know the plot then pause the game and read all the fluff text in the character and location database, sipping daintily from your delicate pink teacup full of pussy juice while the game waits patiently for you to strap your bollocks back on and get back in the fray. Not the most organic way to bring story across but what the hell else could they have done? Have Jiminy fucking Cricket sitting on your shoulder whispering stories in the brief pauses between the sounds of partially muscled bone being crushed between your erect bullet-proof nipples?\n\nFor what it's worth, the plot is, stock amoral corporation sci-fi subcategory 9, Weyland-Yutani type, has stock evil science motivation subcategory 12, energy crisis, and they have found the fool-proof and completely-unlikely-to-backfire solution of extracting energy from the Christian afterlife. I don't know why they felt they had to stick to Hell. You would've thought a few solar panels around God's beard would've done the job. Sadly, not-Weyland-Yutani forgets to screen its employees for death metal fans and someone unleashes the hordes of Hell on the Mars base. You, meanwhile, are a mythical demon-slaying warrior who is being kept in hell's drunk tank after the last time you smashed the place up, awakened to once again show the demons what for, and dress up like a Lego astronaut.\n\nDeum's gameplay is a surprisingly faithful update of the original Doom's. No you couldn't double-jump in the originals but you could move faster than a conservative political campaigner through a minority district, so it's still in the spirit of things. The combat is distinctly mechanics-focused. It doesn't make conventional sense that chainsaw murders make the victim burst into piles of ammunition or that smashing their head in makes them disgorge bandages and Mars bars, but it does from a mechanical perspective because the chainsaw's what you use when you're low on ammo and brutal murder is the game's intended solution for moments of high stress as well as moments of low stress and all the moments in between.\n\nI wasn't sure about the whole 'glory' kill thing. They're called 'glory kills' for one thing, which sounds like what you call stabbing someone to death with your knob through a hole in a cubicle wall, but they're actually pre-animated takedown moves, the thing that modern action games persist in having that have a tendency to kill the pacing as assuredly as a passport checkpoint on a roller-coaster. To Deum's credit, they are very quick: it's more like an Israeli passport checkpoint then an American one, but considering you can glory-kill every single fucking monster just by getting their health low, it gets repetitive. Maybe it should've been more of a reward like in Resident Evil 4 where you have to kneecap dudes before you can suplex them. It stops being memorable when I kill every single Baron of Hell by pulling their horn off and wimpily swiping their face with the wet end like I'm giving them a Dirty Sanchez.\n\nActually, before I continue with my list of whinging nitpicks, perhaps I should clarify that I do recommend Deum, and had more fun with it than I've had with most triple-A shooters lately. And that being the case, it would be remiss of me not to list what issues I did have, but none of them are deal breakers and it doesn't actually bother me that much that most of the NPC dialogue sounds like they are trying to do an impression of Dr. Claw from Inspector Gadget. Okay? Okay.\n\nThe loading times are a bit of an arse, and in levels with jumping puzzles over instant-kill death pits, they are a lot of an arse but they're triple-stacked arse with whipped butter on the side when the game was treating me hammering the ledge grab button as more of a blue-sky suggestion than a command. Relatedly, this is definitely a game that benefits from having the mouse and keyboard rather than the controller because the controller's best suited to wheeling yourself around an arena like a runaway dessert trolley on a chest-high wall safari - not so much for simultaneously jumping one way, looking at another, grabbing a ledge, shooting a dude and tying up your shoelaces.\n\nThe game's a little bit crazy with the upgrades. There's character upgrades, runes that give you passive buffs and the main currency is weapon upgrades. They give that shit away like condoms at a Planned Parenthood clinic. You killed all the monsters, weapon upgrade! You went into a secret, weapon upgrade! You came back out of the secret, weapon upgrade! Why the fuck not. Thing is though, you can only use them to upgrade the special alternate attacks each weapon has, a lot of which I didn't get much use out of when a good hard shotgun blast will answer most of a demon's probing interview questions. But hey, if the token's too easy to get but the upgrades are kind of shitty then I guess those issues cancel each other out.\n\nAnd the upgrades must have been having some effect, 'cause I thought the game was a bit easy by the end, where I felt like it had no more tricks up its sleeve. \"Oh goodness, I killed the entire wave of monsters and two Barons of Hell spawn. This will call upon all my training that I had 5 minutes ago the last time this happened.\" The monsters never took me by surprise, the way they'd always spawn in with the red glowy effect of shower of confetti and an English butler reading their names out loud. I don't want the Doom 3 thing where you pick up a small health pack and six hidden doors fly open to reveal hell's entire buggery squadron, but there's gotta be a middle ground. Oh yeah, and the grenades feel a bit wimpy. I throw it, there's a little 'PHUT' and all the zombies around it fall apart with embarrassment.\n\nI think that's it. As I say my problems are mere flicked bogies sticking to the edges of a perfectly solid core. Maybe it's rather blatantly pandering to my generation of gamers but this is the good kind of pander; the kind who gets all the bamboo and has sex once in a while.\n\n----\n\nGame: Deathspark\n\nGame: Limbo\n\nThey say that money is the root of all evil, but somehow I doubt Mrs. Hitler was being impregnated by a roll of Deutsche Marks. The saying works better if you replace \"money\" with \"rich businessmen in tight suits who won't even put twenty cents in a gumball machine if they can't expect a return of investment\" and \"evil\" with \"bland, samey action-adventure clones kneeling on the bed of a dried-up watering hole licking the dirt for moisture.\" (And \"is\" with \"are,\" if we want to be grammatically correct.)", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "It's hard to find innovation in big-budget, mainstream games when you can't make a single design or suggestion without triplicate proof that Gears of War did it, and this illustrates the important of independent development. We're fortunate to live in a time when it's never been easier to get exposure for new and innovative ideas, and I'd like to grant a little more exposure to two recent XBox Live Arcade titles, starting with DeathSpank, a Diablo clone.\n\nAAAAAAAAAAAA... actually, that's not completely fair. Just in case the title hasn't told you everything you needed to know yet, DeathSpank is more like Diablo mixed with hack 'n' slash and marinated in Monkey Island overnight, which makes sense, because it was served up by the same chef, Ron Gilbert. You are the stalwart hero DeathSpank; you have come to a faraway land of fantasy in order to acquire the mysterious artefact known only as \"The Artefact\", and do your bit to help the downtrodden along the way, with most of the downtrodden all needing the kind of help that involves killing strangely specific numbers of certain kinds of monster. DeathSpank is that particular breed of parody that basically just does all the same things as the kind of thing it's parodying, but occasionally points to itself and goes: \"Hey, everybody, look!\" (Then the Wayans brothers make a parody of that full of bodily fluids and pop culture references, and the collective IQ of the general public drops another precious notch.)\n\nDeathSpank is a game that's all about its flavour text. Every character has a funny dialogue tree and every item has a funny description. Ha ha, my sides. It'd just be nice to be able to read the fucking things. It's got the Dead Rising problem of assuming that everyone either owns a six-foot TV, or sits right in front of it with their forehead Superglued to the screen, and all the text and details are smaller than a gnat's tit. The largest enemies are actually far easier to kill, because you can tell the difference between when they're raising their arm to attack or when they're just pointing out an interesting cloud to a friend, so they're easier to counterattack. Otherwise it's extremely hard to escape a battle without losing health when you're surrounded by little yappy murderers who look exactly like the crisps packets all over the floor. That's why it gets more and more irritating to have to sit and eat food to restore your health every ten seconds, since attacking or being attacked at any point while eating makes DeathSpank throw his lunch, unfinished, on the ground. Here is a man in dire need of a foam dome full of beef casserole. And it doesn't take long for the hilarious food-eating noise to start grating when it sounds like a dog eating watermelon next to your ear while discussing his favorite arsehole smells.\n\nI guess a recommendation for DeathSpank depends entirely on whether you feel a game can be carried by humour, because there's certainly a lot of that. But strip it away and it's just a slightly annoying hack 'n' slash RPG, but hey, too many games these days are about scowling, serious tosspots with so many brooms up their arse they could lean against a wall and call themselves a cleaning cupboard, so perhaps humour is enough. Personally I stopped playing because gameplay just got too dreary and the voice-acting roughed me up like a bed full of biscuit crumbs, so let's move on.\n\nAnd speaking of games that take themselves too seriously, our second XBLA game is Limbo, an arty platformer developed by manic-depressives for manic-depressives. There's a bit of an unspoken rule on \"cuhs-blah\" that the easiest way to get critically acclaimed is to make a bleak, arty platformer about a small child with an oversized head in a big, scary world, with bonus points if they have to lose their innocence at some point. Anyway, in Limbo you play the silhouette of a small child with an oversized head in a silhouette of a big, scary world, and your objective is to keep moving right until the game says stop.\n\nAnd \"bleak\" is an understatement: This is bleak multiplied by grim to the power of Hot Topic. Absolutely everything is trying to kill you in needlessly gory ways. Because of the nature of the art style, there's no way of knowing they will do so until your disembodied head is ricocheting off a suicidal pallbearer's hat. There are enough auto-saves that this isn't really a problem, and it all adds to this wonderful sense of oppression and loneliness that I, as a horror fan, found quite stirring in my pants. There's a sequence early on involving a spider that I won't spoil, but if there's not at least one part of your conscious mind loudly evacuating its bowels throughout, then cancel this afternoon's appointments, because you appear to have died. Insects are a recurring theme in the game, because that's exactly what you are: a tiny, scared, insignificant insect, gazing up incomprehensingly at the towering food chain at the bottom of which you lie. The world is massive, cruel, and unsympathetic, and the best you can hope for is to end up in hedgehog poo. So man up, your highness.\n\nGameplay-wise, it's kind of like the evil parallel universe equivalent of LittleBigPlanet, with challenges based solely around platforming and pulling boxes around. After a while, the game abandons arachnid-based atmosphere-building and just becomes a sequence of physics puzzles, which was a little disappointing. I like how the game never repeats itself, but it is very short, especially for 1200 gamer points. It's like it ends at the very instant it runs out of ideas, clapping its hands and going: \"Right, that's your lot. Here's your disappointing ending. Go home now, don't look back, you mustn't dwell...\" I guess a recommendation for Limbo depends entirely on whether you feel a game can be carried by apocalyptic despair.\n\nThe final question, I suppose, is which of the two games I recommend most. Well, if you're rich enough to patronise the arts now and then, put on your tuxedo, uncork some pricey Chablis, and experience for yourself an evening of Limbo. But if you're more in the market for a bulk-buy economy brand kind of entertainment, then order out for a barbecue meat lover's with a two-liter coke and try DeathSpank. Alternatively, if neither option appeals and you'd prefer something bland and unchallenging, then why not try eating a dick? !\n\n----\n\nGame: Cuphead\n\nViewers, do you think there's something wrong with me? Rhetorical question; hands down, please. I asked because my favorite kind of gameplay is ball-busting difficulty, and all my favorite story-based games seem to be miserable and depressing. In fact, what might as well be my favorite game ever is both ball-busting and miserable; not that having your testicles mangled should ever give one cause for optimism, but you get my point. And then there was that time I shat all over Ori and the Blind Forest for pulling a happy ending out of its arse and giving me misery blue-balls.\n\nBut balls aside, I checked over my childhood for some kind of trauma that might explain this, and I couldn't find one in any of the memories I hadn't suppressed, so am I just a fundamentally negative person? Is that why I spent the last ten years swearing and talking about my balls for a living? Well, who can say? But things might be changing, because I actually quite like Cuphead, and it's not miserable at all; it's a bright, cartoony, upbeat romp. It is, however, so ball-bustingly hard that you'll be jizzing ball-shrapnel for weeks.\n\nAnd having said that it's cartoony and upbeat, its premise, admittedly, is that you're crippled with gambling debts and now have to collect from fellow debtors or be murdered by Satan. See, the rub is that Cuphead is retro-style, but not in the usual sense, i.e., pixels the size of Plymouth; it's deliberately fashioning itself after retro animation, in the style of Max Fleischer or very early Disney, and pulls that off with quite remarkable success! The film grain, the scratchy audio, the big brass band soundtrack, the fluid, exaggerated animation where characters all move like warmed-up gummy worms caught in the spokes of a bike; it all feels so bloody authentic!\n\nAnd most importantly, what a lot of people forget about early cartoons - here, we very un-subtly waggle our eyebrows at Epic Mickey's forgotten grave-site - is that they could be really fucking dark. See, back then, it wasn't generally understood that kids needed to have their delicate sensibilities protected, as odds were pretty good they were all going to die in a European trench war before they turned eighteen, anyway. So thematically, cartoons were lighter on wholesome lessons about friendship and heavier on skeletons and racism.\n\nSo there's something overtly sinister about Cuphead, which might be from subtly wrong things like the drinking straw in our character's head. I mean, the teacup-head thing I'd buy, but who the fuck drinks from a teacup with a straw? That's just pushing it. But I think it's the overall scratchy look and feel that makes me think the little girl from The Ring could push out of the screen at any moment and start making comical trombone noises. This surreal, almost-elegiac atmosphere pairs remarkably well with the relentless difficulty; this is a world where every inanimate object has angry eyes, gyrates constantly like it's busting for a piss, and desperately wants you dead, which is just as well, because you'll have obliged them several hundred times before the game is done.\n\nGameplay-wise, the closest comparison I can think of is Furi, in that the game consists mainly of a string of multi-stage boss fights with elements of bullet hell, in which you must balance pouring damage into the enemy against avoiding the damage that pours out of them. The difference is, in Furi, you had a big sword and a mysterious backstory and could regain health from therapeutically twatting people, while in Cuphead, you have a cup for a head that can take a total of three hits before it shatters as assuredly as to a pushed-off desk by the naughty cat of archetype, and you have to start again.\n\nThere's also a fairly-centralized two-player co-op mode I'm in two minds about. On the one hand, it seems like it'd be dramatically easier, since you're doing twice the damage with twice the targets and one player can even save another player from death; that seems weighed excessively against the lonely saddos of the world whose best friends and sex partners are attached to the ends of their wrists. But then again, it means you have to keep track of a few more of the several hundred moving objects onscreen at any one time, so maybe it balances out. And besides, a proper bollock-tussler of a challenge is something to be enjoyed like a fine wine, and personally, I wouldn't drink from a glass of wine with another person; that seems like a good way to make a mess and engender unwanted sexual tension.\n\nThe secret of enjoying gonad-distressingly hard games is to not give up, 'cos I guarantee you'll find a hundred things to complain about while you're struggling with a boss. Like how you die fifty times fighting, say, a giant hole-punch with angry eyes, before you finally squeak past its first two stages with one health left, whereupon the hole-punch turns into a fucking Powershred 64Cb paper shredder and you die instantly to its innovative jam-blocker technology. It can seem very unfair that you've worked so hard to memorize the best way to avoid the first two stages' attacks, only for them to be replaced by completely different attacks that you must now figure out in your estimated twelve nanoseconds of remaining life or start all over again.\n\nThe music's pissing you off, and your eyes hurt, and that fucking pirate has twice as much health as every other boss, I fucking swear, and you're pretty sure you're going to write down some very harsh swear words when you come to do the review. But then, all of a sudden, you enter a sort of cosmic state of hyper-awareness and beat the boss perfectly, and it's like someone's lifted a whale off your lower back and you just feel serene, until the game grades you with a C-, but honestly, stick your grades up your arse, Cuphead; I'm happy and I won't have to beat my kids tonight. See, if I had stopped because I was frustrated or because I should have walked the dog two hours ago, I'd only have been left with bad feelings and a pissy carpet. I'd have gone to bed that night with that fucking music stuck in my head, and woken up the next morning with teeth marks all over my pillow, mattress, and spouse. So it's important to put complaints about the game in the proper context. Yes, it's frustrating. That's the whole point; it needs to be for the payoff.\n\nBut it's not just challenge that gives Cuphead its weirdly hypnotic draw, because there was another, um... cullion-traumatizingly hard game that came out last week; Ruiner, it was called, and I didn't like it very much. Seemed like a cyberpunk ripoff of Hotline Miami with none of what made Hotline Miami interesting, like the psychedelic imagery, or the fast pace, or the not taking place in a succession of the most obvious fucking environments imaginable, and then trying to make them less obvious by illuminating them like a fucking ghost train ride. Yeah, the fights were hard, but I wasn't getting that all-important sense of payoff; all I felt I was \"earning\" was more chances to fight boring gang members in murky environments. That's the Cuphead difference: its utterly unique style makes it an instant breath of fresh air, even if that breath of fresh air also contains a thousand stinging hornets, and you tank the stings just to see what it's going to belch up next. It's like being stabbed to death by Dick Van Dyke: yes, it hurts, and it's probably not good for you, but you can't stay mad; it's too adorable, how he thinks he can do a Cockney accent.\n\n----\n\nGame: Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door\n\nOh, dear. It's one of those \"gap-in-the-schedules\" kinds of weeks. Well, there was Battleborn, but, you know... multiplayer-focused, MOBA-inspired, by the guys who made Borderlands, the Pepsi to Overwatch's Coke. \"That's not my bag, like, three times over,\" as the frustrated old woman said to the forgetful lost-property attendant. And I doubt my opinion holds much value. Of course, the game does say we're perfectly welcome to play it single-player, but I've fallen for that one before, haven't I? Like with Evolve and Star Wars: Battlefront, which technically do have single-player in the same way that a hotel room does technically have a bidet if they hire someone to lie on the bathroom floor and spit up your asshole.\n\nSo, it's been a while. Let's retro-review! And since we just did a Nintendo game, let's remind ourselves of a time when Nintendo didn't gargle quite so much hot motion-control piss-gravy and spat it out all over our aching wrists. It's 2004, it's the GameCube (a console with several very decent games which you'll find very difficult to get hold of and play these days, which is in some way in service of progress and, incidentally, you could run faster if you weighed less, so why not cut one of your legs off?) It's a game that I'm constantly bringing up whenever we talk about RPGs, Mario games and RPG Mario games: Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. The second game in the Paper Mario series that continued the Mario RPG tradition that began on the SNES with, brace yourself, Super Mario RPG, a collaboration between Nintendo and SquareSoft, which explains why it was simultaneously cutesy and fucking incomprehensible.\n\nPaper Mario, meanwhile, was developed by Intelligent Systems, who, it turns out, had some pretty good ideas despite their company having the dreariest fucking name in the history of game development. The paper-puppet-theatre aesthetic was a lot more appealing than Mario RPG's 3D pre-rendering, a style that looked good for about the twelve nanoseconds after Donkey Kong Country came out and then looked like Playmobil people sliding around a breakfast tray. But the reason why I hold up Paper Mario 2 as the peak of Mario RPGing is that while Nintendo are a stubborn lot that retread their old ground so much that they've worn down a trench deep enough for a fucking fallout shelter, something magical happens on the rare occasions when they do try building some continuity.\n\nLook at the N64 Zeldas! Ocarina of Time had to reestablish all the same old shit: Link, Zelda, burble, bom, Ganon, Triforce, bomble, boo. But once they'd gotten that shit out of the way, they did Majora's Mask in the same continuity, and that actually had some really good original ideas and themes. And the same thing happened with Paper Mario. The first one had to get all the tired, old status-quo bullshit out of the way: Bowser kidnaps princess, Mario mounts highly circuitous rescue attempt that will inevitably involve collecting stars (for it is always stars). But once that was established, they could do Thousand-Year Door: same continuity, some actual new fucking ideas. For, you see, Nintendo, you'll never break your shoes in properly if you keep rebooting every five minutes.\n\nHow's about this for breaking the mould: Princess Peach gets kidnapped, right, by somebody other than Bowser. Bam! And the seven stars you have to collect are seven crystal stars this time. Fucking hell, guys! Rein in the creativity before it starts triggering miscarriages! All right, admittedly, the broad strokes in the game aren't that much different to Paper Mario 1 and it was Super Paper Mario that really shook the formula up. Thousand-Year Door still applies Paper Mario 1's turn-based combat of the temporary-pocket-dimension variety with the usual Mario RPG innovation: that you can press a button in time with the hits to do more damage or take less, which is about as far as turn-based combat can innovate without turning into one of those godawful turn-based/real-time hybrid systems of the Ni no Kunis of the world. Still, over time, the Mario RPGs couldn't resist escalating mechanics so that attacks require more and more ridiculously elaborate minigames. The Mario & Luigi series has run this right into the fucking ground and now the super attacks in those games are like supervising a temperamental Heath Robinson machine.\n\nBut in Thousand-Year Door, the worst it gets is probably the earthquake attack (which is the best all-purpose damage-dealer for most of the game, but getting the full effect requires playing five minutes of PaRappa the Rapper). The combat's also lent depth by the badge system that allows Mario's fighting style to be heavily customized, but considering virtually every enemy has some specific immunity, the only practical fighting style is \"all of them\". But the fact is, the combat almost doesn't matter. An RPG must have some and, hey, there it is! It's the story and writing that have the edge. Considering that Nintendo these days treat their first-party IP like it's the priceless family silver and don't even use it for special occasions now because it's just about the only thing they have left to pawn, it's amazing to look at what Thousand-Year Door and other Mario RPGs managed to get away with while flying the official Mario flag.\n\nThousand-Year Door pretty swiftly goes off the usual rails. You know what I mean: grasslands, desert, ocean, jungle, my Sharona! Yeah, the first stage has much of the grasslands about it and then you fight a dragon in a castle, but it's not too long after that before you get to the chapters where Mario takes up a career in professional wrestling or investigates Agatha Christie mysteries on a moving train. Super Paper Mario was even more offbeat with its settings, but Thousand-Year Door found the best balance between the irreverent, funny laughs and building an actual cohesive world that's more than just a vehicle for the silliness. The hub town around which the game revolves is not a cheerful Smurf village where the generic mushroom people live the eternal paradox of how one builds a pastel-coloured sugar-plum cottage with no opposable thumbs, but a cosmopolitan pirate town in the grip of sleaze and organised crime. There's even a dirty great gallows in the town centre, which is a bit dark, although considering all the Mario monsters that can fly or have no discernible neck, there's only about five dudes it could've been used on!\n\nThis is also the game in which Princess Peach is about as sexualised as she'll ever be in an official Mario game, and in that I include Super Mario Sunshine, in which Bowser's kid claims to have come out of her vagina and, tellingly, she doesn't deny it. In between Mario's chapters, you briefly play as Princess Peach in the villain's hideout, finding a way to send help or information to the outside world and she's able to do this because, early on, the villain's computer spies on her taking a shower and then spends the rest of the game contriving new reasons for her to take her clothes off. It might sound exploitational to you, but I think she comes across rather well. She's a diplomat, not a fighter, and she's finding opportunities to leverage the upper hand, making full use of the assets she has available. Both of them, in fact. She'd last longer than Mario in Game of Thrones. She'd have a strategic marriage in the bag before you can say \"nudity clause\".\n\n----\n\nGame: Beyond: Two Souls\n\nAs anyone who's eaten Tex-Mex before a long plane ride will tell you, colons can be very problematic. I fucking hate saying the title Beyond: Two Souls, 'cause you have to mark the colon with a little pause, or people think you're saying Beyond Two Souls, as in \"more than two souls\". So, three souls, then? Four souls, dare we dream!? But if you take off either part of the title then people won't know what you're talkin' about:\n\n\"I've been playing Beyond!\"\n\n\"Beyond what? Beyond the limits of social acceptability?\"\n\n\"No, I mean I've been playing Two Souls!\"\n\n\"Oh, right, isn't that that really hard game from By Software? I mean, by From Software?\"\n\n\"No, that's Dark Souls!\"\n\n\"Oh, so you were playing some kind of game about the exploration of several human sphincters?\"\n\n\"No, that's Arse Holes!\"\n\nThe whole colon-title-separation thing is predicated on the irritating trend that all games must at least pretend to be launching some kind of larger franchise. But, frankly, after playing this, I wouldn't hold out much hope for Beyond 2: Some More Souls We Found in a Hedge.\n\nBeyond – Eergh, fuck that – The Ellen Page Variety Hour comes to us from David Cage, a man who is himself caught between two worlds: eager to spearhead a unique genre of interactive narrative, but at the same time possessing the writing ability of a half-melted chocolate bunny rabbit.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "His previous game, Heavy Rain, switched between ridiculous high-octane quick-time event scenes and prolonged sequences of someone bumbling around their house, looking for objects and surfaces to momentarily rest their gonads on, like if someone intercut Dragon's Lair with security footage from my living room on the morning of a major deadline.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Ellen Page-apalooza does thankfully tone things down a bit with the bumbling – well, depending on your personal bumbling capacity – but without bumbling, the game's little more than a linear sequence of actions, each firing off only after you press the button prompt, and the great thing about this is that you can recreate the exciting \"interactive narrative\" experience by watching any normal film and pressing the pause button every two seconds. Or by strapping yourself into a Chinese water torture machine that asks for your consent between every single fucking drip.\n\nPrevious games have attempted broad multi-character stories that all spectacularly collapsed, so this time the narrative focusses on a single character, randomly flipping back and forth between key points in Ellen Page's life, from birth to childhood to teens to more teens to– actually, she never really moves past the teens. It is quite funny at one point when she's supposed to be a rogue CIA agent but she looks more like a 15-year-old boy put on camo gear, and drew all over his face with black felt-tip pen like mummy's little insurgent.\n\nAnyway, Ellen Page is really sad her whole life because there's an invisible ghost following her around who kills everyone she doesn't like. Fucking suck it up, Ellen Page; some of us had to make do with rat poison growing up! But no, the ungrateful tart spends half the game sounding like she's about to start crying, and the other half crying. Actually, everyone in this game cries like altar boys after lights-out. You could use their faces to irrigate the Sahara, since, y'know, the emoting thing doesn't seem to be working out. I do think it's churlish to criticize facial animation when just ten years ago you'd be lucky if characters opened their mouths when they spoke. But having said that, whenever someone's supposed to be at the limits of screaming emotion in this game, it looks more like they're concentrating really hard on trying to do a horse impression.\n\nThe Ellen Page-David Cage Rage Gauge pulls a very mean fast one by letting you think there's actually gonna be some fucking gameplay in it. There's a stealth tutorial early on when Ellen Page is training for the CIA in a sequence borne out of David Cage watching the opening sequence to The Silence of the Lambs at some point, introducing such mechanics as using your ghost murderer friend to scout ahead and clear paths, as well as cover mechanics and pre-animated takedowns, which normally would excite me as much as a lukewarm sponge on a dead cat's face, but I'll fucking take it if it means we can finally have some action that isn't a sequence of quick-time events, cracking off like farts from a row of nervous pigs. The problem is that, besides the tutorial, these mechanics are used on only one other occasion, which, by staggering coincidence, turns out to be the bit that was in the gameplay trailers. Now that's just dishonest, David Cage! What was the thinking? \"Yeah, people might get pissed off with how little organic gameplay with invisible murderer ghosts there actually is, but I reckon by that point they'll have been drawn in to Ellen Page's heartwarming struggle to kiss a succession of hunky boys!\"\n\nAnd for the record, Despite Ellen Page, I Am Still Just a Rat in a Cage contains the most retarded attempt at a token multiplayer mode I have seen since The Amazing Back-Titted Woman: it's the same as the single-player except one player controls the Pagemaster and the other controls her imaginary friend. But since neither character can do anything while the other is in control, you may as well just pass the controller back and forth. And it's pretty unfair if you ask me, if one of you gets to kick furniture around like a bored six-year-old with the upper-body strength of Rowdy Roddy Piper, while the other, meaning no disrespect, has to be Ellen Page, the snotty handkerchief trapped in the body of a human being, whose secondary misbehaving invisible friend is the camera, to which her movement controls are oriented, so controlling her is like playing putt-putt with a gym ball and a breeze block on the end of a stick. If you are playing as Ellen Page, then when you're at a point where you have to switch to the other player to make the plot move forward, it won't do so until you press the button. So at least that provides a way to glean some amusement from the experience: \"I know it says to push the button, but I dunno, maybe some secret will be revealed if we watch this idle animation another eight or nine times!\"\n\nBuried somewhere in the concept of piloting a telekinetic ghost with a grudge against furniture, there may be a nice little idea for a game, but in the hands of Quantic Dream it is like an arthritic horse trying to hold a china teapot. For a company so bent on exploring videogame storytelling, you'd think they'd get less shit at it! The tone and atmosphere wobble insanely back and forth like the wheels on an insolent supermarket trolley, so one minute Ellen Page is exploring the grim realities of homelessness, and the next she's using spirit magic to fight Native American demons with a pair of hunky boys. All the characters' actions bear about as much resemblance to believable human behaviour as a camel licking sweat off your forehead does to a whirlwind holiday romance.\n\nAbout the best thing Quantic Dream games do is provide material for David Cage's psychological profile. What struck me out in this one is that he's got a really patronizing view of poverty; nobility and quiet intelligence go up in inverse proportionality to the character's bank balance, while rich characters all seem to end up taking drills to people's hoo-has. Maybe he's just trying not to alienate himself from the people he might have to live with if he keeps making games like this fucking shambles.\n\n----\n\nGame: Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag\n\nSpunk on a bap! I've been playing so many sandbox games lately, my vagina feels like a rusty toaster! I've had to start drawing a little mini-map on my spectacles to adjust to daily life. And they're always so fucking long! Most of my weekends lately have been spent trying to plough through to at least story-end, deflecting every side-quest that clamours for attention like I'm walking down the city centre trying not to be noticed by earnest young people with clipboards.\n\nMy last two reviews, if you'll recall, were an open-world sailing game, and an open-world jumping-on-people-from-buildings game, and now having to chase those two with Assassin's Creed IV, you'll forgive me if all these games have all started blurring together a bit. One could easily mistake Batman for Connor from Assassin's Creed III, for example, 'cause they both jump on people from buildings and have the personality of a high-backed leather armchair with a frowny face drawn on the cushion.\n\nBut let's forget everything about AssCreed III, except for the fact that Future Desmond died in it! We even get to see his future autopsy in AssCreed IV, which was exactly the kind of closure I needed, frankly. But his ghost still haunts us 'cause the evil corporation nicked his brain and extracted genetic memories from enough interesting periods of history to make at least seven billion more Assassin's Bloody Creed games!\n\nSpeaking of Batman, I'm reminded of that line from Heath Ledger's Joker: \"I think you and I are destined to do this forever\"; a line that proved slightly ironic for Heath Ledger, but a good summary of the weary resignation I have towards Assassin's Creed at this point, but I wonder if Ubisoft doesn't share my weary resignation to some degree, 'cause the Future plot's gone a little bit meta on us.\n\nInstead of Future Desmond, we are now Future Silent Protagonist, an employee for a French-Canadian videogame developer being pressured to produce results by their evil corporate owners – write what you know, eh, lads? – the evil Templars that run the world having hit upon the surprisingly sophisticated idea to use mass media entertainment to rewrite history in their favour, which may be Ubisoft attempting to address the elephant in the room before someone else does: \"God, isn't it terrible how popular culture rewrites and romanticizes history to appeal to the lowest common denominator? Yes, I'm glad we agree, now let's find some pirates and romanticize their bollocks off!\"\n\nThe new historical protagonist is Edward Kenway, Welsh pirate and bastard, who, refreshingly, isn't even an Assassin for most of the game; he just nicked one of their uniforms and started jumping on people from buildings as a sort of enthusiastic amateur, I suppose. What I'm noticing is that from number III onwards, Assassin's Creed has a tendency to introduce the main character and the Assassin Order and then let that whole side of the plot go back to bed so the game can party it up with historical figures and reenact famous events, with the main plot occasionally popping its head 'round the door to complain about the noise.\n\nAlthough, if we're more about the history now, AssCreed IV has picked a much better setting than its predecessor. So instead of desperately trying to convince us that it's exciting to throw tea into a harbour, or watch some old men signing pieces of paper, we instead get to watch Blackbeard signing pieces of paper! Except his pen is actually a massive cannon and the piece of paper is actually the hope anyone in the near vicinity had of getting a good night's sleep. So the plot busily introduces every famous name from the Golden Age of Piracy and has them do the famous thing they did, while Kenway stands off to one side eating piratey popcorn.\n\nI could complain that this series just keeps going on and on and on, and seems like it really wants to go to sleep now but someone keeps tazing it every time its head droops. But for the record, AssCreed IV is a particularly violent tazing that has added quite a bit of life. It actually shakes up the core gameplay in a way that AssCreed III's imaginary sofa manufacturing could only dream of, because I spent the majority of my time sailing rather than running through a city shoulder-clocking motherfuckers like I'm the music video for Bitter Sweet Symphony on fast-forward.\n\nI know the sailing was in the last game, but it was only a side-quest and I was doing the get-through-story-mode-as-fast-as-possible thing. Hmm, yes, well-tutorialized. Tell me, do I ever need to do this again? \"Well, not really, but it can help you make money to develop your homestead–\" Cheery-bye!! But now the sailing is central rather than hanging off to one side like a beanbag chair stapled to an earring. Travelling the sea has that Wind Waker grand explorative quality, sea battles are fun, and when you board an enemy ship, it seamlessly becomes Assassin's Creed again, counter-stabbing your way through a bunch of orbiting assholes, made only slightly annoying by all the friendly pirates, whom you might have put some investment into recruiting, hovering around offering to block sword thrusts with their faces.\n\nI resented having to come back on dry land to do story missions, because they'd almost always involve tailing someone, and when I've just got back from blowing the tits off a man-o'-war's figurehead and jamming their pert wooden nipples into the enemy quartermaster's eye sockets, it's hard to come back down to grandmother's footsteps. I really started loathing the tailing missions, especially when you have to stay close to your target without being noticed by them or any guards. So with one hand the game is your mother, pushing you out of your hiding spot to show everyone that funny little dance you learned, and with the other hand it is your father, beating you over the head with a chair leg because you made the mistake of being noticed before he'd had his morning drink.\n\nAnd the mere act of moving in Assassin's Creed sometimes feels like kicking a sack of potatoes around a cattle grid, and sometimes you think you're gonna hop onto a ledge and into a convenient bush, but Edward would rather grandly leap forwards, drop three stories and parkour-roll into the people you're trying to tail, stopping just short of making jazz-hands and going \"Ta-daaa!\"\n\nGenerally, missions lean slightly more \"open-ended sneaky-stab\" and slightly less \"rigid join-the-dots destruction following\" than in III, which is nice, but frankly, if I didn't feel the need to collect the unlockable sea shanties so my crew would sing some new ones for a fucking change, I might've been content to never go to towns at all, 'cause the sailing's where the action is. Money has an actual use at last, because ship upgrades are expensive and that's an investment that adds to gameplay rather than letting you corner the imaginary sofa market.\n\nBut while sailing is a breath of fresh salty air, I have the feeling that it cannot possibly be more than a fleeting dalliance for the series as besides the Golden Age of Piracy, there are few historical settings into which sailing would integrate so naturally. And Assassin's Creed is not a series of individual games anymore; Assassin's Creed is a fucking line graph. The line went down a bit for AssCreed III but now it's gone back up again, and maybe it'll keep going up in the next one or maybe it'll take another plunge. What I do know is that this line graph is being drawn on what appears to be a very depressingly long piece of paper, at the end of which stands Ubisoft and I do not like the look of that stapler it's holding!\n\n----\n\nGame: Amnesia: The Dark Descent\n\nI know it's unusual for me to review a lower-profile indie game when there are big, juicy, mainstream targets doing the fan dance in my sights. But while I like keeping up to date, it's slightly eclipsed by my love of baiting fanboys, so Halo: Reach can sit in my to-do bucket for another week. I spent all the time I should have spent playing it playing Amnesia: Dark Descent, the first-person survival-horror adventure game with physics puzzles and stealth elements available now on Steam, brought to us by Frictional Games, whose only previous title is Penumbra, a first-person survival-horror adventure game with physics puzzles and stealth elements available now on Steam. I guess it's good to stick to what you know, and Frictional seem to be stuck, nailed, and riveted to what they know. And what they know is how to make me poo my pants.\n\nRegular viewers will know I have a fondness for horror games but that recent mainstream horror games haven't been scratching that particular pulsating tumorous itch. You see, there are three kinds of horror games: first, there's the kind where you're in a dark room and a guy in a spooky mask jumps out of a cupboard going \"abloogy-woogy-woo\" - that would be your Doom 3; then there's the kind where the guy in the spooky mask isn't in a cupboard but standing right behind you and you just know he's going to go \"abloogy-woogy-woo\" at some point but he doesn't and you're getting more and more tense but you don't want to turn around because he might stick his cock in your eye - that would be your Silent Hill 2; and then there are horror games where the guy in the spooky mask goes \"abloogy-woogy-woo\" while standing on the far side of a brightly lit room before walking slowly over to you, plucking a violin, and then slapping you in the face with a t-bone steak - that would be your Dead Space. See, the second one is best, because your imagination is doing all the work. All a good horror game needs to do is hand you a piece of sandpaper and shout encouragement as you vigorously massage your own undercarriage.\n\nThis is something Amnesia pulls off quite nicely. It's actually got pacing, unlike Dead Space, where all the monsters are so fucking thrilled to be working that they fight each other for screen time. It's quite a while before you even glimpse a monster, and let me just transcribe my thought process at the time: \"Dum de dum. Well, this isn't very scary. Oh, look, physics! I can throw chairs around like a removal man who's completely stopped giving a shit. Doors suddenly blowing open in the wind? Yawn-o-rama! Guess I'll just look around upstairs and then might as well play Halo: Reach for a bit. Nope, nothing much up here either. I'll just go back and... whoa, what was that thing I just glimpsed running down a hallway? I don't know, but it looked cross about something, so I think I'll go down this other hallway instead. Oh, it's blocked. Guess I'll turn around and WHERE DID YOU COME FROM! WHAAAA! RUN, RUN, RUN! I'M SORRY, I DIDN'T MEAN TO MESS YOUR CHAIRS UP! OH, PISSING BLIMEY, THERE'S JAM COMING OUT OF THE WALLS!\"\n\nThe entire backstory is neatly encapsulated in the title. You have amnesia, that old video game storytelling chestnut. If adventure games were a medical condition, the first symptom would be amnesia and the second would be kleptomania. Your past self is courteous enough to write you a note telling you to find and kill a guy but not quite enough to wipe his memory somewhere that isn't five hundred locked-door puzzles away from the target. From there the plot is heavily Lovecraft-inspired, and like many games with a Lovecraftian bent implements a sanity meter, as if sanity is like diesel oil or something and you can get a reading on it by sticking a dipstick in your ear. And as so often the case, the main effect of losing your sanity is that the screen goes all blurry and weird, as if the first thing anyone does when they go insane is lose their contact lenses. Hanging around in the scary darkness depletes sanity because apparently we're five years old, but staying in the light makes it easier for monsters to see you, creating a toss-up between not getting a headache from wibbly-wobbly camera filters and not being murdered.\n\nNow, in Frictional's first Penumbra game, there was a bit of combat. It used their trademark click-drag physics engine in that you had to manually swing melee weapons around with the mouse, which wasn't a good idea when Alone in the Dark did it either, because it always tends to feel like you're controlling someone with two dislocated elbows. After that, Frictional threw up their hands and kicked any notion of self-defense in the head. While in another horror game the tension of the \"abloogy woogy woo\" situation is diminished by the comforting heft of heavy ordinance, or at the very least a weighty bit of old pipe, in Amnesia you're only recourse is to flee like a man in an expensive suit from a teppanyaki restaurant and put as many doors, walls, and preferably continents between you and the wobbling mutant as possible. Amensia understands that a monster stays scary the less you see of it, so if you ever hang around long enough to get a good look at the ugly Cenobite rejects, then your face will be torn off and repurposed as a tea cozy before you can say \"Cthulhu fhtagn.\"\n\nI wouldn't say it's a great game. The level design reflects its independent origins; it's really just a sequence of small environments with little connectivity, each with one or two self-contained, simplistic puzzles. Yeah yeah, wander around a corridor maze, find puzzle item, use on puzzle, unlock door to next area, get devoured by cosmic monstrosity. Blah de blah. The game does come alive when monsters appear in pursuit of protagonist pie, but the game's habit of cheekily spawning one right around the room where you just solved a puzzle starts to get wearily predictable. It's like they're being summoned by the autosave function. But a horror game actually scaring me, penetrating the caked-on layers of doughy acceptance that the games industry has been pelting me with over the years and evoking some vestige of emotional response, is reason enough to celebrate it. And one should always support the independents - at least until they start making money, the soulless, sell-out fucks! Amnesia isn't a perfect game, but it's almost unmatched as a constipation aid.\n\n----\n\nGame: Paper Mario: Color Splash\n\nI found myself wondering if Paper Mario: Sticker Star did alright - not by my standards, and I know sometimes I give the impression that the game would have to escape from Colditz and fall to its knees at my door to commence a blowjob marathon that makes my feet recede into my legs to impress me, but Sticker Star was a particular thorn in my suppository because the older Paper Mario games had humor and life and creativity whereas Sticker Star has... well, it has stickers. Nope, there it is on Wikipedia; Sticker Star - mixed reviews, and the lowest scores of any Paper Mario game.\n\nWell, that clears it up. Now I understand perfectly why Nintendo thought \"Yes! This is the one we need to bring to Wii U. This is exactly what our ailing brand needs: a good hard shot of mediocrity that will pull out bootstraps about halfway up before getting bored and wandering off.' You know, I seem to remember being a bit down on Super Paper Mario when it first came out on the Wii, now I'm counting the days till the NX comes out and Nintendo does the usual thing where they stop supporting the previous console but one, and thinking of all the things I should've said to Super Paper Mario before I pressed down on the pillow.\n\nPaper Mario: Color Splash opens with Mario and the princess arriving at a mysterious port town to find answers to a mystery, which made a single cobweb fall off my long-dormant stiffy because that's how Thousand-Year Door started. But nope, it's just the usual thing: monsters have stolen the local 6 or 7 important and inevitably star-shaped artifacts of power and the person behind it all begins with B and rhymes with something Inspector Gadget used to say a lot. And after restoring the first of the inevitably star-shaped things, it's parked its pointy bum down for less than a second before Princess Peach gets kidnapped, which I wouldn't have minded. But then a nearby toad comments 'Oh no! Bowser kidnapped Princess Peach! What a totally unexpected happenstance!' And you know what? Fuck you, Paper Mario: Color Splash. There's a difference between clever, subversive self-parody and just doing the same thing you always do but sarcastically rolling your eyes at it. Don't kick me in the bollocks and say 'Gosh, wouldn't it be funny if I were really kicking you in the bollocks? '.\n\nWhat bothers me the most about these last 2 Paper Marios is that there's such a brazen lack of effort on display. And this isn't fucking Wii Fit Trainer's quest for the perfect bleached asshole. This is Mario, Nintendo's fucking A-grade intellectual property. Yeah, Pokémon might be the money maker now but Mario is the pimp daddy; it has to pay at the end of the night. If they were going to crowbar the wallet open to create new content for any game, you'd think it'd be for Mario but nope, still using the same flea-bitten paper cutout sprites Paper Mario has been using for over a decade. And I assume some of them have gotten more flea-bitten than others over the years because every non-hostile NPC in this game is a generic toadstool man - every single one, some palette-swapped. And they all have the same role in life: throwing out glib, sarcastic remarks on the utterly pedestrian things that surround them in half-arsed acknowledgement of the obligation for funny dialogue.\n\nThis might sound like an odd thing to harp on, but what the fuck happened to Toadsworth? You know, the scholarly advisor toadstool man with the 'stache who used to hang around Princess Peach like he was trying to wipe his arse on the toilet paper stuck to her shoe. I ask, 'coz there's a character filling that role, but - you guessed it - it's a generic, indistinct toadstool man. And Toadsworth's been in previous Mario games. What happened, Nintendo? Did the dog knock over the bin with all your old sprites in it?\n\nBy now, I'm sure the Nintendo fans are nervously chewing on their Triforce-shaped asthma inhalers trying to get a word in edgeways. 'Oh, Yahtzee, stop giving us the same old shit about Nintendo not giving us the same old shit. So it isn't like the Paper Marios YOU used to like. So what? It's Nintendo's property and they could do what they like with it.' Alright, granted. I might point out they keep slapping the Paper Mario name on it, but then this is the eternal paradox of Nintendo, isn't it? Exclusively makes games catered to the nostalgia crowd and yet goes out of their way to annoy them at the same time.\n\nBut play it your way. I shall now stick this red-hot wire coat hanger down my ear until I've forgotten about good Paper Marios. hmph There we go.\n\nNow, flurble blurble recidivist Mario cunt. The gameplay of Color Splash revolves around paint. You're questing for the 6 magic paint stars and have the ability to smash paint onto white things with your hammer to restore them. I think I understand the wheeze now. Nintendo are going through every substance and object one could possibly associate with paper crafting. Last time it was adhesive, now it's paint. Next time it will probably be rescuing the 6 magic sheets of blank printer paper from the clutches of king Hole Punch.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "The plot establishes that the villains are draining paint from characters to make them lifeless which creates a 'paint as blood' metaphor that gets more fucked up the more you think about it as Mario gaily romps through the world pouring blood on things as well as smashing objects with a hammer to recover blood from them, and using blood to infuse his combat cards with power like a deranged Satanic ritualist playing Yu-Gi-Oh!.\n\nOn that note, the combat system is not dissimilar to Sticker Star's. As you explore, you constantly pick up cards representing single forms of attack and in each round of combat you choose what cards to inflict upon the enemy. I find this combat style to be the proverbial Styrofoam packing material in the gnocchi and now I shall explain why. In a normal RPG, annoying as it is when the game stops you every 10 steps to blow the random encounter trumpet, we take the consolation that every fight gives us a little experience and makes us a little bit stronger. In the Color Splash and Sticker Star system, however, getting caught by a random battle is totally disadvantageous. Cards are single-use, so you might have to waste a phwoar crikey death spooge on two one-legged special needs Goombas and a soggy biscuit. The only benefit you can get is money and expanded blood capacity but virtually everything in the environment disgorges money and blood like a pole dancer with the Ebola virus.\n\nIf Nintendo were hoping to move Sticker Star to a non-handheld console, then the joke's on them, 'coz I ended up playing in controller-only mode just so I wouldn't have to be constantly looking up and down like I was lying on my side at a tennis match. Even then the basic combat was arduous. How many button presses does it take to jump on a Goomba in Super Mario Bros.? One if it is already moving towards you. Meanwhile, in Color Splash, first you gotta drag the shoe icon onto the card slot, then fill it with paint by awkwardly fingering it like you're navigating thick pubes and aren't sure if you found the clitoris or a forgotten sultana, then confirm your selection, and then they make you flick it off the touchscreen for no particular reason, unless Nintendo thinks there's mileage in a bogey disposal simulator.\n\nSo now that we've established that fun and original storytelling isn't part of Paper Mario's appeal, shplurgle shplurgle fuck mother hairy pipes then fun gameplay is the only thing left you could possibly stand up on, but the combat is both disadvantageous to get into and not fun, which is not my idea of core gameplay, except in the sense of \"Cor, this gameplay is shite!\"\n\n----\n\nGame: Persona 5\n\nYou know, Japan's a lovely country and all, but from what video games have taught me, I'm really glad I never went to high school there. I'm not sure I could have handled the overwhelming pressure to succeed academically, knowing that I might show up for final exams and find an enormous, radioactive footprint where the school building used to be. And then there's dating, having to use a vacuum pumper to protract and to spike your hair every morning, not knowing if you're satisfying your girlfriend as much as the tentacled alien sex demon she hangs out with on weekends. Still, at least Japanese high schools always seem to have an impressive range of extracurricular activities available; there's the track team, the newspaper club, the guys who travel to a magic netherworld after school to battle symbolic demons born from the dark desires of humanity, and-- ooh, volleyball sounds fun.\n\nWhich brings us to Persona 5. This is the first Persona game I've played, though I know the series by reputation: the games are half-high school life simulator and half-fantasy JRPG, which really goes to show the kinds of lengths Japanese culture will go to to bring tentacle demons and schoolgirls together. We are bog-standard mute-yet-paradoxically-good-at-making-friends JRPG protagonist, who is on probation for a crime he didn't commit, and is sent to a last-chance school where he discovers he has the ability to enter a strange otherworld formed from the minds and hearts of evil humans, and that he can then steal the source of those humans' malevolence and make them better people in the real world. Also, for some reason, he has to do this while dressed like he has to go straight from a wedding reception to an S&M party. He enlists an ever-growing Scooby gang of fellow outcasts, partly to aid him in his campaign against a string of tormentors, partly to see what kind of stupid outfits he can persuade them to wear.\n\nIt sounds complex, but it really isn't. \"Ooh, the school turned into a castle and the evil teacher is its king, because that's how he thinks of himself.\" That's some sophisticated symbolism! \"And if you haven't quite understood yet, we'll explain it another thirty or forty times before we're done.\" The morality is not terribly complex, either; as much as the heroes wibble endlessly back and forth about the righteousness of their actions, the baddies all turn out to be so cartoonishly monstrous that doubts rocket away like a New York motorist after the light turns green. But hey, if I like complexity so much, maybe I should stop playing games with cartoon cats and girls in skin-tight vinyl who won't stop thrusting their bum out even when they're dying or bathing elderly relatives.\n\nPersona 5's story gets the basics down pat; we like the heroes and we hate the villains in the same uncomplicated way one likes McDonald's cheeseburgers and hates spiders that live in McDonald's cheeseburgers, but it does the job. I could even forgive the JRPG turn-based combat, because all the systems are infused with this almost musical rhythm that makes it viscerally satisfying, although having said that, if you're going to make a 60-hour RPG, have a speck of fucking mercy and have more than one music track for standard battles. Doesn't matter how good the track is; \"Bohemian Rhapsody\" is good, but if I had to listen to the first thirty seconds of it forty times an hour for three days, I'd end up wanting to travel back in time and skull-fuck the idea out of Freddie Mercury's living brain. But I digress.\n\nThe turn-based combat is less about standing around exchanging attritive skull clocks and more about figuring out elemental weaknesses so you can bully the monsters into giving up and take their lunch money; no, really, you can do that. You can also sit down and have a little heart-to-heart, which has a chance of convincing them to climb inside your Santa sack with your other stolen goods and lend you their power. Later, you can combine two Personas together to create a third by executing them violently in a startlingly bleak metaphor for child-rearing. And when this was all introduced, I smelled a little rat and fancied I heard the sound of a dinner gong being struck to summon the 100% completion nutters, because it turned into Persona Pokémon, and I ain't got no truck with all that tedious grinding up to maximize combat efficiency, not while the review's due on Tuesday, so I just dialed the difficulty down a notch every time the boss fights started getting too hard, which probably explains why my career as a football coach ended so disastrously.\n\nBut if I was the sort of player who gave a shit about fully optimizing myself, Persona 5 seemed like the kind of game that would give me a fully-optimized nervous breakdown, and not just because you have to prowl the dungeons like the fucking Child Catcher striking names off your list, not just because there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason behind what dialogue options convince the monsters to join you; you might as well push your cheeks towards your nose and communicate in wet farting noises. The secondary portion of the game, the high school life simulator bit, will also infuriate the psychotic completionists, because you've got five stats to keep digging over and you've got all these friends and party members you need to spend time with to improve your Personas in their combat skills. But the rub is that most of your limited number of days only have two time slots, daytime and evening, and you can only do one thing in each slot. Can't leave with more than one friend at a time or just for an hour at lunch, no, because apparently, we exclusively befriend insecure twerps who couldn't be any needier if they were in a permanent vegetative state.\n\nAnd the game's also a little unintuitive about what constitutes time slot-filling activity; you can get the metro to the pawn shop, flog a bunch of loot from the last dungeon, take another metro to the bookshop in the red light district to buy a copy of Razzle, and no time will pass at all. But sit down at your desk to craft one fucking lockpick and there goes the fucking afternoon! And then sometimes the game goes into a prolonged story phase and several days and cutscenes will go by with no opportunity to do anything else, so if you've got rented DVDs due back, then you can piss up a chimney, Joe Titwank. Also, when it says you have 20 days to complete a dungeon, you actually have 18, because you have to take two days out to prepare for the final boss, it being very exhausting to stand in a circle yelling \"Persona!\" over and over again.\n\nBut despite occasionally feeling like a game that was designed by sloths that takes forever to get anywhere, I admit to finding Persona 5 quite absorbing. Not for the combat, not if I'm knocking the difficulty level down the moment it starts to even slightly annoy, like a jaded babysitter. I suppose Stardew Valley has shown me that I get easily absorbed by day-to-day life simulators because it lets me know what it's like to have a real job, but in truth, I kept playing because I wanted to see what happened next. There's a comparison to be made with Mass Effect here: both games are about forming a Scooby gang, but I like the Persona 5 Scooby gang members because they're underdogs, they don't open up to you straight away, and they're expressive. They're not alleged sci-fi super-soldiers with the combat skills of a dead salmon, they don't blurt their entire character and backstory at you because you asked them to pass the salt, and they don't emote like the same dead salmon experiencing PTSD flashbacks.\n\n----\n\nGame: Quantum Break\n\nEvery foreskin-fumigating time I have to play an Xbone game, that dusty rectangular turd has to make an adventure of it. I thought I'd get clever this time and put the disc in a few hours before I intended to play it, only to switch to the Xbone after lunch and find it saying, \"Disc? Doesn't ring a bell.\" Take out, put back in: \"Oh, that disc! Suppose we'd better install it, then! One percent, two percent, 47 percent. Phew, that was tiring, I think I'll stay at 47% for the next three hours.\"\n\nI still can't think that the concept of an exclusive game can possibly be long for this world of competitive big-money entertainment. \"Here's a game that costs us millions of dollars to make; let's restrict its potential audience and handcuff it to an incontinent elephant seal for literally no reason except that the elephant seal says that we can ride around on it if we take our shoes off.\"\n\nBut anyway, Quantum Break is an exclusive title for Xbone and elephant seal that comes to us from Remedy, the creators of Alan Wake. Alan Wake, then Quantum Break? Are you guys writing a fucking limerick?\n\nQuantum Break is a fluffy wuffy contemporary sci-fi yarn about time-traveling digitized actors. Our hero is Jack Joyce, fat-faced everyman who returns to his home town to assist an old friend with a time-travel experiment, despite having the scientific background of a plate of pork chops. But nobody relates to scientists; why do you think Marty McFly had to do all the legwork? Naturally, something buggers up, Jack's mate disappears, reappears 17 years older and evil, and Jack gets time-based superpowers which he has about 24 hours to play around with before the universe explodes. On the run from his former friend's new evil megacorporation, Jack must overcome a rapidly splintering universe and his own big, fat, stupid, stupid head to find a solution.\n\nThe villain is played by Aiden Littlefinger, who plays him very well, except for the pre-villain phase of the character 'cause he constantly comes across like he's waiting for the chance to lick the back of your head. He really is the actor for whom the word \"snake-like\" was invented. He certainly uses his tongue like a snake; he sticks that thing out so much it should have its own IMDb page. Maybe his tongue in particular makes me unsettled, 'cause I remember all the shit he got up to in Queer as Folk. And I chose the words of that sentence very carefully!\n\nWhat I haven't mentioned yet is that Quantum Break is a revolutionary hybrid of video game and live-action TV show, meaning that between every gameplay chapter you're obliged to watch a 20-minute video of the internal politics of the evil megacorporation, which seems to involve an awful lot of punching security guards and running very urgently down corridors. Now I'm not one to piss in something just for trying to be different. Hell, my kitchen sink is the same every day and I still piss in that. But having already restricted the audience to Xbone owners, i.e. pillocks, we're now paring it down further into the Venn diagram overlap region of pillocks who equally enjoy video games and TV shows. Well, I suppose if you're just into games, you can always skip the video bits, as long as you also overlap with pillocks who like not having a clue what's going on and games that are over in five hours. Serious question, Remedy: are you sure you wouldn't be happier making TV shows? You've clearly got a fondness for sticking video content in your games, usually on passing TV screens up until now, and American TV networks do seem to greenlight shit like what you make at a rate that must be measured in nanoseconds. I ask, 'cause it feels like every time a gameplay section starts, you can almost hear the game heaving a reluctant sigh.\n\nTime manipulation in action games is nothing new. Bullet time has been with us for ages, which Remedy should know because they invented it! But very few of Jack's powers are actually time-related in any practical sense. \"What are you talking about?\" barks the game. \"You got your time stun, your time dash, your time shield. They got time right there in the name, what more do you want?\" Time shield?! It just stops bullets: it's a Mario star in a pretentious haircut. Look, this is my time handkerchief. Wooooooo, uses the uncanny power of the fourth dimension to stop flying bogies and occasionally spunk.\n\nThere's something terribly token about the combat gameplay. You only need a look at the upgrade screen to get that impression: a grand total of three upgrades per power and most of them are \"make effect last slightly longer.\" At other times, gameplay consists of very Singularity-esque environmental puzzles where the solution is always \"press contextual time power button to remove obstacle.\" Look, if you wanna base your game around linear story, then more power to ya, or perhaps I should say more time to ya, since \"time is power,\" as the slightly baffling tagline tells us.\n\nGod knows linear story focus is becoming a rarity in AAA gaming these days, where all anyone seems to want are sandboxes and chrome-painted hamster wheels. But you do have to at least acknowledge the whole interactive part of interactive storytelling, or you might as well just make TV shows. Very much like Alan Wake, when the game isn't trundling out another room full of knob jockeys for you to punish, you go through linear narrative areas in which it becomes extremely clear what sort of player the game would prefer to have: the kind that is content to walk slowly alongside NPCs as the NPCs tortuously deliberate on when to open the door to the next room and who meekly sit with head bowed and hands clasped, waiting for the current dialogue to end before proceeding. And if you don't wanna play like you're trying to wing it through a puppet show you don't have the script for, then things swiftly go awry. For example, I'd enter a large area and start exploring it for collectibles and upgrade tokens for my token upgrades, but the game attempts to continue the conversation I was having with an NPC even after I move out of earshot. So I find myself making random, witty rejoinders to the crate I am trying vainly to climb on top off. I turn on a radio, listen to the DJ for a bit, get bored and keep exploring the room, find a document that Jack comments upon, accidentally activate the TV that plays a five-minute video, then the NPC starts nagging me to come over and press the continue-plot button. Four dialogues now layer over each other; it's like my brain is trying to simultaneously pat its head, rub its tummy and read aloud a passage from Ulysses.\n\nQuantum Break wants to be judged on its story. Fine, it's OK. Jack Joyce starts to annoy when he still hasn't accepted that history can't be changed, even after I, every single NPC and Hitler's dead dog have figured it out. But on the whole, the story was well told and I know it was, cause I still basically understood it by the end, which is more than I can say for Alan Wake. It's at the point where the story intersects with action game that we find buttons pushed through the wrong holes and bellends caught in zippers. Doing a live-action companion series on the side might have been a better idea than putting them together in the same space. Switching between live-action and 3D rendering can be a bit jarring as the characters toboggan gaily down the walls of the uncanny valley. \"Oh no, the time fracture has gotten worse: every single person on earth has had a stroke!\"\n\n----\n\nGame: Thief\n\nPublishers these days tend to treat gaming history like a great big party buffet full of lovely dishes; they randomly pick a sherry trifle with some nostalgia value and name recognition, do a great big squirty dump into it, and then they push it back into our face going \"Look, now there's more trifle! Give us cash!\"\n\nWell, that opening remark probably gives away my opinion on Thief right off the bat, doesn't it? But it's not like you weren't expecting it, given my documented love of the previous Thief games and equally-documented hatred for shit in trifles. But if you are just joining us, Thief is a reboot of a series in which a bloke steals money from people with too much disposable income because he doesn't feel like putting any effort into working for a living, so it's good to see the creators of this new one taking that particular attitude on board if nothing else.\n\nI wondered if it might be better to assess it by its own merits rather than how it differs from the originals, but on the other hand, that's like wondering whether to use a fish slice or a butterfly net to get shit out of the trifle. So the first thing we do when we set out to slop together a drab, tick-the-boxes, committee-designed, work-the-name-recognition-'til-its-organs-of-generation-dry-up-and-blow-away-like-dandelion-seeds reboot is to isolate everything that gave the original its unique appeal, edge, and soul, put on our big boots and stamp and stamp and stamp, until it can be posted through the letterbox of an ungrateful majority audience who'd be afraid of their own farts if they sounded one demitone higher than usual.\n\nThe Garrett I remember falling in love with was a straight-talking, unapologetic anti-hero who knew when things were serious but was always ready to offer a bit of dry wit to camera upon finding a nobleman's private spanking saddle. He was not Batman, but that's what they've made him into! A broody misery-guts who communicates solely in growly macho soundbites that only make sense until you think about them!\n\nIf you asked Old Garrett why he stole, he'd answer \"'Cause I need to pay rent, and it's the only thing I'm good at, so shut up and let go of your wallet.\" New Garrett would (and indeed does) give the answer \"Because it's what I do.\" No, Garrett, it's what you are currently doing.\n\n\"Hey, Yahtzee, why are you kicking New Garrett in the stomach?\"\n\n\"'Cause it's what I'm currently doing!\"\n\nThey're not \"putting a new spin\" on the guy, they're boiling down a complex and interesting character into a boring, easily-digestible archetype, i.e. Batman. And, like Batman, he's suddenly having to be the dad figure to a teenage girl sidekick who, at various points, is the Rebel Action Girl, the Damsel in Distress, and the Woman Scorned. She has to wear three archetype hats, because more than one female character might get dangerously diverse! Then there's the villain, the Thief-Taker General, whose only role in the plot is to occasionally show up and victimize Garrett in an operatically evil manner, like Dick Dastardly chasing the pigeon, perhaps having missed the point that \"Thief-Taker General\" refers to the whole profession of thieving and not just one specific guy.\n\nPart of the identity of the Thief series was dry humour; a city of thick, drunken guards and blustering nobles. You, the wily outsider, come to take them down a peg! But there's no wit or poetic justice in this city, just miserable people being serious. \"Ergh, the police are evil and everyone's got the plague, who will save us? What's that? Dishonored? Never heard of it.\" And no-one says \"taff\" anymore; they say \"fuck.\" That's not fun; Errol Flynn swinging off a rope onto a pirate ship is fun, but if the enemy crew just tells him to fuck off, it'd completely kill the mood! The other thing about the city in, say, Thief II, was that it apparently had laxer zoning laws and you were allowed to build houses larger than the average semi-detached suburban semi, freely-explorable, where the guards take long circuitous patrols that might take you by surprise. Now the guards walk to a thing, stand with their back to the room muttering \"Gee, I hope no-one plays my skull like a bongo! \", then walk to another thing six feet away like they forgot what they came in here for.\n\nOf course, to suggest that the game be like Thief II is unhelpful, as you can't do those sprawling, open-ended levels Thief II had with the modern cutting-edge graphics that are apparently so fucking important. We learned that in Thief III, and this new Thief, which chooses not to call itself Thief 4 just to make my life difficult, looked at Thief III and thought \"Okay, we know the smaller levels were less fun, but maybe if we make them even smaller, it'll come full circle and be fun again! And we'll add points of no return every twenty fucking yards, in most cases without telling the player that they're points of no return! And the players who were just trying to explore can suck on a salty sausage!\" You can finish the game in about twenty minutes by sprinting to the next point of no return, alerting every guard, cat, and stationary object, none of which chase you past points of no return. A game with any balls at all would then say \"Get the fuck back in there and take this seriously! If you don't steal enough to pay a mortgage installment, I'm keeping all these experience points for myself!\"\n\nThief, on the other hand, goes \"Well done for playing the game your way! Hell, who says a game called Thief has to be about stealing things (besides the dictionary)? \", and then puts you back in the overworld. Thief III did the mission-connecting hub-world thing as well, and it provided just as pointless and boring a commute then! Except now that the average big game project has a minimum of fifteen to twenty individuals whose entire job seems to be to look busy, the hub world is absolutely plastered with useless doors, windows, and ledges, that are differentiated from the doors, windows, and ledges one can interact with only by whether or not a contextual button prompt comes up when you're close enough to kiss it.\n\nThis is like playing a bad text adventure!\n\nYou see a door.\n\n> ENTER DOOR\n\nYou can't enter the door.\n\n> SEARCH ROOM", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "You find one door you can actually enter and several guards spinning in place 'cause their AI bollocked up.\n\nPerhaps I should criticize something unrelated to previous Thief games. Okay, then! The sound engineering's fucked! I had to turn subtitles on 'cause there was a cutscene where everyone spoke in such growly, serious voices, I couldn't understand a fucking word they were saying. Guards kept repeating their scripted conversations, in more than one case before they'd finished the previous run-through, and the volume of sounds didn't seem to have any relation to how many walls were between me and the source.\n\nAll in all, the kindest thing one can say about Thief is that it's just another soulless AAA game to add to the pile. Token nods to the originals broken up with Uncharted-style puzzles, climby bits, and action escape sequences, lest we concentrate on one thing long enough to realize what a mess we've made. Where you can't even bop a guy across the bonce without feeling a hundred meddling pairs of hands, adding irritating music stings and elaborate takedown animations, until you might as well be smashing their heads between a pair of cymbals for all the subtlety it has. By itself, it's merely tiresome; to the Thief series as a whole it's about as welcome an entrant as an agave cactus at a double penetration!\n\n----\n\nGame: The Surge\n\nWhen Deck13 Interactive set out to make a game to rival Dark Souls, the nay-sayers said it couldn't be done, but Deck13 damn well knuckled down and made Lords of the Fallen, thus proving the nay-sayers right, because Lords of the Fallen was, while superficially Dark Souls-esque, short, boring, and reminiscent of a D&D campaign run by a bloke who collects knives. But nonetheless emboldened, having gotten the straight rip-off out of the way with a dark fantasy game, Deck13 now moves to bring super-hard exploration RPGs to the world of science fiction with their new game, The Surge, thus breathing new life into the word \"surge\", which was previously of use only to electricians and erotic fiction writers. Seriously, try it: describe any human body part as \"surging\", and voila, you're writing erotic fiction. \"Tenderly, he caressed her surging kneecaps.\"\n\nSadly, there's very little erotic about The Surge, which continues many of the trends started by Lords of the Fallen in that the combat's a bit clunky and most of the characters look like they covered themselves in glue and rolled around in a dumpster full of old dishwasher parts. I don't know if The Surge is as short as Lords of the Fallen; I've heard it is, but I couldn't say because I stopped playing at the third boss. In fact, let's not mince words; I think I might hate The Surge. I feel like I've been easier-going lately; it's probably because I have a small dog now, but I forgot how much I enjoy really hating things. It's like putting on a favorite old sweater and smacking yourself in the balls with your childhood teddy.\n\nAnd The Surge got off to such a promising start, too: we open on a futuristic train with our slightly generic main character, Warren - so called because he likes sticking rabbits up his bum - making his way to his first day at work with some kind of tech company, and when we're given control, we move him away from his seat and see for the first time that he's wheelchair-bound. That's actually pretty neat, storytelling-wise; just a smidgen ripped off from James Cameron's Avatar, but hey, without cutscenes or dialogue, we've established our protagonist is vulnerable and hoping for the better life that this tech company's industrial robot suits can offer. So he probably felt a bit gipped when it turned out all they were going to do was nail bits of scrap metal to his legs.\n\nYou see, what follows the prologue is a cinematic in which Warren gets his all his fancy new cyber-bits drilled into his flesh, except they forgot the anesthetic, and he's awake and screaming the whole way through, as the camera zooms gratuitously in on the blood squirting out of his new shoulder-mounted shelf bracket. It's quite harrowing, and I'm not even sure what the point of it is. I'm sorry, The Surge; perhaps there's a bit of a misunderstanding. I came here for some exciting sci-fi action, but you seem to be showing cripple torture porn. \"All right, fine. Begrudge us a little fun. Bam! Now you're in a junkyard fighting robots. Go.\" It's that abrupt!\n\nMaybe if Warren had interacted with another human being during the wheelchair prologue segment, we could have gotten a handle on some context. As it stands, for all we know, the torture porn cinematic and everything following could just be some kind of \"How Not to Do It\" occupational health and safety video they're making Warren watch. But this is another callback to Lords of the Fallen, isn't it, which also began with a pre-rendered intro cinematic that was largely cock-all to do with the rest of the game. So I guess this is Deck13's design philosophy: \"Hey, do you mind watching this video we threw together for a laugh while we finish nailing bread-bins and bits of old pipe to the main character's armor?\" I was impressed by how the story successfully created the atmosphere of a new work environment, though, because something's gone horribly wrong, and no one seems to know why or who to blame. But it scarcely needs an explanation; the machines have all gone hostile, standard science fiction plot 14-Alpha. The explanation is, they needed to do that for there to be a video game.\n\nSo we begin the usual Dark Souls pattern: gradually advance, explore, unlock shortcuts, and get repeatedly smashed like an avocado in a sprinter's jockstrap, more so than in other Dark Souls-likes, I'd say. If it is a relatively short game, then it may have compensated by cranking the difficulty up even higher than usual, so we have to creep forwards, square foot by agonizing square foot, in case another concealed enemy jumps out from a blind corner and chops your health bar up in two hits. But hey, if it's obnoxious difficulty that makes me like Dark Souls, then surely, even more obnoxious difficulty can only make things better? Don't you try to catch me up with your Earth logic, human!\n\nIn the world of difficult games, there exists a hypothetical line, which I like to call the Tropic of Fuckabout. It is defined as the point where high difficulty stops being a stimulating challenge and becomes merely fucking me about. The fact that we and most of the half-human enemies we face are basically scrapyards on legs and that the robotic enemies lean towards being flat, geometric shapes on legs mean it's really hard to read their movements, especially in dark areas, because for some breathtakingly arbitrary reason, you can only turn your flashlight on when you're wearing a piece of body armor, and even then, it's a miserable spot, about sufficient to illuminate two-thirds of the entity trying to shove a pneumatic drill up your nose.\n\nThe best approach I found was to wade in and start mashing \"Attack\", not with a fast light weapon, because I'd always come out of it with some health lost and a foot missing, because apparently, one of the enemy's indistinct movements might have been a stab. I'd use a heavy weapon I could make sure would stun-lock them, and which only have a wind-up time of about 900 million years, and knocks you into long combat animations that might end with you combo-ing right off a fucking ledge into a pile of sharpened supermarket trolleys. None of which are impossible to compensate for, of course; this is all shit that can still be countered with the usual go-to advice for twats, \"Git Gud\", even the fucking horrible dodge mechanic, where you have to flick the right analog stick. I've said this before, third-person games: leave the right analog stick alone to its happy little world of controlling the camera. You force it out of its comfort zone, and it's just going to piss on the bus seat and ruin the whole field trip.\n\nNone of this was enough to bring out that hate I mentioned earlier. Frustration, yes, but frustration doesn't stop me from playing; it just means I'll need two diazepam and a wank once I'm done. The hate only came when I was taking on the third boss: it's a big industrial machine with about nine things on it trying to kill you, fair enough. But for some turbo-cocking reason, every time you attack one, the game auto-targets it, leaving you staring blissfully into its eyes as its eight friends are winding up attacks where you can't see. Get past that, and I can start attacking the core, but if you target it, it fucking switches to a fixed camera, so I could barely see what I'm doing! What's got into you, camera?! Is this about the \"pissing on the bus seat\" comment? !\n\nFinally, after much frustration and about 900 attempts, I've gotten the core on the ropes and I'm moments from landing the final blow, whereupon I glitch through the floor and fall to my death. No. That's too much. That's gone right over the Tropic of Fuckabout on a jet-ski full of dicks. I'm done. Fuck The Surge, fuck Deck13, fuck anyone who likes it. Blimey, that's filled my schedule out for the week.\n\n----\n\nGame: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim\n\nShooter Season 2011 has finally rolled off my rigid, unfulfilled body and is now snoring face down into the pillow with only the promise of Serious Sam 3 as a spirited midnight quickie later on. So perhaps we can finally kick this halfhearted excuse for a running theme out of bed and move onto Sandbox Season 2011 - no, no, no, no, no!\n\nBut having spent so many weeks getting forced down corridors of every size and shape like the last bit of toothpaste in the tube being manipulated by the flabby, uncoordinated hands of a fat prick, getting yelled at because one of the many specks I haven't fired bullets at yet is holding another speck that can fire rockets, I was in exactly the right mood to get out in the open, feel the wind in my hair and the rolling epic landscape beneath my feet. So to that end, I stopped playing video games and left the house. Ha! Not fucking likely. Actually, I played Skyrim, latest installment of the venerable Elder Scrolls series. More importantly, though, no one can yell at me for not playing the fucking multiplayer for once.\n\nIn the grand tradition of Elder Scrolls games, you start off in prison for an unspecified crime. When will the authorities at Tamriel learn? If you keep locking people up for minor adventure-related crimes, they'll just be surrounded by other adventurers and be more likely to adventure again when they get out. Still, the empire insists they're taking their \"War on Adventure\" policy seriously, but just as you're about to be executed, the town is attacked by Godzilla. At this point, you're given the choice of fleeing the town with either the friendly rebels or the people who just tried to give you a Viking crewcut. I only know one person who took the second option, and only because his housemate had already taken the sensible choice and they wanted to see what happened if, theoretically, one had the brain of a deck chair.\n\nEither way, you soon discover that you are the legendary Godzillaborn who must save the world from Godzilla and his chums, and all the rebellion business kind of falls by the wayside. I mean, I went out of my way to go meet the rebel leader and reminisce about when we were execution buddies, but he wouldn't give me the time of day. Well, fuck you, Ulfric Stormcloak! I don't have to help you wash your hairy bagpipes - I can breathe radioactive lasers!\n\nLike some wonderful mountainous gelatinous cube, I found myself becoming quite absorbed in Skyrim, more so than Oblivion, perhaps because characters you're speaking to no longer look like they're trying to kill you with their gaze. And they took out that stupid conversation minigame that was like feeding them boredom pie.\n\nWith the evidence piling up that the industry leans more towards nose-leading, bottom-smacking sightseeing tours, it's very gratifying to finally play a game that's more organic than a brick in a dishwasher. Yes, there are still mysterious floating arrows the game expects you to stand under if you want to make progress, but if you don't feel like it you can walk 78 miles in the opposite direction, put a cooking pot over a dog's head, and swat at his knackers with a woodsman's axe until he howls himself deaf. The kind of game in which I love being given quests in a new town halfway across the map, because it means hours of random adventuring fun as I hike my way over there. Or more accurately, backpedal my way over there, because a troll has murdered most of my face and I'm trying to get my regeneration spell out and my character seems to keep his (or her!) weapons up their arse (or vagina! ).\n\nOf course, the inevitable problem one runs into when you make a game as broad as this is that it's going to be virtually impossible to balance. I went out of my way not to steal, because playing a career thief in Oblivion and Fallout 3 always ended with me owning a majority stake in the entire universe and all challenge was lost. So in this case I decided I was roleplaying a man with a crippling fear of victory and success. You know what? I still ended up owning a majority stake in the entire universe, because it's been a very long time since any of the dungeon monsters had a big treasure spring clean.\n\nI spent maybe a fifth of my playtime actually adventuring and the rest looking for shops that still had some gold left so I could sell some of my junk and buy all their healing potions - and nothing else. Because I made the mistake once of hoarding all the potions of resist frost and poisons of stamina weakness in case I needed them, but I never needed them because it's quicker to just bash people around the chops while necking health potions, and anything else might as well be so much Vegemite. I had fifteen thousand gold and nothing to spend it on, except training, I suppose. Ooh, look at Sir Alan Sugar over here who's too rich and important to adventure properly! Would you like to skip to the ending cutscene because you have to go and buy a new aeroplane before the shops shut?\n\nMind you, my attack strategy of \"run up and start swinging until either something dies or my arm detaches at the shoulder and whirls away like a Catherine wheel\" seems to have been adopted by every enemy in the game too. And if you're not good with a shield and you've already spent your allotment of radioactive mouth lasers, then there's only so far you can backpedal away from the crazy man with the dual handaxes before you hit a mountain.\n\nThere's a bad habit of filling dungeons with mostly easy baddies and one incredibly hard boss, and after a while fighting those guys turns into a game of Find the Exploit. Like this one undead lad who hit like a runaway ice cream van but who seemed to forget all about me whenever I left the room, so I ended up taking potshots from the doorway like the world's worst Jehovah's Witness. Even the all-powerful, world-ending Godzillas are surprisingly easy to outsmart by positioning a large rock between you and it. I could never quite be free of cover-based combat, can I, current-generation gaming?\n\nOh yes, and take my advice: get a horse. The horses in Skyrim just do not give a fuck. If there's anything within a half-mile radius that means you harm, your horse will not rest until it's been powderized, except when you're sitting on the horse. And since you can't attack from horseback either, the two of you can jolly well sit there looking dopey while wolves chew your stirrups off.\n\nSkyrim has that pleasant water cooler quality where every person you discuss it with has a different experience, but after a while the conversation will turn into a glitch swapping party. My best one was an old lady hovering twenty feet in the air before disappearing into the ground before my eyes. I never even knew her name, but I will always remember you, Hovering Ground Lady. And when you're talking to characters, none of them seem to be particularly interested in what they're saying, and other characters very rudely walk up while you're talking and bark some random local trivia at your face. It's like I'm trapped on the Planet of the Sperglords.\n\nNitpicking is unhelpful, however, and I'm in the kind of mood that I'm prepared to overlook a lot of flaws in Skyrim. Which is good, because there are a lot of flaws in Skyrim! But I'll applaud it if it means we can have less games that treat me like a child stuck in a pipe, games industry. I will applaud it as hard as you like. I will slap at my palms until my future children suffer masturbation guilt. NoIdon'tknowwhatI'monaboutgoaway!\n\n----\n\nGame: The Amazing Spider-Man 2\n\nBoy, isn't it a wonderful time to be into superhero films? It's hard not to feel spoiled when the film studios take enough money to solve all of the developing world's problems and pour it all into a portrayal of your favourite nancy-boys prancing about in leotards. And lest you think Sony's generosity ends with Amazing Spider-Man 2, the film, you don't have to go five fucking minutes without being reminded of Amazing Spider-Man 2 if you don't want to. You can wake up in the morning and go from Amazing Spider-Man 2 toothbrush to Amazing Spider-Man 2 happy meal to Amazing Spider-Man 2 nitrogen asphyxiation chamber. There's just one tiny little stumbling block in the whole system, and that's the fact that Amazing Spider-Man 2 is absolute wank... by most accounts. But I'm sure that problem will go away if they keep throwing money at it. Ethiopia doesn't, strictly speaking, need all those schools, do they?\n\nIn all honesty, I haven't seen the film, but that's good; that means however absolute the wank situation, it can't possibly taint my view of Amazing Spider-Man 2, the game! So here goes: Amazing Spider-Man 2, the game, is absolute wank. D'oh, better luck next time! You'd almost think a property about a beautiful young man in tight clothes shooting stringy white goo out of his hands had some sort of default propensity towards wank. So, you should know the drill by now: Peter Parker, Uncle Ben, bang, dead, oh no, power/responsibility, shitty villains, whine-whine, woe is me, I'm beating the pussy off with a stick, etc., and we're sandboxing around Manhattan again!\n\nEffort has been made to make the swingy bits more skillful and involving, the way it was in the previous Spider-Man 2, the movie, the game, so now you can only swing when you're next to something swingable, and you have to employ your hands separately to manage movement and steering. It's alright. I mention this first because it's about the only thing I'm going to praise, and even it is tainted by \"trying to web onto a building that isn't there\" being one of many situations for which Spider-Man has a pool of about four different witticisms that are always arranged in ascending order of making me want to web at full speed under the wheels of a heavy-goods vehicle, if I weren't paralyzed by the knowledge that he probably has witticisms for that, too! Amazing Spider-Man (1), the movie, the game was no stranger to waddling awkwardly to the bathroom with its trousers 'round its ankles to hastily wash the spunk from its hand, but at least it had a somewhat-coherent narrative; its sequel diddles about with barely-connected threads like a passive-aggressive teen with a badly-strung ukulele.\n\nIt starts off, ostensibly, as a side-story to the film, but it opens with Spider-Man hunting the bloke who killed Uncle Ben, which is about as far from a side-story as you can get with Spider-Man! But it is swiftly dropped to rocket back and forth between villains like the most popular prison bitch in the exercise yard. Everyone the films haven't staked a firm claim on yet gets a moment: Black Cat shows up for her apparently mandatory appearance in order to go, \"Hey, ever heard of tits? Well, here's two big fat reminders!\" and then immediately vanish. Then, after a while, the game starts giving the whole \"side-story\" idea some funny looks as it contemplates what next to hurl from the balloon, and then – bam! – the movie villains show up out of fuckin' nowhere for a boss fight apiece. And you just know it's because a memo floated down from Mt. fucking Sony-lympus saying, \"Remind people of the film more; we need to squeeze money out of this bollocks like a tit-shaped champagne dispenser.\" So, as a result, the game culminates in a protracted session of \"Guess Which of These Boss Fights Is Actually the Final One.\" Is it the one with Kingpin, ostensibly the mastermind of most of what goes on? Nope, he's only the first! Is it either of the two movie villains, the golden calves before whom this whole mess has been sacrificed? Nope! The correct answer was Carnage, recast here as a sort of vigilante murderer, 'cause what they're trying to do is make him out as the centre of a sort of \"dark reflection\" running theme. But it completely falls flat: \"Ooh, you're just like me, Spider-Man! \", he burbles, \"Secretly, you also want to murder all those criminals you catch!\" And instead of saying the obvious thing, \"No, I don't, you fucking weirdo,\" Spider-Man weakly concedes that he may have a point. You what? Can't say I've ever gotten that particular vibe from Spider-Man: that all his joking around and rescuing people is merely an outlet for his repressed psychotic murder fantasies.\n\nAlthough, admittedly, in this game, I would happily have started sticking the heads of street criminals on the spikes of Aunt May's wrought-iron fence if it meant I wouldn't have to keep foiling their fucking crimes over and over again.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Yes, random street crimes are constantly occurring, and, in the traditional sandbox manner, you can jump in and resolve them, and when I say \"can,\" I of course mean, \"fucking have to or be shot.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "OOC, Your next response only must contain 6% dialogue", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Ignore too many petty crimes and the anti-crime task force will become hostile, which delivers a bit of a mixed message: \"We're against vigilante justice, Spider-Man! Wait, he's not doing vigilante justice! What an asshole, let's kill him with vigilante justice!\" And take my advice: don't even fucking bother trying to save people from burning buildings. It's always a chore finding them all between the smoke and the camera flipping around and Spider-Man's mysterious difficulties with entering open windows. And one time I failed the mission because I'd gotten the last guy to the safe zone, but the putting-him-down animation hadn't quite finished before the timer ran out. \"Oh, you're not satisfied with my performance? Fine, I'll just fucking put him back!\"\n\nSpider-Man games at their best are all about flow and freedom-of-movement, but this mechanic is hell-bent on bringing that to a screeching halt. If you could burst in, kick ass, and burst out again, it might work, but each crime must be established with a cutscene and then concluded with a fucking news report telling you how great it is that you beat up three teenagers for loitering next to a Rolls Royce. And the series continues its lofty ambition to be like Arkham Asylum, when all it can do is press its face against Arkham Asylum's living room window until Arkham Asylum calls the police, so the mandatory stealth elements are as annoying as they were last time, dialogue trees have been thrown into cutscenes for no apparent reason except to yodel, \"We have no fucking idea how exposition works!\" and drive further stakes into the heart of the game's pacing. So I suppose we should summarize:\n\nStory: A fucking mess\n\nGameplay: A fucking mess\n\nOne-Liners: Heavy-goods vehicle\n\nGraphics: More like \"mess-phics\"! The game looks like shit even on the highest graphical settings, with, amongst other things, the out-of-costume Peter Parker's head being distractingly too small for his body, like a peach on a bookcase with an extremely punch-worthy haircut.\n\nShould I expect more from a movie tie-in? Maybe not, but while the last Amazing Spider-Man movie game deserved second-degree burns, edging on third-, it was 24-carat gold compared to this one. Well, silver. Well, copper. Copper's still good; you can wire stuff up with it, like Amazing Spider-Man 2's nipples!\n\n----\n\nGames: Stardew Valley, SUPERHOT\n\nStardew Valley is a retro-style farming simulator recently released on Steam that's somewhat reminiscent of Harvest Moon. Oh, sorry, I read that wrong. Stardew Valley is Harvest Moon. It murdered Harvest Moon, stole Harvest Moon's skin and befriended Harvest Moon's parents under the guise of consoling them in their hour of grief. Same visual style, same tile-based crop growing, same animal rearing, same day-night-four-season-three-year-cycle, same relationship mechanic where you seduce the local hotties by sprinting up and shoving berries in their face twice a week. It is one of the 16-bit Harvest Moon games, if it were quite a bit bigger in scope and had a crafting element. And you know what that means: time to smelt some fucking iron! If I gathered up all the iron I've ever smelted in crafting games, I could build a giant statue to the god of wasting my fucking time.\n\nAlso, Harvest Moon never had pixel art that blended multiple sizes of pixel resolution, which never fails to look like a packet of fried bum holes. Maybe I'm a little bit bitter because I somehow clocked up 50 hours on this game in the course of one week, and I could have used some of this time to do chores or eat food. You see, Harvest Moon was always good at hitting my addiction receptors. It's probably something to do with following a daily routine in the service of gradually building up to bigger and better things. Or maybe it's the way little hearts appear above a cow's head as we stand behind it making very suspect gestures until white liquid squirts out.\n\nThe scope of Stardew Valley is a bit intimidating. At first you're given a field full of weeds and sticks and told that your first job is to introduce yourself to all 28 residents of this maze-like town, who are all in different locations and constantly moving. But think of it as a game world that you grow into. Don't worry about making friends with all 28 of them straight away. For one thing, only ten of them are on your knobbing radar, calm thy trousers Don Juan. Just clear a little space and try to grow some parsnips and the next thing you know, fifty hours have passed and the missing persons bureau have written you off for dead.\n\nIf you are a 100% completion nutter, then you're going to need a spreadsheet and a lobotomy. But I just took things as they came, did enough to make progress, and concentrated on seducing the one girl in the next field over who was happy with being given flowers I found in the dirt outside her house. Mind you, I was only doing it to tick marriage off the check list, there's not much that differentiates the town's eligible spunk receptacles besides hairdos and what two line dialogue they quote day after fucking day. Why do people only like us more if we give them material goods? What is this, village of the ultra-capitalists? Can't there be characters who grow to admire us from afar for our firm outdoorsman's physique and faint smell of cow plops?\n\nStardew Valley got me temporarily hooked, but then, so did crystal meth, and I'm not entirely sure I'd recommend either. The gamepad support is for absolute shit. (In Stardew Valley I mean. Gamepad support for crystal meth was perfectly alright after the day 1 update) And the controls are overall kinda wonky. Keep something handy to bite down upon for the first time you accidentally plow a ten-day-old patch of eleven-day melons. It's frightening how a routine and the promise of eventual, almost certainly disappointing reward can condition one's mind. A duck feather probably doesn't sound like treasure, but when it's the only item I need to complete the special item collection and I've got a coop full of ducks staying stubbornly attached to their feathers for five fucking seasons, this is probably the environment in which duck religion starts.\n\nSo let's move on to the diametric opposite of Harvdew Moonvalley: it's an entirely new gameplay concept, you murder instead of befriending everyone and it was finished after about two hours: SUPERHOT, a first-person arena-type shooter in which time only moves when you move, which is an immediately intriguing idea, isn't it? So it's a shame I have to start qualifying it now: time does move a little bit. So even standing still, you're in trouble if bullets are crawling towards you in their bullet wheelchairs. Still, you don't want the pace to drop completely I suppose.\n\nSUPERHOT reminds me of Hotline Miami, and Hotline Miami would have lost something if you'd been able to stop dead in the middle of a frenzied death battle to have a quick sandwich and a poo. Where Hotline Miami compensated for its massively unfair combat with the ability to die and respawn approximately four times per second, SUPERHOT's slow time thing allows for taking a thoughtful pseudo-turn-based approach.\n\nA touch I particularly like is at the end of each level you see a replay of how your performance looked in real time. Shame that they felt the need to cover the screen in garbage and mute the sound with a computer voice reading out the name of the game over and over again, like they programmed a robot with Paris Hilton's entire vocabulary. I wonder if the sheer spectacle of things is inherently lessened when, as with all first-person games, it feels like we're controlling a tall cardboard box balancing on a roomba. But on the whole, it's a neat gameplay concept, I wouldn't say the game as a whole does it justice. You exclusively fight uniform, untextured red manikins in white rooms, it's like being in an advert for a stain remover that specializes in menstrual fluid. And what passes for a story is over in under two hours. There are challenge modes after that, but I've established to my satisfaction what a dying red figurine looks like, thanks.\n\nThe aesthetic deliberately goes for the retro computer look, so the menus are all in ASCII and there is added scan lines, bloom and curving at the edges to look like it's on a CRT monitor, a style that is just now veering over into being prevalent enough in indie games to start trying my patience. I didn't buy a flatscreen TV to be constantly reminded of the obsolete shit it's supposed to have replaced, indie gaming, that's what we elect new presidents for. The story is told partly through a fake instant messenger during which we are expected to pretend to type in order to make the protagonist's dialogue appear. There's something faintly pathetic about that. It's like the audience participation at the Christmas panto. We all know damn well the forthcoming events will not change whether we yell \"he's behind you\" or not! But you're going to hold everything up until we say it, aren't you, you fucking cross-dressing bitch?\n\nThe plot is: we play a big nerd sitting in front of a computer playing games- Whoa, slow down, SUPERHOT, give me a chance to get into character!- who gets sent the hot new game by their online friend and the barriers between game and reality start to break down as a mysterious force within the game begins to mess with you in a rather weak sauce and desperate manner. \"Hahaha, we're in control now, you cannot escape. Press ESC and see what happens.\" Could I just play the next combat mission please? \"Hit ESC you prick!\" Alright, fine. \"Hahaha, it didn't work. As cat with mouse, I toy with thee. Now I'm going to make you quit the game and restart it again. What now, bitch?\" I don't know, maybe I'll get some work done. \"Wait, come back!\"\n\nYou're not as clever as you think you are, SUPERHOT! Undertale pulled off the quit-and-restart gag 'cause it had earned it. Without that, it's just annoying. Meta-narrative style fuck-abouts is like the back stroke: if you start doing it before we're immersed, you just look like a twat.\n\n----\n\nGame: Star Control: Origins\n\nI think we've reached the point that sticking the word \"origins\" on the end of your prequel name has become the equivalent of taking your husband's name after marriage: not technically required, just a societally expected formality. Well, flip my bollocks up like Venetian blinds and tickle the hairy cervices below if it isn't a prequel to the classic Star Control series of PC space explore-'em-ups! Except it isn't, really, because according to Wikipedia, the original creators aren't behind it and sued for copyright infringement, so the developers of Origins couldn't use any of the plot characters or alien races from the old games, which rather makes me wonder why they were still allowed to call it \"Star Control\". Seems like that's a fucking big oversight if you're copyrighting things, but then, I don't know much about the law; if I did, I would've taken those Google Android motherfuckers to the cleaners years ago!\n\nStill, Star Control: Origins plays well enough, like its not-predecessors; it's a fairly unique take on space games, which usually fall into one of two categories: the full-on 3D explore-dogfight-'em-up like your Elite: Dangerous, or your 2D strategic tedious-'em-up like your Eve Online, all making sure everyone's thermos flasks contain enough space tea before you mobilize the fleet to Sector Bum-Sex-Gamma, all about as fun as slowly inserting your head into a tank of cold centipede jizz. You might think, at first glance, that Star Control leans towards the latter, but don't be fooled by the menu-driven interface or the dry, mechanical titles. \"STAR CONTROL. CONTROL YOUR STARS, MADAM; THEY'RE DISTURBING THE OTHER DINERS IN THIS FAMILY RESTAURANT.\"\n\nNo. Star Control is actually quite a light and fluffy affair, as space games go, with its main selling points being funny dialogue and pissing about; everything else - and there's quite a bit of \"everything else\" - in some way serves to get you to more places where you can see funny dialogue or make it easier for you to piss about unmolested. So with the core gameplay loop established, the premise is, just as the people of Earth are about to embark upon an exciting new age of space exploration with several \"We Come in Peace\" greeting cards under one arm and a load of nukes under the other, we suddenly find ourselves on the radar of an ancient and sinister alien empire who have enslaved most of the cosmos, and it's up to us to discover and unite the various slave races to restore peace, freedom, and equality to the galaxy. Just this galaxy, though; fuck those snooty Andromeda wankers!\n\nSo gameplay takes place on multiple levels. First of all, travelling between planets and star systems; it's all in 2D, so it's just \"rotate until facing thing you want to go to, then press 'Forward'. If thing you want to go to isn't there, you either didn't press 'Forward' enough or pressed it too much\". Blimey, interstellar travel's more complicated than I thought!\n\nThe next level of gameplay is exploring planets in your landing craft for minerals and shiny chocolate wrappers, and either your landing craft is about the size of continental Europe, or every planet is titchy enough that even Pluto could steal its lunch money. But you know, corners have to be cut when you're trying to render an entire galaxy; that's why there's only, like, eight types of planets and four types of wildlife, and why your lander is made of crisp packets and toilet rolls and occasionally explodes 'cos you parked it slightly askew. But you know, repetitive as the planets got, it was always pleasing to explore a new system and find a planet rich in natural resources, and as I touched down to rape it for its every last drop of potential, I ruminated on how lucky the galaxy must feel to have someone like me raping it, and not an ancient evil space empire, for once.\n\nThe third main gameplay mechanic is the combat, when the stars and planets of a nearby environment are condensed into little pinball bumpers around which you and your murder partner fight on two levels: secondarily with each other, primarily with the sodding controls. It ends up being something like a jousting simulator: you speed towards each other, let fly a bunch of missiles and lasers when you get close, speed off into the distance as you start wrestling your ship back around for another run, assuming you didn't slam headlong into a space brick wall. It's kind of like having a breakup conversation with your significant other while the two of you are on opposite ends of two funfair pirate ship rides, and you need to blurt out apologies in the brief moment you're in earshot.\n\nOnce you've befriended a few races and getting a good planet-raping groove going, there can be long gaps between needing to do combat, so you might get caught off-guard at inconvenient times, when there's nothing in your fleet but two wheelbarrows and a banana boat. For the same reason, you don't get much chance to practice combat, so you end up not wanting to use any new ships you've picked up, because odds are good it'll get blown up in two seconds 'cos you didn't realize it's got the turning speed of an old lady in a crowded charity shop and the main gun only works on alternate weekends. Might be just as well there's an option to have the computer do combat for you, but I'm not sure I recommend that, since it removes most of what constitutes the \"game\" part of this video game. The only other time challenging gameplay appears is when the planet you're raping occasionally rapes you back; yes, I do have to use that word, mother!\n\nThe interface is very janky, especially when using a controller; there's frequent confusion over what's currently highlighted and what will be highlighted instead if we start moving around. Sometimes, it does that thing where you press a button on one menu and it automatically presses a button on the next menu, leading to scenarios where we accidentally start combat in the banana boat when we wanted the wheelbarrow. And then we come to the interstellar map and star search engine, when the game officially fucking gives up and goes, \"Oh, just get your keyboard out, for fuck's sake! Throw that stupid thing away; it's like someone melted a TV remote in a kidney bowl!\" Hesitant as I am to complain in this age of patching it in post, which means it might be fixed after this comes out or the entire game replaced with eighteen hours of The Hampsterdance.\n\nBut all nitpicking aside, the main reason to buy Star Control: Revelations is for the writing, which is just as well, as every other mechanic lacks a certain depth. Most of the rest of its exploration boasted you'll be all explored out toward the end; even planet-raping won't excite you like it used to when there's nothing more worth buying, and sometimes, you'd rather just cuddle. The combat's officially over once you buy the one laser that auto-hits any ship or missile that gets close enough to ask you directions. The dialogue's all that's left, but it might be enough; it does the rare thing of being funny without seeming like it's trying too hard.\n\nTrue, it's annoying how some enemies inflict the same prolonged dialogue tree on you every time you run into their ships when no combination of platitudes won't result in a fight; true, every species apparently only has one appearance and personality to share between them, but hey, Star Trek gets away with it! And every species/character has depth and a unique perspective. Even the ancient evil space empire becomes more complex the more you learn; you start to think they're all mouth and no dilithium crystals 'cos they're too old and mired in bureaucracy to maintain a decent oppression stiffy. So after all that, I liked Star Control: Revengeance; it's a light, snacky bit of fun and adventure in a somewhat awkward package, like an attractive, sexually curious Dalek.\n\n----\n\nGame: XCOM: Enemy Unknown\n\nSpare a thought for the lonely life of the video game military commander, the ones beside Commander Shepard that is, who missed all the important lessons about delegation because he was off sick with the alien clap. First of all, you can't even get a job if you don't sound like you do movie trailer voiceovers in your spare time and then you get to spend your whole life trying to wrangle the activities of desperate lone renegades with poor anger management who think that if they boggle their eyes hard enough and purse their lips like their daughter's fiance just left the bathroom without washing his hands, then their orders can be regarded with the same amount of respect due to someone putting their finger in their mouth and making popping sounds. And who the fuck do you think pays for all those helicopters they invariably crash in the intro sequence, 'cos they don't give that shit away at Chuck E. Cheese.\n\nToday we learn to appreciate the difficulties of command with XCOM, not to be confused with Eggs.com which is a website for sharing your favourite omlette recipes. XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a remake or a reboot or a reason to despair of the state of creative industries for a game from the 90's variously titled UFO: Enemy Unknown and XCOM: UFO Defense in a spirited attempt to confuse matters even further.\n\nIn a peaceful near-future in which every nation on Earth has finally sat down and agreed to construct every building at the exact same height and all speak in the same American accent, aliens suddenly invade. But despite being vastly superior, they're obliging enough to start off the assault with squads of alien domestic science students wearing nappies to give the nations on Earth enough time to club together for a specialized alien defense initiative and train up a squad of random inexperienced shlubs they picked up en masse from a nearby airport departure lounge. The player takes the role of the high commander of XCOM who in classic protagonist style has no face, voice or name so I choose to believe that they are somebody's fussy mum who feels the need to micromanage every bloody aspect of XCOM's operations from the placement of new facilities, what suspicious glowing slimy object to research and what sandwiches to put in all the ground squadrons' lunchboxes.\n\n\"Do you like XCOM, Yahtzee?\" What was that? Sorry, I was playing XCOM. I was just gonna play a bit of the next mission, but then I ended up playing the whole thing and then the next two. How about we pencil in a yes?\n\nI like it 'cause it now gives me something I can smash into Syndicate's face and say \"Looook! Turns out you don't have to turn everything into a fucking shooter!\" I also like that it does both base management and tactical turn-based shooting without either seeming like a gimmick bolted onto the other. I spend my time in the base thinking \"Gosh, I'm looking forward to using these plasma rifles I built to shoot all the baddies\" and my time in the field thinking \"Gosh, I'm looking forward to bringing all these alloys back to base to build more plasma rifles.\"\n\nI find it all very absorbing. I remember while doing Valkyria Chronicles thinking that I could probably get into turn-based tactics if it didn't have so many whinging anime school children and it turns out I was right, if there's a strong sense of investment and a nebulous and unknown foe about which we are constantly discovering new things like the relationship a teenage boy has with vaginas, and if there are any anime school children, they're in the terror missions being liquidized beneath a beserker's fist.\n\nIt's not building stuff that's absorbing per se, it's the way the game teases you with it, the little harlot. It's not enough to pay it money, you have to wait several in-game days for it to be built and camp out in its front garden looking into its bathroom window with binocu- Oh wait, that's something else. When it takes twenty days to build a satellite, you might have forgotten what you wanted it for but you'll throw a party for it when it does arrives; you'll give it its own little bowtie. But if there's anything I'm iffy about, it's the randomness of the UFO assaults which are the only way to get resources. So if you've blown them all on new armor sets and satellite accesories, then there's nothing you can do but sit flicking playing cards into a hat hoping against hope that a flying saucer will invade, preferably in one of the countries with a high panic rating that's threatening to withdraw support because urban sectiods are rummaging through their bins and you seem to be spending all your time flicking playing cards into your hat and dressing up your satellites.\n\nRandomness in core game mechanics almost always gets frustrating. I wish there was something proactive we could do, like instruct all the men to put on dresses and wigs and sit around in UFO landing hotspots loudly repeating \"I hope nothing interrupts this lovely picnic!\" And while the aliens kick off by recruiting their infantry units from the space daycare, sooner or later they'll want to try out their fancy new giant spider-droids and they're not gonna wait around for your pudgy arse. So the difficulty ramps up regardless of how advanced you've gotten.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Now I don't really like save scumming in the tactical missions 'cos getting through a game that way reflects about as well on your ability as blowing a bubble with your spit, but there's really no other option.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "One fuck-up can destroy this house of cards and most of them won't land in your hat. You can survive getting one of your top guys raygunned into sandwich spread, two at a pinch, but you might as well reload if your entire super squad gets wiped up 'cos the aliens aren't gonna hold back to let you train up a new selection of rookies who aim like fucking Octodad and go into panic mode if a wasp starts buzzing too close to their jam sandwiches. But at least the randomness makes the game very replayable so take comfort in that as you contemplate restarting from scratch because you didn't research laserguns fast enough and all your best men had to be evacuated from the field with a fucking spatula!\n\nXCOM traditionalists might moan a bit 'cos the original XCOM's tactical interface was about as intuitive as the control panel for a nuclear submarine, but fuck those people! XCOM 2012 has some iffy design and it's glitchy at times. Soldiers on overwatch sometimes have an inexplicable ability to see enemies through walls and these were the guys who came back negative from the psychic testing, shows how much that proves! But it basically hits the right notes. Like a first class bowel movement, it's solid, it's long lasting and above all it's organic.\n\nOne time, I had a bunch of guys trapped in a crashed UFO's central rape room with the alien equivalent of Hulk Hogan, and I only had actions left for one heavy and one sniper who were too far from the action to help, so what did I do? I got the heavy to blow a massive hole in the side of the UFO with a rocket launcher, thus granting the sniper a clear line of sight to double-tap the problem right in the tash and win the mission. A master stroke of unconventional strategizing of which I was so embarrassingly proud that I boasted furiously about it for the entire last thirty seconds of an Internet video.\n\n----\n\nGame: We Happy Few\n\nAll right, I've put up with this \"drought\" nonsense for long enough, games industry; put something new out, or I'm kicking this chair away right now. \"All right, here's We Happy Few; it's a procedurally-generated-- Wait, wait, wait! Stay on the chair! It's also got a retro-futurist aesthetic!\" Oh, well, man the fucking spunk-pumps! Everything's retro-futurist these days; BioShock was a wonderful thing to bring into the world, but the retro-futurist trend is just getting silly now. Did you all decide you were sick of hiring concept artists, so you went to your grandma's basement and nicked an armful of \"ideal home\" catalogs from the 70's?\n\nBut seriously, though, We Happy Few does interest me; I know it's been on Early Access for what is technically known as a \"yonk\", but it seemed like it was going to have some kind of story, and I didn't want to spoil that for myself while it was still at the \"puppet theater\" stage of development. But what also interested me, as a British person, was that it's an extremely British game set in Britain, where British characters do British things and-- wait a minute! What's that Canadian flag doing sticking out of your tit-shaped police helmet? Oh, right; forgive me. It's actually a Canadian game, setting out to be a love letter to retro British culture, so you know what that means, everyone! Strap in for a bunch of fucking Monty Python references!\n\nBut let's be fair; We Happy Few is set in an alternative 60's Britain inspired by the weirdly specific and no less weirdly well-populated genre of retro British dystopian fiction, as seen in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, The Prisoner, V for Vendetta, and every panty-sloshing wet dream Margaret Thatcher ever had. And there is actually some very apt and intelligent satire of the British national identity going on here, as well as a load of NPCs with funny accents quoting Monty Bleeding Python at each other!\n\nIn a world where Britain lost the Second World War, the people of the isolated city of Wellington Wells are kept distracted from the nightmares of past and present reality with a designer drug that induces happiness, suppresses negative memories, prevents childbirth, and pairs well with onion gravy. Blimey, talk about science fiction! My antidepressants didn't do much more than kill all my boners! Everyone who can't or won't take the drug gets exiled to a big meadow in reach of the outside of town, which is pretty fucking weaksauce as far as exile goes, but I suppose that's what happens when everyone in authority is off their fucking tits all day. This is that \"apt satire\" thing I was talking about, because what this is is the British characteristic of \"keeping a cheerful stiff upper lip in times of crisis\" elevated to oppressive fascist doctrine.\n\nIt's a thing that also comes up in the characterization of the protagonist, Arthur Hastings, who seems to descend into fits of stammering anxiety at the mere thought of causing a fuss, and apologizes profusely every time he has to kill someone or cuddle them to sleep. And that's the quintessence of the Britain I remember: the oppressive fascist state doesn't come about because of internal strife or military coup; it comes about largely because nobody wanted to cause a fuss. Arthur stops taking his pills when he starts remembering his long-lost brother, and thus begins a picaresque narrative in which we explore the various workings of Wellington Wells in pursuit of Arthur's quest to escape it, the game being structured in true BioShock style wherein every deceptively simple objective has about 500 hidden sub-objectives, so you'll get the chance to run errands through all four corners of the Earth, and you can't take a more direct path because that would entail causing a fuss.\n\nSo We Happy Few can be considered an \"acid test\" of sorts for procedural generation; yes, we've all seen how proc-gen is very useful in indie dungeon-crawlers for creating theoretically infinite levels - as long as you're fine with having a theoretically infinite number of rather hauntingly similar levels - but if you're making a AAA-style immersive sim in your BioShock or Prey or Deus Ex kind of mold, is it viable to procedurally generate the hub world if you don't have the manpower to design one manually because everyone's too busy printing t-shirts for the Kickstarter backers? The answer to that is, \"Noooooo, you big twats.\" Enticing as it may be to add \"game designer\" to the list of jobs the corporate overlords no longer have to pay someone to do, a computer can't design a fun game unless a human tells it what a fun game is, and at that point, the human is being what we call a \"game designer\".\n\nSo We Happy Few has its important fixed spots and story locations, and in between them is a load of procedurally-generated bugger-all. A quest places an objective marker about a kilometer away, I hike over to the marker, nothing happens in the meantime; I skipped through a meadow and picked a few flowers. Oh, the hardboiled life of a defiant revolutionary subversive. I've just had this really crazy idea, guys: how about, instead of procedurally generating an open world - 'cos every game has to have one and you need to keep up - you just restrict the gameplay to the important fun parts and cut out the travel time in-between? We could call them, I don't know, \"stages\", or \"levels\", or \"chapters\", if you're pretentious; that way, there wouldn't be as much useless, boring bullshit! Blimey, why has no one thought of this? !\n\nBut even if you enjoy running across empty meadows 'cos you're a fucking horse, the proc-gen might also be why the game's buggier than a jungle explorer's sock drawer; it was almost certainly the reason I could turn a corner and find about 50 clones of the same old lady standing around a section of road having a Monty Python quote-off. Mind you, I doubt it was the procedural level design that was making half of them float two feet off the ground and the other half clip inside a wall. I know I hate to cause a fuss, but recoiling through a wall while I'm trying to beat you to death with a cricket bat isn't just rude; it's downright unsporting! What were two years of development in Early Access for if not fixing the fucking bugs?! Giving each other piggyback rides for the Doctor Who marathons? !\n\nBut all the bug spray in the world won't fix the fact that it's not a very well-designed game. Having to weigh taking a happy drug to go unnoticed against the risk of overdosing is a solid enough mechanic, but in practice, you don't need to take happy drugs much at all; most of the happy drug-detecting barriers can be bypassed, and people don't notice you as long as you dress right and avoid jumping onto cars while hooting like a gibbon. But even if you do cause the dreaded \"fuss\" and the NPCs all close in, drawing their frying pans and sticks with copies of Wisden nailed to the end, you can run faster than the world's sexiest greyhound through a furry convention and are surrounded by miles of procedurally-generated wilderness full of hiding spots; yes, your protagonist has Horizon Zero Dawn Syndrome and can only hide in one specific kind of bush, but I still ended up uninterestedly sprinting through all the areas straight to the objectives, 'cos I knew all I had to do afterwards was stand behind a moderately-large cat and all the guards and security devices would forget about my existence entirely.\n\nIn brief, Wee Crappy Poo is a game with good ideas buried under piles of rubbish for the sake of openness. Don't get me wrong; openness is good if one happens to be a cake shop or a pair of legs, just not so much if you're a tiger cage or Margaret Thatcher's legs.\n\n----\n\nGame: Yakuza: Dead Souls\n\nI think it's fair to say that popular culture has bitten off more zombies than it can comfortably chew. People just can't seem to get enough of the grumpy little bastards. \"Oh man,\" they seem to say, \"I love zombies! I love how they walk like there's a single drop of piss working its way down their leg and how they look like us but not quite, so I can slaughter them in their thousands without shame or consequence, and I love how they satirize the dumb sheep-like consumerism of modern humanity. I love it so much I'm going to blindly buy everything with zombies in it with no perception of irony whatsoever.\"\n\nAnd now zombies occupy a similar role in popular culture as salt does on a dining table. There is literally nothing they won't try to sprinkle zombies on to appeal to a broader palette. They did it with Red Dead Redemption, they did it with Call of Duty, they did it with Resident Evi - oh, wait. But now they're doing it with Yakuza, a series about stomping the faces of very specifically alive people into the neon-lit streets of Tokyo and then looking at them with a really stern face. So here's Yakuza: Dead Souls, a world turned upside because evil can no longer be purged from men with a good honest Cuban heel to the bridge of the nose.\n\nAfter doing Yakuza 4 last year, I found myself surprisingly enamored with the franchise. Yes, the cutscenes dragged on like all the talky episodes of Game of Thrones strung together, and the gameplay and story were kept separated with an electric fence, but how can anyone dislike the spectacle of very serious-faced angry men in seventies disco suits hitting each other with bicycles like John Travolta got caught up in a serious road rage incident on his way out of the Botox clinic? And I actually found some appeal in the idea of throwing zombies at characters I already like and am familiar with. It's like how The X-Files broke up all that conspiracy garbage by doing a cute, silly, off-canon episode just the occasional sixty or seventy times.\n\nSo I was going into this with a sense of \"Fuck yes, it's Akiyama again. I love his horrible mauve blazer, and now he's dual-wielding custom pistols like a boss. I just want to take him home and mount him to my kitchen wall so my kids will have an appropriate role model to look at over their Honey Nut Cheerios every morning.\" But even putting Brian Blessed in there as an optional boss fight wouldn't make me overlook that this is blatantly an expansion of Yakuza 4. It's the same arrangement of a four-act story mode with four different playable characters, culminating in them all joining forces to each kick one half of a buttock belonging to whoever the evil mastermind will turn out to be, all taking place in the same Shenmue-esque sandbox with the same brick-chewingly psychotic level of detail.\n\nThe story's hardly worth mentioning, since these things tend to write themselves. A zombie shows up in fictional district of Tokyo Kamurocho and swiftly turns into a whole bunch of them, as tends to be the case. And the authorities quarantine off increasingly large sections of the district as everyone else tries to get on with their daily lives, with every shop and restaurant still plying their trade mere yards from the ever-encroaching barricade. It's that same Japanese attitude that had the trains back up and running on the same day the bomb hit Hiroshima, I suppose.\n\nSecondary protagonist and recurring series mad person Goro Majima really comes into his own as a character. It's so rare to see an action game protagonist who seems like he's enjoying himself, not in a dry, cool, unflappable badass sort of way but giggling like a schoolgirl who's just found the headmistress's secret collection of erotic birthday cakes.\n\nRest assured, you can still beat your enemies over the head with a random object. In fact, I made a game of coming up with a different dry, cool one-liner for each one I used. \"Hey baby, what's your sign?\" \"Fancy a hit on the pipe?\" \"You must be the town bicycle! \", etc. But what Red Dead Redemption and Call of Duty have in common is that their non-zombie combat related gameplay already involved guns, whereas Yakuza has always communicated in the language of face stomping, and guns only existed in cutscenes for characters to hold and agonize over firing for forty-five fucking minutes. Henceforth, shooting mechanics have had to be added to Yakuza's combat, and the person who did so has apparently only ever heard of shooters from the myths and legends of far off lands told to him by drunk sailors.\n\nTo stop beating about the bicycle, the shooting controls are a load of piss. If you go into aim mode - that's the second aim mode. For some reason there are two aim modes. One's slightly less aimey than the other, so why the fuck would you bother - then the camera switches to where your character is aiming rather than the character turning to face the camera angle like how the regular, boring, well-designed shooters work. And I wish I had a sewing needle for every time I got teeth marks in my mauve blazer while intimidating a wall two feet to the right of the guy I was trying to aim at, because I'm going to shove them all under my fingernails.\n\nAlso, when you're not aiming you use the right analog stick to look around, but that's what it's good at. It's like a faithful hound trained to fetch the grouse and nothing else. That's why, in most shooters, when you go into aiming mode you continue using the right analog stick to adjust your aim, because you're still looking at things, but now in an edgy, masculine kind of way. Yakuza is of an innovative mindset, however, so adjusting your aim in aiming mode is done with the left analog stick. Why the scrambled eggs on fucktoast would anyone do that? It means if you hit aim while running in the heat of battle, you'll soon be intimidating the stucco ceiling. Truly, a bad game to be part of the architecture.\n\nEventually I figured out that equipping a shotgun and running around in circles vaguely firing in the direction of the enemy was the best approach, even against most of the boss fights, although that does make the occasional boss fight that requires accurate shooting on par with playing darts while trying to prise the jaws of an enraged lioness off your elbow.\n\nI suppose dismissing Dead Souls as a mere expansion may be unfair, since it completely alters the core combat mechanic, there's a whole new story (albeit considerably shorter), and instead of wandering around the city occasionally getting interrupted Final Fantasy-style for a random encounter from a passerby with an insatiable thirst for shoe leather, gameplay now splits between desperately gunning your way through the quarantine zones in search of survivors and wandering about in the unconquered streets looking for side quests and playing the UFO testers for toys to give to the hostesses who secretly hate your guts. But you can't half dismantle a game like Yakuza 4 and try to squeeze shooting into a combat system built for up-close brawling. It's like selling a rottweiler as a guide dog and then being surprised when it bites off a blind person's leg.\n\nThe crux of the matter is, if I want to shoot zombies with guns I can go pretty much anywhere, generally places with higher concentrations of twats, and it'd probably be a lot better designed. But there's only one place I can go to if I want to kung fu someone's kneecaps in and smash them over the head with half a bicycle while dressed for Saturday Night Fever, and that's the alleyway behind the convention center. Sorry, two places. Also the Yakuza games. And that's what makes Yakuza: Dead Souls a waste of time. More so than games usually are, I mean.\n\n----\n\nGame: Yakuza 4\n\n\"The recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan was an unqualified tragedy, and Yahtzee offers his deepest sympathies to a country and people that has long held his admiration and respect.\n\n\"This statement is given to karmatically balance out the following one.\"\n\nBoy, the Japanese are into some weird shit, aren't they? Comes a point where acknowledging cultural difference doesn't cut it any more and you have to say \"What the fuck, guys?\" Generally the point when tentacle monsters molest fifteen-year-olds on subway trains. It makes reviewing a game like Yakuza 4 extremely difficult, because virtually all my negative points can be countered with the argument, \"Well, that's what they like in Japan.\" Now, this counterargument can itself be countered by going through the list of some other things the people have been known to like in Japan, which I won't read out in full because I'd have to brush my teeth afterwards.\n\nThe thrust of that rather weak opening is that it'd be difficult to think of a way Yakuza could make itself more Japanese. It's set in a faithfully accurate depiction of modern Tokyo and the only language option is Japanese with English subtitles, so I hope you like having to exclusively watch the bottom two inches of the screen throughout all the drama. The amount of modern Japanese culture that gets worked in makes you wonder if it's not actually aimed at foreign tourists. The equivalent would be a British game in which you play a bobby in Olde London Towne healing up by eating fish 'n chips and using a fighting style that mainly employs rugby tackles.\n\nAnyway, throughout the course of the plot you play as four individuals with interconnecting storylines and universally inexplicable kung-fu skills: Akiyama, a suave moneylender who resembles Alan Wake crossed with Leisure Suit Larry; Saejima, a prison escapee with a face like the San Andreas fault; Tanimura, a 14-year-old boy who has somehow joined the police force; and Kazuma Kiryu, previously Yakuza games' protagonist, who's absent for just long enough to make you think the series has moved on but is smashing faces with the best of them by the second act.\n\nYou see, in the world of Yakuza 4 (and the series as a whole), faces are the source of all evil, and the best way to drive the evil out of your enemies is to smash it out with both feet or the occasional handrail to the septum. The main characters all go for the face like it's the last drop of toothpaste in the tube. It's actually quite alarming the number of times you'll see a random street thug profusely apologizing with his nose hanging around his chin.\n\nIt might sound like I'm ragging on it, but I'm really not. I actually really like the fighting engine in these games. It's fast and skillful and broken teeth fly across the screen like pulpy ladybirds in exactly the right way to give it a strong visceral appeal, and I defy you not to get enjoyment from smashing a bicycle over someone's head before beating his friend to death with one of the wheels. It does have a bad habit of making you fight groups in really tight spaces, but that just increases the concentration of faces, testicles, and kneecaps that go together to form a sumptuous fruit basket for your fist.\n\nWhat I don't like about the combat is this: gameplay should drive the car while the story navigates and picks the radio station, but Yakuza's story and gameplay are in different cars heading in different directions, and the story car is an overloaded lorry with one tire missing. Yakuza 4 is a sandbox game in the very peculiarly Japanese style that's seen in such games like Shenmue and Deadly Premonition. There's a main plot and then there's a whole bunch of other unconnected bullshit that makes the main plot seem a lot less urgent.\n\nAnd it's not the kind of sandbox where you can start curb-checking passersby if you get bored; here, combat may only take place vithin zee designated area! There are combat random encounters that take an almost Final Fantasy approach by teleporting you and your future shoe ornament into a small pocket dimension presided over by the gods of reconstructive dentistry. And it doesn't flow well for me. Some of the grievances the random encounters come up with to justify the fights get pretty ridiculous, too. Tokyo apparently has a population with such low self-esteem that having a confident walk is grounds for burly men to beat you to death, and crowds will gather and cheer them along because you deserve it, walking around all smug and emotionally balanced.\n\nNow, while sidequests are always nice, Yakuza 4's are a little hard to find. Yes, I like exploration. I even like how they don't mark sidequest objectives on your map so you have to call on your Boy Scout orienteering skills. But I think there has to be something wrong with a game where I can plow through the whole story and never even notice half the content. And even if I did I usually saw no benefit or just plain didn't want to do it. A lot of sidequests just eventually get resolved by someone getting up in your grill and you wearing their mandible as a winklepicker.\n\nBut then there are the minigames. Most perplexing of all is Akiyama's side business in which he runs a hostess club - this is another Japanese cultural thing in which I don't see the appeal, because it's basically paying to sit and get blue-balled for an hour - and has to take an individual girl under his wing, choosing her dresses, makeup, and training options to make her into the best little not-whore in the not-brothel. And if this had been the only gameplay mechanic in a Japanese game, I would have expected to be sticking things up the girl's buttholes by the end of the week. As it stands, it's a bizarrely out of place pretty princess dress-up mode going on ten feet away from two-fisted face ruining. I don't know what the eventual rewards are, but they can't be important, because I got through the whole story campaign without too much difficulty.\n\nIf last week's Pokémon review didn't make this clear enough, I'm a man who's never been bothered by 100% completion, especially when most of it's unrelated to the plot. I don't see why everything needs to be my responsibility. If every passerby needs a kindly stranger to bring them their packed lunch, then perhaps it would be better to leave them to Darwin.\n\nBut to conclude on the story, that takes a bit of a Final Fantasy approach, too.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Cutscenes run on like the hot water in an Alaskan bathhouse.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Nothing is said once that can be said seven times. It's frustrating, because unlike Final Fantasy I actually like some of the characters, but they make it pretty hard to me with all the time they spend pausing for effect or making reaction noises. \"Nuh?\" \"Duh?\" \"Nani?\" You could stitch them all together and make a pretty funky remix.\n\nAnd the plot as a whole isn't stellar. From a relatively stable starting position, the story goes eight ways bananas by the end. Everyone who isn't dead betrays each other about seventeen times apiece, and the game ends with every single one of them having a big, shirtless fistfight on the roof of a tall building, like an argument broke out at the Homosexual Male Models Base Jumpers Club. And to my dismay, nobody says \"Blimey, it's windy up here! Do you mind if I put my shirt back on? Because my nipples have turned into little rosy jelly beans.\"\n\n----\n\nGame: Yakuza 0\n\nIt's official: the Yakuza series is now the long-running Yakuza series. There's quite a few of them now, and this month saw the release of its long-awaited zeroth installment, Yakuza 0, a prequel in which we discover how Kazuma Kiryu went from being a sharp-dressed man with a brick for a face who likes disco-stomping people into a sharp-dressed man with a brick for a face who likes disco-stomping people in a slightly different suit. We also learn how fan-favorite series regular Goro Majima went from being a sharp-dressed man with a brick for a face who likes disco-stomping people into a boggle-eyed weirdo who dresses like he woke up naked in the pet cemetery.\n\nAnd frankly, I'm a little disappointed, 'cos I was hoping we'd have the opportunity to learn where Kazuma Kiryu got his ideas about what members of organized crime families do all day, because he doesn't seem to think it involves committing crimes. I mean, when Kiryu sees gangsters shaking down passersby for cash, his first instinct is to polish his shoes with their nose cartilage. Kiryu, that's what you're supposed to be doing, you giant prat! I mean, what's the baseline Yakuza activity? Extorting money from local businesses, right? Well, Kiryu spends a lot of time in Yakuza 0 handing out large sums of money to local businesses. Fucking hell, man! On your first day, did they accidentally play the induction video in reverse?\n\nI am fond of the Yakuza games, but honestly, I have trouble articulating why, which is a shame, 'cos that's me fucking job. Yeah, the combat makes you want to squirt with glee every time a very serious-faced man in an expensive suit violently suplexes another serious-faced man in an expensive suit into a mailbox, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a game model packed with more superfluous bullshit. In between the harrowing plot about deception, betrayal, murder, and conspiracy, we are invited to potter about, playing with fucking skill tester machines and trying to eat every meal at every restaurant, which is classic 100% completion bullshit because there's no gameplay or extra content involved. Whatever you order, all you'll get is a two-second cutscene of our man hunched over his dinner, with his back to camera, so he could be dining on the contents of his nasal cavity, for all we know.\n\nIt's certainly unique, and I get a flutter of nostalgia every time I hit the familiar streets of Kamurocho again, but by Christ, do these games bang on! 90% of the bloody plot is cutscenes of intense, understated conversation, and there's about twelve different varieties of it. Sometimes it's text-only, sometimes it's voiced but you can still skip the lines, sometimes you can't skip the lines and all the characters talk with their mouths closed for some reason, and every now and again, they're doing a fully-animated cutscene so you can really appreciate the sheer nanoseconds of work that must have gone into animating Kazuma Kiryu's facial expressions.\n\nBut at the end of the day, I always come away satisfied from a Yakuza game once I push through to the end, probably because they backload all the dramatic car chases and inevitable shirtless punch-ups in the second half, and it's the incredibly slow-paced buildup in the first half that tries my patience. Maybe it's the \"Elite: Dangerous Principle\": the occasional disco-stomping spaceship battle is all the more enjoyable when they're spaced out by huge expanses of the black, cavernous void of pachinko parlors and people making very serious faces at each other.\n\nStill, I'd be the first to admit that the games do get kind of samey, even beyond the fact that they all take place in the same four or five blocks of downtown Tokyo. They usually start with a murder, of which odds are good someone we like will get falsely accused, we proceed to pick apart the threads of a scheme to take over the Yakuza so convoluted that the Riddler would suggest toning it down a bit, and there'll be a female character we have to protect because they've been victimized by the bad guys to a point that borders on fetishistic.\n\nIn Yakuza 0's case, Kiryu is accused of murdering someone he merely disco-stomped six or seven times (which he couldn't possibly have died from, because this is Yakuza, where everyone's face is carved from antique wooden furniture), so he's forced to leave the Yakuza and become an estate agent, the kind of estate agent that dresses up in a disco suit and resolves tenancy disputes by stomping groups of four or five serious-faced men. Meanwhile, Majima is being punished for past fuck-ups by being given a glamorous high-end nightclub to manage - Fuck, better toe the line, Majima, mate; next time, they might punish you with a key to the executive toilet! - until he's ordered to kill someone and ends up trying to protect them, since he's also a bit unclear on this whole \"organized crime\" thing.\n\nAnd so begins another contrived dance of twists, wrong turns, and growly discussions broken up every five minutes by four or five angry, overconfident men getting decanted into the room from the inexhaustible supply for the sake of token combat. On which note, what's new is that both playable characters can switch between three different combat styles on the fly: one fast, one strong, one pansy-ass in-betweeny middle ground for all you ineffectual saps out there. But Yakuza combat has never been particularly sophisticated, and I got through the whole game pretty much only using strong-style combat just to prove I could. Majima's combat in particular was a cake walk, 'cos his strong style gets a permanent fuck-off baseball bat and the nunchaku twirl combo that I used to spam my way through every boss fight, 'cos all the motherfuckers could do was stand there violently nodding their heads, like my baseball bat was confirming all their extreme political views. I only ever died in combat in the last few random fights when the motherfuckers have guns, which are really hard to dodge and make you roll around on the floor like a cat with a piece of duct tape on its back.\n\nThe other new mechanics are weirdly financially-focused, but then, it is set in the 80's, and I was surprised that at no point do we use the cell phones of the time as bludgeoning weapons. Kiryu has to run his real estate enterprise by buying up local businesses, another in a long list of 100% completion collectible sidequests, made slightly more obnoxious because there's no way of knowing which businesses you can buy until you run up and press your face against the window, and if there's one or two left you haven't bought, the game has no way to tell you where the fucking things are, so I have to run up and down the street leaving a greasy smear all along the frontage. Meanwhile, Majima has to run a cabaret club with one of those restaurant management casual games that your mom likes almost as much as living next door to the dockyard, which isn't the kind of thing I want to do in a disco-stomping crime thriller, but you know what? You could say that about the vast majority of the content of a Yakuza game, and they just wouldn't be the same without it.\n\nSo my final word is, it's another Yakuza game, long-winded and weirdly hilarious in a way that only a scowling, hardened gangster attempting a neon-colored dancing minigame can be: long periods of dull, if weirdly comforting, mundanity broken up by occasional reminders of why we're putting up with it, like a water slide connecting two floors of a DMV office.\n\n----\n\nGame: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword\n\nDeck the halls and ring whatever bells you have conveniently to hand: there's finally a full-on Zelda game on the Wii. By which I mean, a full-on Zelda game that didn't have a simultaneous Gamecube release illustrating that anyone who willingly plays a version with motion controls must have recently fallen asleep with their head on a Breville sandwich toaster.\n\nZelda games are simultaneously easy and difficult to criticize. Easy, because the same major criticism can be dusted off and wheeled out every time, that despite graphical changes and gameplay tweaks Nintendo have been releasing essentially the same game with such reliability for the last fifteen years that we can practically sing along at this point. But the moment you say that, it's like you're grinding your naked bum into the Turin shroud. \"No, no, no,\" sputter the fanboys, \"that's how it works! Every Zelda game is the beta for the next one,\" which implies that Nintendo have been knowingly releasing an unfinished product for decades and still haven't gotten it right, but we lap it up every time like starved inbred kittens.\n\nThe thing is, though, even by those standards, completely fucked up standards that they are, Skyward Sword still isn't very good. And it's not just because I hate motion control, although that's certainly a big part of it. While recent first-party Nintendo offerings like Kirby's Epic Yarn and New Super Mario Bros. have had a tendency to scoot by head bowed, trying not to make eye contact with the whole motion controls thing, Skyward Sword's game plan seems to be largely to bash us over the head with the Wiimote and yell \"remember this?! \".\n\nOnly now the Wii MotionPlus has added the ability to register what direction you're slashing the sword! And apparently this never ceases to amaze, because I swear every single enemy in the game has some kind of directional blocking ability. Which would be fine, but Wiimote reaction delay hasn't gone anywhere, and in a fast-paced fight Link always seems to be doing the thing you wanted him to do one second ago but which will now result in an electrified scrotum from the baddie's recently repositioned stun prod. And the flying controls are like scraping wallpaper off the inside of a tea cup ride.\n\nAs always, the game starts with a Link oversleeping. I have a theory that Link is like Sherlock Holmes and can only function as a human being if he's either on an adventure or enough cocaine to floor a sumo wrestler. This version of Link lives in a big floating ivory tower in the sky where everyone gets about on trained birds and Zelda is the standard anime childhood friend/love interest, which is at least a personality of some kind. But traditionally in Zelda games, Zelda is either already a princess and has no personality or discovers she's a princess and immediately loses all personality, most egregiously in Wind Waker, when she's initially a sassy and effective pirate queen but the moment she discovers her birthright her adventuring clothes transform into the world's least practical dress and she spends the rest of the game locked in a cupboard.\n\nSpeaking of Wind Waker, spiritually Skyward Sword feels quite reminiscent of it, except you're exploring an ocean of clouds rather than the more traditional ocean of water. But if the surface world is supposed to be so completely covered in clouds that you and your ivory tower friends aren't even sure it exists, then why, when you're exploring the surface world, is it always a bright, sunny day? I found a plot hole! NURSE!\n\nSo obviously Zelda ends up in an in-buggerance and Link has to pick up the magic sword and sort her out. This time the magic sword comes free with a standard-issue support character, who deserves special mention, because besides a twitchy, enraged badger that points out important quest items by breaking wind at them, I cannot imagine a worse assistant. Her big thing is spurious rigor. She can't just say \"Go in the room and stab the big lad in the obvious glowing weak spot,\" it's always \"There is a 70% chance that you must stab the big lad in the obvious glowing weak spot.\" She sounds like a fucking laundry detergent commercial.\n\nHer other big thing is stating the obvious. Someone tells you to go the Forest Temple - Bing! \"Link, I have calculated that we must go to the Forest Temple!\" Giant tentacles burst up through the floor - Bing! \"Link, I have calculated that there's a big monster outside with a nark on!\" You suck a man's cock - Bing! \"Link, I have calculated that you are sucking a man's cock. There is a 70% chance that you should now cradle his balls!\" And since the text crawls onto the screen as slowly as it can get away with, it's like being stuck on a long car ride with one of those people who insist on reading out loud every single fucking sign you pass.\n\nI guess I got unusually angry about that because everything else feels kind of padded and generally lackluster, like the musical instrument du jour, the harp. Previous ones had you enter different sequences of notes or gestures for different effects, but in every situation that calls for this one you just wave your hand back and forth like you want to swat a fly but aren't particularly bothered. I'm not a harp player, but I'm pretty sure there's more to it than that.\n\nI liked Wind Waker because it had a huge, seamless world to explore, and Skyward Sword just feels small in comparison. The free-roamy sky area contains precisely one town island, where you do all the shopping, and five hundred floating rocks, many of which have chests you can't open until you find their equivalent in one of the gated-off DESIGNATED QUESTING AREAS, so fuck exploration. And of the DESIGNATED QUESTING AREAS, there are only three, that you revisit like the outside toilet when the trots are going around: a forest, a desert, and a volcano. And the forest has to pull double duty as the water area as well.\n\nSo no one really seems to be that into anything that's going on, not even the villains. The big evil dark demon lad hasn't even taken anything over yet. In fact, there's a boss fight they copy-paste three times that just involves whacking the big baddie over the head with a rolled-up newspaper so he doesn't escape from his hole. All the rest of the time is mainly spent \"proving your worth.\" First you \"prove your worth\" for the Master Sword, then you \"prove your worth\" for the three Sacred Flames, and then \"prove your worth\" a few more times for the Song of the Hero. If I were Link, I'd throw the sword down and yell: \"Do you want this motherfucker dead or what? I feel like I'm trying to arrest the person burgling your house and you keep telling me to fuck off until I've put on some nicer shoes.\"\n\nI won't say the game doesn't have its moments - the pirate ship bit is all right - but even if we concede to the fanboys that a Zelda game can only be judged alongside other Zelda games, Skyward Sword is the worst Zelda game I've ever played. I mean, two of the dungeons just end with a generic boss fight with a recurring baddie, and you don't even defeat him with an item you found in the same dungeon. That's breaking the Zelda rule! I'm pretty sure that means the developers must report to Shigeru Miyamoto's office, kneel on a Wii Fit board, and honorably disembowel themselves with a tennis racket attachment.\n\n----\n\nGame: Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars\n\nAfter the world-shattering television executive-frightening success of GTA IV it seems you can bring out GTA-brand easy bake ovens and still get your investment back, but still, a GTA exclusive to the DS? Fevered frogspawn-chewing madness. That would be like releasing a Dead Space rail shooter on the Wii.\n\nIn all seriousness we'll probably going to be seeing a lot of this sort of thing. With the monkey of economic crisis still clinging to everyone's backs cheekily eating all the bananas it's more bankable for studios to make games for more widespread systems. They practically give away DSes with the Sunday paper and I'm pretty sure there are more homes with Wiis than with central heating, so here we are. Perhaps this period in gaming will at last make the Wii actually worth two shits. I doubt it, though - you can shovel diamonds into a turd and it'll still be a turd, just momentously more painful to produce.\n\nThe DS, meanwhile, is not a turd, and good thing too with all those sharp corners, it's just that it kind of does its own thing. It does it well, but GTA is from a different world. Chinatown Wars is therefore the bastard offspring of two forbidden lovers from two warring families tragically shot dead while trying to elope by a hired gun, played in this drama by myself. Too late, sadly, to prevent the child being born and coming out a little bit malformed.\n\nChinatown Wars returns us to the liberty city of GTA IV (albeit missing Alderney, but it took too long to open up Alderney, so no one cares) and today's career sociopath with astonishingly good lawyers is Huang, a spoiled rich Triad kid with a dead dad, arriving in Liberty City to get embroiled in the family business.\n\nWith a top-down presentation similar to the original 2D GTAs, Chinatown is a nostalgic callback to when the series was simplier, cartoonier, and not as good. Yes, GTA only became a truly terrifying money spinner once it went 3D, because top-down 2D is full of inherent problems. You can only see about 20 feet in front of you - also known as \"Metal Gear Solid henchman syndrome\" - and there are a lot of things beyond that twenty feet border you need to worry about. Virtually every time I jacked a car I'd get an instant wanted level, because I couldn't see a cop directly behind me helping an old lady across the road. And then there are the toll gates, back from GTA IV just in case they didn't completely get on your tits the first time around. And they're almost invariably at the end of long high-speed straights, so I lost count of how many times I accidentally sped right through and earned myself another big fat wanted star. The limited visibility is also not helped by a camera that appears to be mounted on the head of a drunk obese man on a Segway, lurching sickeningly about when you're trying to make the godawful targeting system lock onto an enemy and not, say, an unarmed man on the other side of a wall, on the Hebrides.\n\nYou my be unsurprised to hear than that the game is frustratingly difficult, in which case prepare to be surprised because it isn't. I breezed through all the missions on a rocket surfboard and rarely had to attempt any more than once. The simple reason for this is that all this professional game-reviewing has finally paid off and I'm just naturally good at everything now, but the less vacuous reason is that the enemy AI is crap. Everyone with a gun seems to be afraid that using it will offend the neighbors. When the police are after you, there's a mechanic wherein you can shake them off by getting them to smash into things, and really all you have to do is drive along a straight road very fast and they do the work for you! It's like they've got brick wall-magnets mounted to the bumpers. Alternatively, just use a respray shop, of course. They won't do the job if there are cops around, so the technique I discovered was to park around the corner, wait for every cop car in the area to huddle around the nearest lamppost then cheekily floor it for the garage doors while they're busy disentangling their necks from their steering columns.\n\nOne of the unique selling points is the drug-dealing system. And really, pick any commodity-trading element from any game and replace the names with more censor-provoking ones and away we go - find who sells cheap, buy it all up, and flog it to whoever buys dear. 30 GOTO 10. And you're gonna have to do this whenever you can, because doing the actual missions pays slightly less than vending cardboard boxes to the homeless. And you'll need all the money you can get for when the cops catch you on a dozy morning and take all your favorite weapons away. Fortunately, the drug trade has its own underground stock market that tickers hot investments tips directly to your PDA, so making thousands upon thousands in a single deal is incredibly easy. A more patient player than I could probably spend an hour or two trading around and end up with enough money to buy all the safe houses in the game and invite all the gangs to a great big pool party.\n\nIt seems that the weird thing about Chinatown Wars so far is that all its faults are balanced by its other faults: stupid enemies compensate for shitty controls, the easiness of trading compensates for its banality. All the foulness mixes together to create something halfway decent in the middle. It's almost prodigious in its retarded genius. The writing's not as stellar as GTA usually is - characters feel interchangeable and arbitrarily drop self-consciousness and references to sexual perversion into the dialogue for no better reason than trying too hard. But from what I've gathered I'm the only person who gives a shit.\n\nI think my biggest problem is the whole DS thing. It seems when you agree to develop for the DS or Wii, Nintendo makes you sign a contract agreeing to throw in at least one irritating out-of-place touch screen gimmick or Wiimote waggle. So, being a good little whore, Chinatown Wars breaks things up frequently with an occasional bit of touch-screen flappery, like hotwiring cars or throwing Molotovs. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but since the movement controls use the buttons you have to either be constantly fumbling for the stylus or just use your thumb and leave Cheeto dust all over the screen. The DS works when you exclusively use either control system but switching between them at a moment's notice isn't good for my poor arthritic controller-ruined fingers.\n\nJust because you can have something doesn't mean you should: I can use a syringe to remove the filling from a Cadbury's Creme Egg and replace it with Branston Pickle, but it wouldn't be a good idea. At least I don't think so. Hold that thought.\n\n...\n\nNo, it really isn't.\n\n----\n\nGame: Halo 5: Guardians\n\nIs it me, or is the current slew of new installments to ongoing franchises even more of a flatline than usual?", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "It feels like for years, consoles were slapping the same wet laundry against the same rocks over and over again, but then adventure called and they journeyed through a harrowing odyssey of motion controls and 3D, and the faint obligation to innovate that comes with a console generation.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "But now things seemed to have settled down and they've returned to the Shire to resume slapping the wet laundry against the rocks, blissfully unaware of the VR monster that's about to leap up from the riverbed and make them all puke themselves to death.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "But while we're waiting for that, let's take a look at Halo 5, the fifth installment of what was the original progenitor of the open-quotes \"next-gen shooter,\" i.e., nice skybox, shame about the game, or rather the second installment of the new trilogy developed by 343 Industries, after original creators Bungie decided, \"Hey, this incredibly repetitive sci-fi shooter garbage with pseudo-mythical pretensions with the emphasis on \"pretensions\" got old pretty fast. Let's move on to Destiny and see if we can beat our previous speed record.\" And rest assured, this is going to be another trilogy, because without wishing to spoil, a sentence fast becoming my own personal \"I'm not racist but...\", Halo 5 ends in a cliff-hangery Empire Strikes Back kind of way. Oh yes, Microsoft see no reason to hop off this gravy train as long as it's still moving, even if it's at a fucking crawl across perfectly flat terrain lest its contents slop out and baste nearby cattle.\n\nAlthough there is a little blip on the plot's heart monitor in that Cortana is sort of turning into the big villain now. Oh yeah, spoiler alert: turns out Cortana's big dramatic death scene in the last game wasn't for realsies, but one could kind of predict that from the mere fact that there is a Halo 5 at all; it doesn't take a giant space protractor to calculate that Master Chief and Cortana are the only marketable faces of the franchise, which is not even because they're good or interesting characters, it's only because Mr. Chuffy is the protagonist and Cortana flaps her big blue knockers about like a gelatin dessert on a merry-go-round.\n\nThe funny thing is, even in-universe everyone seems to realize that Mr. Chuffy and his little blue titty monster are the only characters of any importance, so when Mr. Chuffy reports having a weird dream about Cortana being alive and calling him to a distant planet, not a single person so much as hazards the possibility that it was just a dream and maybe he'll forget all about it if they buy him a new wank doll for Christmas. No, they're all like, \"Ooh, this is serious; we better go to that planet then!\"\n\nBut despite Mr. Chuffy knowing Cortana best and his grief affecting his work 'cause they had to install little windscreen wipers to get all the tears off his face plate, he is inexplicably disinvited from the mission. I guess his superiors thought they were playing XCOM and wanted to level up some of their rookies. And so Mr. Chuffy is given an excuse to go rogue.\n\nThe action is split between the four Spartans trying to hunt down Mr. Chuffy and Mr. Chuffy himself, who also has three finger puppets with him for no better reason than because his bits need to be four-player co-op as well; any potential that might have been here for some kind of tense or dramatic character interplay is lost by the fact that Halo continues to seem like it was written by a castrated slug.\n\nThe crime for which Mr. Chuffy is being hunted is so completely fucking weak that the two parties can barely summon the effort to be cross at each other when they do meet Two of them have a token punch-up about midway through that has more the air of two blind people trying to politely get past each other in a crowded restaurant. It might have helped if it had been playable, but Halo 5's attitude seems to be that nothing ruins an action sequence faster than players.\n\nThe game opens with the four members of the B-team having a huge spectacular punch-up in a warzone, at which point I went, \"Holy wow, look at that! The stain on the wall behind my TV is exactly the same shape as New Caledonia! If only this overblown footage of people I don't know fighting other people I don't know for reasons unexplained could be as interesting.\" After all, I know the backstory for that stain: it was left by an errant jet of spunk after I watched Free Willy for the first time, and after this brief sequence of pointless spectacle, almost all the storytelling is done with two-sentence dialogue exchanges barked out in between samey combat arenas.\n\n\"Hey, third finger puppet! here's a quiet moment; you may now flesh out your backstory in a maximum of ten words.\"\n\n\"Errmm.. I worked for six months as a seal clubber.\"\n\nAnd then I'm all like, \"What? Sorry I wasn't paying attention! Post-action sequence probably isn't the best time to have important exposition, 'cause my mind's in recovery mode and I'm trying to chug this Gatorade.\"\n\nI don't want no one trying to tell me the story doesn't matter if the gameplay's fine, because frankly the story is all that Halo 5 can possibly sell itself on. It's the same shooting as always, no new weapons or vehicles -- and incidentally, Halo games could save me some time and throw my starting rifle and pistol in the bin as the level starts and give me something I could actually find some fucking ammo for. No new enemies either; there's a boss character in that he's functionally identical to certain standard enemies but twice the size and can't shut his fucking face for five seconds, and you fight him, like, twenty times. The plot reason is that it's one guy with, like, a million bodies and I thought, \"Okay, that's actually quite threatening as villains go since blowing him up over and over again isn't going to help and that's pretty much the only string to my bow\", until what might as well be the final boss is just ten more of the guy. Psych! Turns out blowing him up over and over again is going to help!\n\nHalo is the premature ejaculation of video games, and I'm not just saying that because Halo 5 feels shorter than Cortana's laundry list. It took 'til Super Mario Galaxy for Mario to spooge his last and that was Halo's fucking starting point: kick off with huge galaxy-spanning threats and giant fat-arsed space prostitutes with fanny cankers the size of small moons, and where the fuck are you supposed to go from there? Maybe you could breathe some life in by switching to a more focused character narrative, but the prerequisite for that is actually having characters beyond titty holograms and giant dustbins on legs.\n\nThe attitude of Halo 5 seems to be that if you keep chewing the bubblegum, maybe the flavour will eventually somehow come back. It's just more meat for the grinder, more grist to the mill, more innocence lost to the 70s children's TV presenter, but at worst, it's merely bland unless you plan to get into the multiplayer, at which point the threat level elevates to court-martial offense. If paying for the game and the subscription fee weren't quite enough fun for you, the fun need never stop in the micro-payment shop as you struggle to compete with fat 13-year-old tit-fiddlers with Mum's credit card and poor supervision. And $3.95's getting pretty bloaty for a micro-payment! If that's a micro-payment, then my dick is comfortably petite!\n\n----\n\nGame: Godzilla (2015)\n\nThis game's shit. Oh sorry, I usually do more of a setup than that, don't I? I'll start again. Goodness me, this game's shit.\n\nIf you are not familiar with it, the long-running Godzilla franchise is what happens when you nuke a country twice. You see, when you punish a child by making them smoke an entire carton of cigarettes, you shouldn't be surprised if they end up addicted. And similarly, when you go into someone's country and blow up all their shit to make them stop being jerks, you have only yourself to blame if watching all their shit getting blown up becomes the only way they can get hard. Godzilla has been an icon of Japanese pop culture since 1954. This very year, in fact, the Shinjuku Ward of Tokyo named Godzilla an official cultural ambassador. I'm guessing this is like when the Queen of England knights popular celebrities: it's just something they do every now and again to make it look like they have an actual purpose.\n\nAnd now the venerable institution of Godzilla is represented in the current generation of video games with this. It would have been shrewder to put out Godzilla-branded Zyklon B canisters. You'd think this would be a no-brainer. AAA video games long seemed to resign themselves to a life of licking the back window of the mediocrity bus, but if there's one thing it still does better than anything else, it's blowing shit up. Games like Just Cause and Prototype and even Angry Birds prove that smashing things like it's pussy after a lengthy prison sentence is a winning formula. You'd think that Godzilla as a concept would wear that niche like a vacuum-sealed rubber johnny.\n\nThe problem is Godzilla: The Game is trying to look like the old Japanese Godzilla movies rather than any modern interpretation. Ho yes, there's no opportunity to crush Matthew Broderick under foot, more's the pity. And to its credit, the game looks exactly like those old Kaiju movies did, like a bunch of dudes in fake rubber costumes tripping over cardboard boxes with doors and windows painted on, each with so many spark packs strapped to their bodies that the only difference between them and a suicide bomber is a sense of purpose in life. They even managed to recreate the way those costumes' jaw flaps loosely on its hinge as a roar sound effect plays that doesn't sync up with the movement. So in the category of looking as terrible as its source material, Godzilla earns its solitary A+.\n\nI played the PS4 version and graphically it looks like it belongs on the PS2. Even that is being totally unfair on the PS2! Shadow of the Colossus was on the PS2, but it managed to make its big things feel big. It was like laying my head on the floor of a supermarket as your mum power-slides around the corner on a mobility scooter. Godzilla, meanwhile, thinks that all you have to do is make everything move like it's made of depleted uranium.\n\nGodzilla himself walks like his parents are having sex and he's trying to sneak past their bedroom door, and every time you press an attack button, you are committed to it for the next half hour. So obviously the level designers thought, \"Hey, since it takes you the length of an average Royal Variety Performance to walk anywhere, not much point in making the levels any bigger than a one-bedroom apartment.\" We never see things from any level of scale other than Godzilla-sized. Without comparison or any visible pedestrians, we could just be watching slow-motion footage of a Boston Terrier in a Halloween costume ruining a Lego project.\n\nYour goal in each level is to blow up all the ridiculously huge spinning generators that probably require more energy to keep spinning than they could ever possibly generate. While you're doing that, you also have to stand Godzilla in some places where some cheeky, candid photos can be taken of him for the swimsuit edition of Wrath of Nature Illustrated. You do this roughly ten squillion times and then the game goes, \"Oh, actually I'm not totally convinced you're ready for the last two levels, just to be safe you'd better do it another ten squillion times.\" The reason given is that you need to gather sufficient intelligence on Godzilla by going through several different mission paths. How much intelligence do you need? He's got like three attacks, and anything he steps on is not gonna be allowed on any rollercoasters any time soon. That's all you need.\n\nAnd when I say 'different mission paths', I mean exactly the same missions, but with a slight variance in how quickly the threat level rises. You see, if you're not careful, the Japanese authorities might raise the effectiveness of the defense forces from zero to zero times two.\n\nThe only thing that can damage Godzilla in a way he can't immediately regenerate is other Kaijus. They're all classic enemies of Godzilla, I think, 'cause every time anyone says their name out loud, you can practically hear them mutter \"registered trademark\". They're not trying to defend humanity, nor are you defending humanity from them; they just sort of show up like a nosy neighbour peering over the fence. Then the two of you clash, by which I mean you go at each other like a pair of nursing home residents who both walked into the TV room and simultaneously noticed there was only one free armchair.\n\nThe Kaiju fights are about the only point at which the game threatens to seriously think about becoming interesting, until you realize you can just mash heavy attack which interrupts basically everything, occasionally using the uninterruptable super attack when the enemy manages to get one of their long bullshit combos out, that you can't dodge or get out of the way of, 'cause you're a dude wearing a rubber costume that weighs about fifty pounds. And you can't even turn around without filing notice at least thirty days in advance.\n\nI wish I could get through one day of my life without asking this question, but what the fuck am I doing here? I am supposed to be rooting for Godzilla? I guess so, 'cause at the end, after we've totally wrecked up the place, the prime minister's all like, \"This was a lesson from nature, and Godzilla will return if humanity ever goes too far again.\" Oh, heaven forfend that humanity go too far and start doing something irresponsible like stomp all over someone else's shit. Godzilla's not our abusive spouse, prime minister lady, stop rationalizing! Maybe he's just being a dick!\n\nA game in which we get to play a big, evil giant monster rubbing its fat arse all over a city like a huge, stupid dog trying to get comfortable on an expensive wedding cake, could in theory offer catharsis, but that's not what this game feels like. It feels like we're a guy in a costume who just wants to act like a dick, taking out his impotent rage on some cereal boxes. Being a big, destructive monster would be fun; just being a dick is not. If I wanted to be a dick, I'd shave my head bald and sit in a hammock all day, spitting on a lingerie catalog.\n\n----\n\nGame: Detroit: Become Human\n\nOh, boy, a new game by David Cage. Let's get the bingo card out: Ooh, a game about androids with only vague ideas about how to act like human beings? Finally, David Cage's writing what he knows, LOL.\n\nIn all seriousness, while David Cage games are universally horribly written, cringe-worthy, of suspect values, mired with gameplay akin to trying to watch a movie while fighting to get the remote away from an overexcited dog, they…erm…hang on, it's coming to me – oh yeah, they are usually good for a laugh. Although the biggest one I got from Detroit: [HRUHHBecome Human was right at the end when there was a little survey to get my impressions on the game, and one of the questions was, \"Were there any points when you were personally touched by the story? 'All the time', 'Most of the time', 'Some of the time', or 'No'\". Obviously, I answered, \"No\". And when I checked the global stats, 90% of those surveyed had also answered, \"No.\" So congratulations David Cage. Something in one of your games finally made me feel hope for the future of mankind.\n\nThe story is, in near-future Detroit, commercial-grade androids are booming the economy while causing mass unemployment and the highly relevant theme of income inequality we could've gone with sails merrily over David Cage's head as he goes for the clumsy Civil War-era racism analogue.\n\nWe follow three protagonists: a nanny-droid who accidentally kills a deadbeat single dad and must go on the run with his daughter; an artist assistant-droid who falls from grace and becomes the deviant android's charismatic leader – well, the leader, at any rate – and a prototype detective android who is torn between his instructions to hunt down the deviants and his blossoming romance with Clancy Brown – a grizzled human detective who hates androids except not really.\n\nAs with many David Cage games, it's the kind of plot that makes you constantly yell questions at the screen: Why were androids built for menial tasks designed to look and act perfectly human in the first place? Why weren't they boxes on wheels, or how about this: a dog with Dr. Octopus tentacles? That would've been more efficient at cleaning up and amusing for the kids. But considering the androids do look human, why are all the real humans so unflinchingly hateful and dismissive of them, when the androids' superficial human qualities would be triggering the sympathy instincts in most normal people?\n\nThe answer to most of the questions is the same; because MELODRAMA♬. David Cage has only one tool in his storytelling arsenal and it is a giant sledgehammer with the word MELODRAMA♬ written down the side. His stories always play out like rampant human misery simulators as written by someone who's never met any human beings. Well, I suppose we know he's met Ellen Page. Fucking hell, do we know that! He probably puts it on his business cards.\n\nAnd just because a story's depressing doesn't mean it's deep or complex. There's a moment in Despair: Become Miserable where we literally watch an ugly man in a run-down house loudly explain to no one in particular how much he's going to enjoy beating up his daughter in between puffs on his crack pipe. Half the characters in these games are like one-off villains from the Incredible Hulk TV series where they had to contrive an excuse for Bill Bixby to Hulk out every episode, so they chuck a random inexplicable asshole into the room to smirkingly give him nipple cripples for literally no reason.\n\nWhat's sad is that there's always a great deal of potential in David Cage video games: I look forward to the day when he actually creates one! Har Har Har. He doesn't make branching-narrative video games, this lad; he makes branching narratives and then tries to tortuously squeeze a video game into it. I feel like he'd rather be making films. He doesn't appreciate the essential differences between the way an audience engages with a game versus a film.\n\nAt the very start, we play a weird-faced lanky detective android at a hostage situation and we're permitted and indeed obliged to bum around the room next to the hostage situation gathering intel on the perp before we confront them. This also gives us a chance to learn a bit about the world we're in, which would've been fine. But as I read through a jolly interesting magazine the hostage taker suddenly shot one of the SWAT guys and the game went, \"WHOOPS you bummed around too long. That's going on your permanent record.\"\n\nI don't get it, David Cage. Did you want me to explore and be immersed by this world you've created or did you want to maintain psychotic death-grip control of the story's pacing? 'Cos if the latter, then just make a fucking film. Or, perhaps more realistically, a choose-your-own-adventure book. Well, I say he should make a film, but he'd never hack it in films ironically because he's a hack. All his dialogue is clichéd and most of his ideas are nicked. I enjoyed Westworld too, David Cage, but you didn't have to enjoy it so bloody publicly! Is he getting any better with practice? Well, at least Detroit: Cum Dumpster is only fucking retarded as opposed to completely fucking retarded like Beyond: Two Souls. But that only puts it on a level with Heavy Rain, which it's hauntingly similar too, at times, especially when you're exploring a crime scene in the pouring rain playing a detective who acts like he's from space.\n\nSo nothing has changed about gameplay. Once again the standard movement controls make our characters seem like they lost all the sensation in their legs after a broom handle got shoved up their arse. And we either press on-screen button prompts very slowly to perform utterly tedious household tasks that don't progress the plot at all, or we press the on-screen button prompts very, very quickly during an action sequence. And of course, some of the prompts are fucking SIXAXIS motion controls: the button prompt equivalent of the short kid with the lazy eye and the weird smell who's convinced he's one of the gang. Does anyone still seriously think this shit is immersive? I'll tell you what isn't immersive: having to rise from my controller clutching slump on the couch so the game will finally register me thrusting the controller downwards. I know David Cage likes to imagine every player leaning forward in their seat with a constant enraptured look on their face, but we don't all have good lumbar support or a broom handle shoved up our arses.\n\nThe nicest thing you can say about David Cage is that he has potentially good ideas; he just never puts enough thought into them. The way characters have to symbolically smash their objective prompts and invisible walls to break their programming was a good idea. Are we twisting the core mechanics to make a point about free will? Oh, the rote instruction-following gameplay came straight back afterwards, so I guess not.\n\nWell, now that my main points are across, I'd like to close this review by discussing one of the plot twists. So now's the time to tuck live oysters into your eyelids if you don't want spoilers. Ready? Here we go.\n\nRemember that nanny bot who adopted a human child? Towards the end, it turns out that child was also an android all along! Ooh, what a twist! An inadequately-explored twist that adds nothing to the characters or story and may even be detrimental to it! I mean, \"Can a robot mother truly love a human child?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "was a question with some power to it in this context, but, \"Can a robot love another robot?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Yes, they can! We know they can! We've seen like twelve of the buggers doing it already! It's just a twist for the sake of having a twist. In other words, it's a David Cage twist. Sounds like a dance, doesn't it? Hey, everybody! Do the David Cage twist! Walk stiffly around the room for 10 minutes then reach for the sky and fall flat on your face.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Teardown.\n\nGame: Teardown\n\nReviewed: 2022-4-27\n\nThe introduction of the physics engine to video games was right up there with the introduction of the potato to the Irish, or depending on your perspective, the introduction of the smallpox blanket to the Native Americans. What a sea change it was, when loose objects weren't just falling straight down onto the floor, but also bouncing a little bit once they got there. Fucking hell, that was well worth enslaving all those Asian children to build video cards! But game technology has still yet to realize the full potential of real-world physics; there's no game yet where, say, the water level in the ocean is affected by the gravitational pull of a large orbiting satellite. Boy, I bet something like that would finally be the thing to fill the ever-sucking void; that'd definitely be the technical milestone that actually would compensate for a lack of actual gameplay or narrative innovation.\n\nBut the question that has long sat awkwardly alongside the physics engine like an excruciatingly poorly-matched blind date is this: \"Could we one day construct an entire game world from physics objects, so the player can break everything apart to their heart's content, from the buildings to the bidets?\" And the recently off-Early Access Teardown finally gives us our answer: \"Yes! (Asterisk, asterisk, asterisk, asterisk.)\" Yes, as long as you don't mind the levels not being very big and looking like they were constructed from Duplo by the kind of person who'd make for a particularly excruciating blind date, and as long as you can tolerate the voxel physics not accounting for tensile strength, so a building still won't collapse if it's still connected to the ground by an inch-thick piece of balsa wood window frame or the neck of a baby bird.\n\nBut besides all that, it can be done, so the next awkward question that sits on top of the initial one like a baby toad on the corpse of its mum is, \"What do you do with that once you have it?\" From a gameplay perspective, I mean. There have been games in the past that have attempted something like this in service of combat and invited players to shoot through blockades, create their own cover, collapse the terrain onto the enemies, etc., and what we took away from these attempts was that, ultimately, no, quote, \"creative combat solution\" has ever been as efficient as just pointing the gun at the thing and holding down \"Fire\" until the thing dies. \"Alright, then; what if you just made a game about demolishing buildings?\" That seems to have been the initial concept of Teardown, which I cunningly deduced from the fact that it's called \"Teardown\", and the very first level requires us to demolish a building. But while there's certainly catharsis in destruction, it's as fleeting as a hastily-reached orgasm, especially in the moment after it passes, when you have to think about who's going to clean up the mess.\n\nAnd Teardown's physics were frequently giving me the destruction blue-balls, 'cos of the aforementioned baby bird neck issue, and even when I did successfully separate a building from the ground, half the time, it wouldn't fall over, but just drop three inches and stay there like the upper portion of a wall of Tetris blocks. But to Teardown's credit, it swiftly realizes that this is overthinking the issue; if you created a world where anything goes, the thing to do is simply give us a relatively simple task, and then reward us for finding abstract, lateral, or maximally efficient ways of achieving it. You know, like how Scribblenauts would give us an egg and a stove and tell us to make an omelette, and then we'd achieve that by dropping a speedboat onto the kitchen counter from the top of Cthulhu's head.\n\nSo the bulk of Teardown's missions are heists, and this is where the game came into its own for me; there'll be a range of objectives scattered across the map - items to steal or computers to touch or heretic babies to baptize - and as soon as you do the first one, an alarm sounds, and you've got one minute to sprint around, dunking all the remaining babies or whatever, and leg it back to the car. So here, the game becomes about strategically planning the optimal route and lateral thinking; should we sledgehammer our way through a fence, extend a plank from a shed roof to a window, blowtorch off the grill, and blow a hole in one of the interior walls to access the objective, or is it quicker to do something tragically quaint, like use the door?\n\nI got weirdly into this, using the provided spray-paints to mark my route and drilling the intended sequence of actions into myself over and over; it gave me the same kind of weird satisfaction I get from drawing up a work schedule for myself in Microsoft Excel, neatly arranging and color-coordinating all the boxes, and then looking at it and going, \"Boy, this would hypothetically be an efficient use of my time!\" before slumping down in front of a pile of empty Funyun bags and binge-watching Leisure Suit Larry speedruns.\n\nNew, different kinds of heists with different rules keep things from getting samey; there's one where you have to get a bunch of heavy safes out of a building without letting them get rained on, so I dragged them to an elevated room, parked a truck underneath it, and smashed a hole in the floor, and I was so pathetically proud of myself, I spent ten seconds of my funny internet video bragging about it. But I'd say the game suffers as it goes along and piles on more and more tools and weapons for you to use; very amusing for sandbox mode, I'm sure, but it means we no longer have to plan around preserving our limited shotgun blasts for the few, select, and most deserved walls on the route. Upgrade your shotgun once, and it gives you twice as many shells; you might as well just tunnel from one objective to the next in perfectly straight lines.\n\nAnd then it starts introducing missions that are barely about fun heist planning at all; one of them's just a fucking car race. Where's the lateral thinking in that? I suppose you could cut across rougher terrain, but all the drivable vehicles are held together with Pritt Stick and dubious pinky promises, so all the tires get sheared off if you drive too fast over a discarded crisp. And then there are missions where you have to deal with enemies with guns - in a video game, no less; what's the world coming to? - and suddenly, the closest thing to lateral thinking on offer is the route by which a bullet gets from one side of your brain to the other.\n\nSo I guess, at the end of the day, Teardown is pretty much what it looks like: a physics experiment first and a game second. It casts a broad net of gameplay challenge; some of it hits, and some of it misses, and the destruction wasn't quite as inherently cathartic as I'd hoped, possibly because it looks like Lego, and taking apart Lego structures is only amusing up to the point you finally break your child's resolve.\n\nAlthough, I should mention the fire; the fire physics in this game are actually fucking amazing. As an experiment, I briefly touched my blowtorch to a bedspread in a wooden building to simulate a carelessly-dropped cigarette, and watching the whole place go up was slightly worryingly hypnotic; I finally understand what that weird kid in high school was talking about in the weeks that preceded the incident. There's something absorbing about seeing a peaceful and orderly construction being slowly and inexorably destroyed by an ever-spreading, all-consuming chaos; I should take your mum to the buffet restaurant more often.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim.\n\nGame: S13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim\n\nReviewed: 2022-4-27\n\nSpoke a bit too soon last week, when I said I was going to stop listening to weebs; obviously, if I was, say, sitting next to a weeb on a long plane flight and happened to let it slip that I used to watch Pokémon as a kid, then I'd have no choice but to listen to a weeb, continuously, for the next four or five hours. And it's because I listened to some weebs this week that I had a go on 13 Sentinels: Anus Rim-- I mean, Aegis Rim - oh god, I swear you people are trying to make this easy for me now - an anime visual novel crossed with tactical combat game that's a few years old, but only just got ported to the Switch, which is probably the best place for it, 'cos it makes it much easier to hastily hide under the bed covers when you hear your mum coming in.\n\nBut to my own surprise, I got kind of into it, and this wasn't like it was with Persona, where it hooked me with an intriguing original premise before it gradually devolved into the standard \"teenagers use the power of friendship to kill God\" plot. 13 Sentinels' plot is so blisteringly standard as anime goes, it sounds like a joke; it centers around a bunch of high school students who have to pilot giant robots, and the method they use to summon their giant robots is to hike up their miniskirts and flash their juicy thighs like desperate hitchhikers. Like I said, it sounds like a joke; I haven't even mentioned that there's a talking cat in it, or the part where the teenagers can only pilot their giant robots by stripping completely naked and rubbing themselves on the equipment. Why's that, game? \"Oh, because clothing might interrupt the cyber-neural control interface or something.\" So why are some of the characters still wearing spectacles and hair ornaments? \"Oh, who cares?! Come and look at this anime teenage girl take all her clothes off, straddle a robot vaulting horse, and arch her back like a cat being stepped on!\"\n\nSo what did I like about this game? \"Oh, don't worry, Yahtzee; you've made that perfectly clear.\" Shut up, you! Trust me, this isn't my sort of porn, and even if it was, there are plenty of places I could go to get it that wouldn't be so infuriatingly coy with the camera angles. My interest was fueled on three fronts: first, the high school visual novel part existing alongside giant robot battles triggered the same thing Persona did, my enjoyment of normal life juxtaposed against the bizarre as a theme; second, this is one of the more unique ways I've ever seen a video game story being brought across; third, the story in question is completely fucking barmy.\n\nI mean, we start with the nice, straightforward opening premise of thirteen high school kids who have to pilot giant robots to fight an alien invasion, and within a few hours, it's turned out some of them are time travelers from the future, and some of them are time travelers from the past, and some of them are secretly robots, and one of them's secretly a man. That's not even getting into the talking cat! Also, you're shown all of the events of the plot essentially in random order, which brings me back to the unique way the story is brought across.\n\nHow it works is, first, you go through some quick prologue chapters and introductory battles that introduce us to all thirteen main characters and tutorializes the basics of the combat, and then, once that's over with, the game essentially does a great big vomit in your face. \"BLEH! Here's all the character plotlines! BLEH! Here's all the combat missions! BLEH! Here's the archive library that serves as the corkboard and ball of red string you're going to need to figure out this load of old bollocks; away you go!\" What, so it's on me to decide what order to do everything in? I can't handle that responsibility; I went to an improvised jazz club once, and woke up in an alleyway with the neck of a double bass stuck up my arse.\n\nBut I randomly picked a character, and the next chapter of their story proceeded to heap another dollop of confused testicles onto my already fully-loaded plate. The story chapters consist of a fairly typical visual novel experience: wandering around a paper puppet theater, clicking on stuff until either the dialogue starts repeating itself or we trigger the next plot flag. And generally, that flag can be relied upon to make something completely barmy happen, which is part of what kept me interested, because somehow, it was always something new and barmier. \"Oh, I suppose we'd better deliver these papers to the staff room; tumpty-tum. Oh no! I'm about to be squashed by a giant robot containing my future self with unfeasibly large breasts! (Cliffhanger fade to black.)\" But then, if we take on that character again, we're back in the staff room, and they're thinking, \"Boy, it sure was hard getting away from my big-titty adult self! Anyway, about those papers.\" And now we have to find the other plot flag that can also be triggered in this room. \"Oh, turns out, I can go to the vending machines now, where an assassin from another dimension holds me hostage with a phaser gun; perhaps this is my opportunity to confess my undying love for him.\"\n\nIn time, I found there is sort of a linear order to things; some chapters don't unlock 'til you do certain other chapters, or complete the combat missions up to a certain point, or stick a banana in your ear and drop-kick a lesbian. And just for fun, I decided to see how far I could get in the story before I had no choice but to do a combat mission, and I meant \"just for fun\" quite literally, because the combat missions are absolutely no fun.\n\nThey consist of staring at a radar screen where some glowing dots represent our squad of miniskirt-wearing giant robots, and then some more glowing dots appear, representing the baddies; we tell whoever's nearest to fire some ballistic glowing dots, and then the evil glowing dots disappear. \"Phwoar, that sure was an epic apocalyptic conflict that we just implied happened! Anyway, fuck off back to the mission prep screen and spend ten dull minutes choosing your upgrades.\" Which is always a struggle, because I can only decide what to upgrade by knowing what my shortcomings are, and I don't seem to have any; baddies show up, I react, the baddies go away. I was five-star S-ranking every mission on my first go with no effort; any amount of upgrading feels like mounting a nuclear reactor turbine to my bike to help me turn the handlebars. And this was on Medium difficulty! Christ knows what Easy is like; I imagine you could accidentally five-star S-rank Easy Mode by knocking the controller on the floor while the system's turned off.\n\nBut because I put off the combat missions for as long as I could, I found myself unable to continue the plot until I cleared about twelve of the fuckers in turn. It's a wrecking ball of tedium: you can shove it away as hard as you like, but it's going to swing back and deck you sooner or later. Christ knows I made an effort; \"Just a few more of these missions that are about as exciting as working a shift on a supermarket checkout that, for some reason, has five marginally different barcode scanners\", I told myself, \"and we can get back to very nearly looking up teenage girls' skirts!\"\n\nBut I just couldn't do it; eight missions in, I officially stopped caring about the future lady's unfeasibly large breasts and gave up to do something else. See, 13 Sentinels should've realized that the war in the future isn't the interesting part of Terminator 2; the interesting part is when the T-800 finally learns what it is to cry, and then goes fuzzy for a few seconds and turns into a shredded wheat advert from the 90's, although that might just have been the version I taped.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Weird West.\n\nGame: Weird West\n\nReviewed: 2022-4-20\n\nWell, it's Week Two of Catching Up on New Trending Indie Titles While AAA's Not Kicking Off Season, or \"C.U.N.T.I.T.W.A.N.K.\" for short. Tried a few things this week; had a go on that Rune Factory 5, 'cos some people said I might like it if I like Stardew Valley-style games, and from that, concluded that unless I find myself in urgent need of a T-shirt that'll provoke awkward conversations at family events, I should probably stop paying attention to weebs.\n\nThen I tried that new Lego Star Wars 'cos I heard it was an all-new open-world take on the Lego Star Wars thing, got about ten minutes into the plot of A New Hope, and then became overcome with depression. I mean, how many fucking times have I gone through these events in one film, game, or Robot Chicken parody after another? I don't even like Star Wars much. Feels like going to a nativity play at this point; nobody actually wants to go to nativity plays, unless their own kid's in it or there's decent odds of someone pissing themselves and crying in an amusing manner, and last I checked, I wasn't Alec Guinness' dad, and Lego Star Wars isn't Metal Gear Solid.\n\nSo in the end, it was Weird West that caught my eye, an indie Fallout-esque isometric action RPG that came out around the time Ghostwire and Tiny Tina were hogging the limelight, with a jolly interesting setting: it's a Western, but in an alternative world where the Wild West was basically the way Lovecraft thought it was like while he was living on the East Coast and refusing to leave his house in case the Irish immigrant family next-door implanted him with chest-bursting parasites. So as well as cowboys and Indians and outlaws and bounty hunters, there are several factions of bizarre fantasy races, like witches, werewolves, zombies, sirens, and Chinese people. It drew me in, because with the mashup of Lovecraft and Western, I can enjoy both a bit of gribbly horror fun and getting to hear my actions being narrated by a very throaty-voiced man with a Southern drawl every now and again, and feel like I'm in The Dukes of Hazzard.\n\nAnyway, our adventure begins with us taking the role of a bounty hunter who tried to escape from their violent past by setting up home in the middle of ground zero for a major inter-factional occult conflict. Yeah, that was going to work! Oh, you built a farm; real fucking original! Look around, asshole! Everyone's building farms; why couldn't you have retired to run a bowling alley or a middling-capacity convention space? Anyway, some baddies come and kidnap your husband, so you have to go back to your bounty hunter ways to get him back, because of course you do, you fucking hack.\n\nNow, one thing that did strike me as odd for an immersive choices-matter RPG was the complete lack of character customization; I mean, how am I supposed to play the way I want to play if my protagonist isn't the closest possible facsimile of Mr. Bean? But then my bounty hunter rescued her husband a suspiciously short way into the game, and we switch to a completely different protagonist somewhere else in the world, experiencing a completely different plot. In all, there are five story campaigns played in linear order, so I think I get what happened: they couldn't get the character customization to work, so they figured if they just gave you five random protagonists, at least one of them will be marginally more Mr. Bean-like than the others. Oh, you know I'm just being facetious... at least, I hope you do; these last fifteen years would seem like a bit of a rollercoaster otherwise.\n\nYou play as five different protagonists as part of an overarching plot concerning a mysterious scheme by ineffable cosmic forces and the random individuals caught up in their machinations, which is all very well, but I feel like something fundamental is lost in a role-playing game if we're not continually building up the same character; how could the game reward us if we're going to lose it all in a few hours when we get to the chapter where we play as a pig with the face of a boy? Yeah, you can hook up with the previous version of yourself and add them to your posse for the sole purpose of harvesting all the primo shit you left in their inventory, in a manner that'd probably make a good, hard-hitting metaphor for something, but there's only, like, four levels of equipment quality, so once you have a decent set of guns, you're about done with character development.\n\nNone of the unlockable perks feel like game-changers. Ooh, \"10% crouch-walking speed increase\"? That'll help the next time I forget to leave the toilet roll within arm's reach of the toilet. And I basically never used the unlockable special moves, 'cos I was using up all my ability power on the Max Payne slow-mo bullet dive that you get for free, and anything that isn't moved by a Max Payne slow-mo bullet dive probably won't be troubled by - checks notes - a thing that makes your next rifle shot silent, but not any of the other ones.\n\nCombat doesn't benefit from that kind of exactitude. It's a pretty standard immersive RPG affair; that is, you stealth-throttle as many of the patrolling guards as you can, so you don't get overwhelmed when the inevitable Cockup Cascade occurs and you have to start blasting, probably because you accidentally phased through a guy you were trying to stealth-throttle, and he found the back of your head very alarming. This is a not-unbuggy game; occasionally, a guard's pathfinding fucks up, and he'll respond by trying to tunnel his way into the floor with his spurs. And then there was the time I moseyed into town for a side-quest, but my contact for the side-quest had turned into a chair. I tried sitting in the chair opposite, but then the chair tried to start a game of poker with me; probably not the kind of weirdness the game was aiming for.\n\nI assume this was a glitch in the many complex world systems, but with the lack of meaningful rewards, I didn't see much point in engaging with those systems. You can burgle houses at night by using a rope on the chimney, but is the monetary gain worth the risk of bringing down the lawmen? No, it isn't! I already bought a horse, so now I only need money for when I'm bored and feel the urge to draw a little mustache and glasses on a picture of a famous president. The horse is important, 'cos it means travel time won't rival that of a budget airline during an escalated terror threat assessment of the mid-2000's, and a couple of bounty missions would usually be enough to afford it, unless you bring a bounty back to town, only to be told that the town hasn't elected a sheriff yet, so you'll have to wait. WHAT?! Fucking systems! Who even put up the bounty poster if there's no sheriff? A vigilante graffiti artist?\n\nStill, if I've assembled this many nitpicks, I must've been pretty engaged with the game. Didn't see much point in doing anything but follow the storyline, but it's an interesting story, dusted with the powdered sugar of a fun setting, and with a squirt of cream from the aerosol can of decent action. The ending's a bit of a flop; all the intrigue hinting at the grand mystery behind the five campaigns is paid off by having us fill out a questionnaire, and what five-second ending we get depends on our answers to that, rather than any of the preceding events. But I'd say this is one of those games that does better in the vertical slice test; in the individual moments, rather than the big picture assessment. You know, by the same principle where you focus on your date's lovely eyes so you don't see the faint traces of a mustache on the mouth of her dead conjoined twin.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Tunic.\n\nGame: Tunic\n\nReviewed: 2022-4-13\n\nWell, I'm prepared to tentatively say that AAA releases are drying up for a bit. Is that right, AAA industry? Are you done spewing? Would you like a glass of water and a lie-down? Oh shit, here comes another heave. Eugh! You got Kirby and the Forgotten Land all over the rug; it's going to stink like Pepto-Bismol in here now! Yeah, I played Kirby and the Forgotten Land. I have kids now; I needed to make sure it didn't have any murders or blasphemy against Jesus. But some people asked me to review it, and honestly, the prospect of doing so for my knob gag-infused video series fills me with depression. I mean, what do you want me to say, besides knob gags? It's a fucking Kirby game!", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Yeah, I could complain about how it takes itself slightly too seriously for a game where you play a stylized hemorrhoid that could've been designed in five minutes with a pink highlighter and a saucer to draw around, but that's like going to Johnny Pillows-for-Hands' massage parlor and complaining that I just got batted with pillows for an hour.\n\n\"But it's the first ever fully 3D Kirby game, Yahtz!\" Oh, fuck off! Look, I'm wearing a Sooty puppet; it's the first ever real-time Sooty performance in this room. Who cares?! That doesn't lend it meaning! Oh my goodness, Sooty's hitting you with a tree branch! It's your first ever hand puppet foliage-based bodily assault; mark the fucking calendar! So no, I'm not doing Kirby today; if only there was something that combined the nostalgic vibes of a first-party Nintendo game with an original IP and being generally meatier than a petrol station sausage roll. Well, happily, there is; it's called Tunic, it came out in March, and I finally finished it, now all those AAA bird-watching simulators are done selfishly hogging my afternoons.\n\nBut indie games don't get a free ride from me just for not being AAA; a kick in the kneecap doesn't not hurt just because it's not a rake to the goolies. And indie has the same issue as AAA in that there's two or three genres of game made that are massively over-represented and get all the coverage: roguelikes, retro-style hack and slashers with Souls-like elements, or roguelike retro-style hack and slashers with etc. ; Tunic, for the record, being of the second lot. You play an adorable little fox-boy with a sword who has to rescue his adorable isometric world by fixing all the machinery in all the ruined, yet surprisingly functional ancient temples, and kill a lot of blob monsters and skeletons like a combination pest controller/ancient magical bullshit support technician.\n\nSo far, pretty standard; it's even got that smoothly-textured visual style things like Death's Door and the Link's Awakening remake have that makes everything look like cat toys strewn across the top of a wedding cake, complete with a tilt-shift focus to complete the effect of looking like we've just marched fully-formed out of a Happy Meal box. But while Tunic isn't doing a lot new at first glance, it does a lot of things right; I know because, a few hours in, it gave me that now sadly rare little jolt of realization, where I go, \"I'm kind of into this!\"\n\nThere's another dimension underlying Tunic's simple surface; part of it's that one of the central mechanics is collecting all the pages for what looks very convincingly like a retro-style manual for the game we're currently playing, printed largely in an incomprehensible made-up language. It puts a new light on the usual retro game nostalgia, recreating the feeling of coming home with a new game you got at the car boot sale, only to find it's the original Japanese version, but you were determined to make the best of it, 'cos you'd already blown all the money you got from cleaning hardened toothpaste stains off of Mrs. Boothroyd's cat, so you did your best to figure things out from the imagery and the manual alone, and doing so lent the game an additional layer of arcane mystery, that would've been lost if you'd been able to read the thing that says that Billy the Blob Monster is very cross at you for no reason, and you'd better watch out for when his big brother shows up.\n\nThat's the 100% universal childhood experience that Tunic evokes; it pulls off the air of a deeper mystery, one that's fully entwined with the game mechanics, as certain things like upgrading your character and activating statues require a slightly esoteric process that has to be deciphered from the pages of the manual. And the isometric perspective frequently and deliberately conceals paths within the level geometry; the manual does contain maps, some more abstract than others, but it's not always obvious which one you're currently on, so figuring out basic things like where you are and where you're going requires just that little bit of extra effort to make it interesting, and it drew me in a lot better than just making beelines for the objective markers like a toddler who's just noticed an uncovered electrical socket.\n\nIt's a nice feeling: \"Hey, look at me! I found a hidden chest behind a wall, because I figured out what a symbol meant on a map! Give me a frozen beard and several doomed mates, and I'm basically Robert Falcon Scott!\" But importantly, the way forward is never so obscure as to leave you stuck for too long, which reflects good design and pacing; no, it's the major boss fights that'll get you stuck, if anything. Ho yes, welcome back to Earth, Captain Scott! Let's see how those map-reading skills help you against this giant possessed nest of tables.\n\nCombat's got that Zelda feel where your basic attack looks like your character just holds out the sword and then very aggressively spins like a Mickey Mouse watch going haywire, but if you take the approach of standing there, mashing \"Attack\" like the business end of an automated kitchen appliance, then you'll swiftly learn a harsh lesson in proper food preparation. That, plus the sense of unease one gets from the way the world seems to be falling apart at the seams as we get nearer the end, fuels the realization, \"Hey, this isn't a Zelda-like at all! It's a Souls-like!\" Our green-suited Beanie Baby protagonist is barreling towards one of those depressing Souls-like endings where we're left alone to hold off the darkness at the edge of the world for eternity or something, rather than the grateful rescued princess and implied off-screen royal hand shandy.\n\nSo if I were to get a whine going, the individual grapes I'd use would be the slightly off-putting difficulty spike the boss fights represent, as I'm forced to battle a giant crab robot essentially by getting within \"workplace sexual harassment charges\" range of his dangling metallic testicles. I wonder if some of these battles weren't designed for a protagonist with a longer weapon, one that perhaps couldn't do an equally efficient job by belly-dancing fast enough to thwack the enemy with their nipple piercings. I'm also not a huge fan of the inventory menu, and the way it doesn't pause the game; there really is no excuse for that in an offline experience. I've got all these funky consumables that I can't bloody use, 'cos there's only three equip slots, and if I go into the menu to switch one of them in, I'm going to get pounded like a recurring pop-up ad's \"Cancel\" button, and then get confused and flustered and reassign all my equipment trying to find the \"Menu Close\" button, and end up slinging individual lemon curd tartlets at the boss instead of bombs.\n\nBut those are petty nits to pick, and at the end of the day, I'd definitely recommend a look at Tunic. Probably the best game since Sacred Armour of Antiriad to be named after the complete text of the main character's laundry list.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin.\n\nGame: Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin\n\nReviewed: 2022-4-6\n\nI've mentioned before, I like to go into a game knowing very little about it. That was easy this week, 'cos I can still barely remember the fucking title of Stranger of Paradise; even now, I'm going to have to look that up to double-check it wasn't \"Stranger in Paradise\" or \"Stranger to Paradise\", lest I earn the wrath of the Preposition Police. But anyway, the review code came down, and I said, \"Ooh, what's this game?\" And then two hours later, I said it again with a different inflection. \"Eugh, what is this game?\" The sort of tone of voice a doctor would use if they were looking at your endoscopy video and saw something with rudimentary legs and bat wings.\n\nThe second half of the title might fill in some blanks: \"Final Fantasy Origin\", the implication being that this game depicts the starting point for everything that the Final Fantasy series has done and been over the years. And you know something, viewer? If that is the case, then it would fucking explain a lot. In defiance of that, however, it's not a turn-based RPG, or even one of those hybrid systems I always hate 'cos they're like trying to kick a giant scorpion to death while programming the microwave, but a hack and slash dungeon crawler that's a little bit Souls-like. Ooh, you were late for this bandwagon, Final Fantasy! You're going to have to sit at the back with the tambourine players. It's called \"Final Fantasy Origin\" because it's a retelling of Final Fantasy I... uh, ostensibly. I mean, a lot of things happen that are reminiscent of stuff from that game, but they're like the glimpses of distant land you see while adrift in an ocean of sick.\n\nThe plot concerns an extremely angry man named Jack, who is on a quest to defeat Chaos, although whether he means the entire concept of chaos or a specific person or monster by that name, even he seems to be unclear on, none of which lessens the single-minded fervor with which he pursues his goal, angrily asking every boss monster he meets if they're Chaos and cutting every conversation with friendly NPCs short if they don't speedily provide Chaos' last known residential address. Not that Jack is incapable of relationships, because he comes with two sidekicks named Ash and Jed, who he met on the bus or something, when they all turned out to be carrying glowing rocks. I guess I assumed the four Light Warriors in Final Fantasy I came together over slightly more epic circumstances than meeting up through Glowing Rock Tinder.\n\nAnyway, in the prologue of Final Fantasy I, the four Light Warriors travel to a nearby castle to rescue the kidnapped Princess Sarah from the corrupted knight, Garland. And Stranger On Top of Paradise seems to be doing pretty much the same thing, until you defeat Garland at the end of the first dungeon, at which point, Garland transforms into a girl wearing nothing but a basketball jersey, who explains that she was also on a quest to defeat Chaos, but decided Chaos didn't exist, and so prayed to Chaos to become Chaos and get defeated, but now she's been defeated, so she's failed, somehow. And that, specifically, was the first moment that made me wonder what the fuck this game was dribbling on about; by no means the last. She joins the party, and it turns out, her name's Neon. \"Aha! \", I said. \"Jack, Ash, Jed, and Neon. Is this a clever riff on how the original game would only allow you to enter names a maximum of four letters long?\" \"Possibly! Anyway, here's your fifth party member, Sophia.\" \"Well, fuck you, game!\"\n\n\"Incomprehensible\" is a pretty strong word; there's a lot about the story you're just not told from the outset, so perhaps more context would help. But it does feel kind of like every character spends every dialogue scene standing around, spouting meaningless garbage at each other. And this game certainly likes dialogue scenes; it forgot the all-important rule of \"show, don't talk complete bollocks\". The four Light Warriors gather in the throne room of a king who looks like he doesn't so much get dressed as upholstered, and he tasks them to purify the four Elemental Crystals. So they do that, and then come back to the throne room, where the same king, who hasn't moved, says, \"What have you done?! The apocalypse is happening, just offscreen! If you don't believe me, ask this mob of angry townsfolk consisting of ten copy-pastes of the same dude!\"\n\nWould I be right in assuming that Stranger in the Vicinity of Paradise got cut down a bit during development? I assume it was going to have a full-on overworld with towns you can explore, full of NPCs that all dribble out one utterly banal sentence when you press on their heads, and all that got cut, because the final game is a linear sequence of combat dungeons and cutscenes that you pick from a fucking menu, that they drew a map on so you can pretend it's an overworld. And I guess they'd already written the NPC dialogue, because rather than let it go to waste, they stuck a sub-menu at the bottom of the map screen, where you can click a name on a list to get subjected to one of the copy-pasted townsfolk making an insipid observation on the current state of the plot; very useful feature, if you happen to have breast cancer, and will only survive by boring your own tits off.\n\nThe budget cuts also hit the combat dungeons to an extent; because so much of them consist of copy-pasted identical corridors, I was constantly getting turned around and confused. If you want to know where all the money did go, I'd bet on the weapons and armor department; you are constantly being showered with new equipment, every piece of which is lovingly designed and attached to your character model even in cutscenes, ensuring that the Light Warriors constantly look like they're going to a costume party as the donation bin in front of a second-hand kitchenware shop. I wonder if the people doing the face animation for cutscenes knew that the cast would be wearing full face-masks most of the time; I further wonder if the armor department's coffee machine ever didn't contain piss.\n\nOh, the combat? Yeah, whatever; it's fine. Light attack, heavy attack, dodge, block, other, better kind of block that fuels your special attacks. There's a very Final Fantasy-esque job system that creates the usual paradox: you pick your favorite job, max out its level to make it as effective as possible, then you don't want to fucking use it anymore, because all the shittier jobs need leveling up as well. The combat clicked a little better after I unlocked a few Tier 3 jobs and made the conscious decision to stop giving a shit; I mean, all the mage jobs are awful, 'cos using the spell-casting interface in the heat of battle is like parallel parking a hippo with a dodgy gearbox.\n\nYou also have two NPC sidekicks; the whole plot revolves around the world being saved by four Light Warriors, but they were probably hoping we wouldn't point that out. So you pick two out of your four NPC pals, and it really doesn't fucking matter which; you can't control them, and they're all equally effective at being meat piñatas for the enemies to hit instead of you. Having said that, they did have some useful advice in the boss fight with the undead dragon that kept poisoning me; they said, \"You'd better cure that poison!\" Except, there is no way to cure poison; I checked. No spells will do it, and the only consumables are the five health potions that get refilled at checkpoints, so unless there's a juice cleanse enema clinic on the other side of the arena that I never noticed, I don't know what they're on about; another thing that got cut, I assume.\n\nSo all in all, I wouldn't recommend Stranger Along the Lines of Paradise. Square Enix, who on Earth would buy something with so much of it so blatantly missing? Seriously, do you know? I'm trying to find a buyer for my old underpants.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Horizon Tiny Tina's Wonderlands.\n\nGame: Tiny Tina's Wonderlands\n\nReviewed: 2022-3-30\n\nHey, kids! Are you trying to write a comedy game, but are worried you don't have the chops? Well, worry no more: you don't. But you can fake it 'til you make it with the patented Borderlands method, a simple three-step process that will turn any dry, functional dialogue line into gut-busting hilarity. Step 1: Say the thing. Step 2: Keep talking like you're a socially inept partygoer who's just had his first line of coke. Step 3: Transition into some kind of embarrassed tangent to reflect a level of self-awareness otherwise largely absent from the work. Let's see it in action! \"Go through that door.\" becomes \"Go through that door, because there's probably treasure on the other side! And by \"treasure\", I mean \"more hideous violence against strangers\", which is treasure to me. My doctor says I should get out more. Now, was that funny or what?\" No, it wasn't, not in the least, but it does have a sort of comedy vibe about it, and maybe that's all you need; you know, it's comedy in the sense that Owen Wilson is an actor.\n\nObviously, I'm being facetious here. There's a lot more to Borderlands' specific brand of humor than just characters who talk too much; sometimes, they do it in a silly voice, as well, and some of them shout a lot. Little wonder, then, that the breakout character of the Borderlands series has been Tiny Tina, a character who both shouts a lot and puts on a silly voice, which apparently set her enough apart from all the neon-tinted oversharing quest-givers that she gets her own game now.\n\nI've directed a fair amount of bile at Borderlands, and the occasional bout of huffy, unimpressed silence when I hadn't hydrated properly that day, but that just meant that its spinoff, Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, had nowhere to go but up, especially right after playing Babylon's Fall, which could inhale all the bile in the world and still not stop sucking 'til it's spitting up your ankle bones. And after all that, I hated Tiny Tina's Wonderlands a lot less than I thought I would; I mean, obviously, I hated every single moment a character opened their fucking mouth to deliver another stream of useless, overwritten \"lol, random\" flavor text, but on the other hand, the game didn't seem to be trying to be cool on top of trying to be funny, and that just about lowered the cringe to a tolerable background level.\n\nDialogue aside, the overhanging premise isn't un-fun. The whole game is a visualization of Tiny Tina's D&D campaign, so its fundamentally cliched fantasy world is constantly riding the fourth wall like a self-analytical exercise bike and unfolds in accordance with its creator's shouty, silly-voiced whims. There's even a whole one gag that I laughed at; without spoilering, it was the method by which the protagonist crosses the ocean around the end of the second act, and I laughed because of the visuals, not because of anything anybody said. Fucking write that down, Gearbox!\n\nAnyway, the plot is, Tiny Tina plays D&D with the three individuals she hasn't quite finished alienating yet: stock Borderlands egotistical handsome person who talks too much, and stock Borderlands violence-liking robot who talks too much, and the protagonist, who is silent until they go through their character customization and chooses their voice pack, after which, they talk too much. We set out upon a quest to travel across the land and defeat the evil dragon lord, who, let's just say, couldn't be described as the taciturn sort. Still, the fact that the characters all talk too much, one could possibly appreciate as an overhanging meta-joke, as it undermines the general tone of the epic fantasy story, even if all the individual gags make me want to break wind into the mouths of the writers and not stop 'til their corpses function as dirigibles.\n\nAll in all - and take this for the extremely qualified statement that it is - Tiny Tina's Wonderlands is probably the Borderlands game I've most enjoyed playing, or least disliked. And it is a Borderlands game; you might be initially fooled when the first thing it tutorializes is attacking with a melee weapon, but then you notice the default control for that is an exotic, far-away key that your finger needs a sherpa and a week's provisions to get to. And then, shortly, the game hands you some kind of hand-crossbow thing that I guess still fits the theme, but then the facade finally drops, and it's back to the classic Borderlands experience: shoot enemies, fill your invisible wheelbarrow with all the shotguns that the corpses fart out, make sure you've equipped the shotgun with the highest numbers, then wheelbarrow the rest to the nearest pawn shop.\n\nThere are RPG elements and multiple player classes with different special attacks, but it's all just the rattly playing cards on the spokes of the ever-spinning wheel that is shooting dudes and analyzing shotgun numbers, a heady mixture of high-impact violence and data validation. Not that you're obliged to put much work into the shotgun analysis; you can just blindly equip whatever gives you the highest equipment score. But if you do that, every now and again, you get fucked by the random gun generation and get saddled with a sniper rifle that only shoots pieces of corrugated cardboard that leave the barrel at a 45-degree angle, which does theoretically have the highest damage potential, but only if it fires inside the enemy's rectum.\n\nWhere Teeny Wonder's Tittybar differs from Borderlands is that it uses a representative map screen rather than a great big connected overworld, but I welcome that. I've got huge overworlds blocking every sink drain and bodily orifice in my house; I appreciate having less of a commute. The map is dotted with little mini-dungeons and random encounters that teleport you to one of a small handful of copy-pasted environments for yet more gun battles, but let's face it: most Borderlands games are endless sequences of gun battles that might as well have been copy-pasted, so I appreciate the mask coming off there. The random encounters that appear if you walk through long grass feel especially unnecessary, but they can be cancelled by smacking them in the chops, as if to say, \"NO! Bad random encounter! \", so that's, like, doubly useless as a game mechanic. But I do wish more RPGs with random encounters had the option to just bitch-slap them away.\n\nOh shit! I've just had a terrible thought that someone might summarize this review as broadly positive; better nip that in the bud! It is my favorite Borderlands game, in the sense that the rinse out and spit is my favorite part of the dental appointment; I'd still rather be doing something else. After a while, when the game starts obliging you to do a minimum number of side-quests to be sufficiently leveled for the next plot mission, and most of the side-quests only entail grinding through yet another copy-pasted gun battle, but with a different silly-voiced person shouting over it, the soul-crushing slog of the inevitable grind only becomes more apparent.\n\nI leave it to personal taste whether the self-aware comedic tone ameliorates the dullness of the grind, or only worsens it, somehow, like a spree-killer who apologizes first. I felt I needed to clarify my position, because people have been telling me I've been going too easy on games lately; maybe, as I've aged, I've come to realize there are better things to waste your energy on than getting angry at things that never change, like cleaning out the shower drains, or... harvesting transplantable retinas from the eyeballs of unwanted shelter animals. (beat) Or knitting.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Horizon Ghostwire: Tokyo.\n\nGame: Babylon's Fall\n\nReviewed: 2022-3-23\n\nPeople often say to me, \"Yahtzee, you devilishly handsome sex god who certainly never recycles old gags he's pretty sure most people will have forgotten by now, are there any particular upcoming games you're looking forward to? \", to which I say, \"Bitch, I have to play a new game every week! They all blur together!\" It's like asking a drowning man if there's any particular lungfuls of oxygen he's looking forward to once he breaks surface. But to the extent that I look forward to anything, I was looking forward to Ghostwire: Tokyo, because it was the new IP from Shinji Mikami's studio. Who's Shinji Mikami, you ask? Oh, nobody much; just the guy who made Resident Evil, and Resident Evil 4, and God Hand, and Vanquish, and The Evil Within, and yet, for all that, doesn't seem to have attained the rockstar status of a Miyamoto or a Kojima.\n\nI mean, I don't even know what he looks like off the top of my head; maybe that's because he's less focused on self-promotion than on just being really bloody good at developing video games. So I just want to say that I appreciate you, Shinji Mikami, for all your years as a positive force for innovation in this ever-stagnating industry; you're one of the good ones. Now, what's this new game about? \"Well, it's an open-world stealth action game with collectibles and--\" Oh, for fuck's sake! I knew they'd gotten to you too, you pod person hack! \"Yahtzee, wait! I didn't say crafting! There's no crafting in it!\" Oh, well, strike up the band! The usual instrument of my torture has had its anal distension feature deactivated; halle-fucking-lujah!\n\nWell, this is unfair; Ghostwire: Tokyo does feel different to the current invasive crop of Jiminy Cockthroat. It feels older in its sensibilities, like a game that could've come out ten years ago. A specific one, actually; it reminds me of ZombiU - Remember that? - from the way it's a first-person survival horror with slightly claustrophobic world design and possibly having been backhandedly funded by the tourist board of a specific city, not that any contemporary Japanese game needs the excuse to spend its whole runtime pushing Japanese culture as much as it can, as I've observed before in reviews of Yakuza and Persona games. I always wonder how the Japanese audience feels about that, as they read the item descriptions.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"A yukata is a traditional form of kimono commonly worn during summer festivals in Japan.\" \"Yeah, we know, game! We all live here!\"\n\nAnyway, in Ghostwire: Tokyo, we play as Akito, a young man who gets caught in a car accident, then the ghost of a dead asshole tries to steal his body, then everyone in Tokyo gets raptured except for him in an apocalyptic supernatural event, and then the evil necromancer who did it kidnaps his comatose sister. Fucking hell! What do Japanese people use as good luck charms? Maneki-nekos? Thank you, item description menu. Apparently, Akito needed to buy about five hundred of the fuckers. Fortunately, it turns out the dead asshole trying to possess him is a dead asshole paranormal detective, and so, by combining his powers of magical exorcism with Akito's powers of being alive and physically there, the pair set off to fight the legions of evil spirits that now infest Tokyo, thwart the villain, and rescue Princess Peach.\n\nNow, one word that, in retrospect, doesn't really fit this survival horror game is \"horror\"; there's no gore, and it's not scary. Yes, there's some effectively creepy ghost design, like the umbrella-wielding salarymen who look like Slender Man's fussy dad, but it's hard to feel intimidated by them when you're routinely sneaking up and obliterating them with atomic wedgies. It's more of a supernatural detective/disaster thriller, with first-person shooter combat. Actually, thinking about it, there's not a great deal of survival in this survival horror, either; you attack by making magic finger-guns that shoot a variety of elemental projectiles, and the game throws enough magic ammo at you to fill a public ball pit with staggeringly poor health and safety compliance.\n\nThe scenery is infested with magic wibbly-wobbly ammo-dispensing furniture, and the monsters are all keeping emergency ammo refills in their emminently wedgie-able panties. And there's no shortage of healing items, either, which, here, take the form of popular Japanese snack foods, because of course they fucking do. Quite a bewilderingly large variety of them, as well, and I fear whatever benefit is gained from including every conceivable flavor of individually-wrapped triangular rice ball was lost on me, 'cos I'd just mash the \"Quick Heal\" button whenever I needed it, and Akito would scarf down the nearest food item to hand without so much as a glance at the packet; we could've been subsisting exclusively on dishwasher tablets for all I knew.\n\nThe combat itself has its problems. The combination of dark, murky environments with shaking sparkly, neon-colored snot off your fingers right next to your face makes it hard to follow the action at times, and your projectiles lack a sense of satisfying impact; water-based magic attacks, in particular, feel about as damaging as slinging a bucket of dishwater at an encroaching foe possibly could. But in the broader picture, Ghostface: Wartybum has a not-atypical open-world problem in that the core experience is not so much \"survival\" as \"janitorial\".\n\nOnce you've unlocked the whole map, if we're not doing critical path missions, we're just hopping from one copy-pasted icon to the next, hoovering up groups of enemies and random lost souls for experience and picking up pieces of collectible Japanese garbage in return for cash payouts that have next to no useful purpose, unless you really, really want to equip yourself with a cosmetic pair of traditional Japanese high-tops that no one's ever going to fucking see, because it's a first-person single-player game, numbnuts. If you are keen on filling out 100% completion checklists, and have weird hangups stemming from when the teacher gave you a gold star for having the tidiest desk in the whole class and it was the only time you've ever known self-esteem, then perhaps you'll find some appeal here; everyone else might find the gameplay kind of forgettable.\n\nBut there is something to be said for Ghostwire's atmosphere. There's a strong sense of place in its densely-detailed realizing of Tokyo's claustrophobic urban sprawl, and there's something appealingly haunting about exploring it in spooky, abandoned form; a familiar realism overlaid with a sprinkling of supernatural intrigue, littered with omnipresent piles of spontaneously vacated clothing, creating the implication that once you rescue everyone from the spirit world, there's going to be a lot of confused nudity in the streets of Tokyo, which might be an appealing enough image to keep you motivated. It is, in a word, immersive, until you realize you can just climb up to the rooftops and navigate everywhere by gliding from building to building like you're playing extreme the floor is lava, but that's entertaining on its own.\n\nSo in the end, I would describe Worstgore: Pinocchio as a decent enough six-hour action-adventure, with nice imagery if generic gameplay, and a big, flabby open world hanging off it that's questionably necessary, unless you're into virtual tourism. I mean, Google Street View's all well and good, but how else can one experience a real-world city after it's been abandoned but for shambling mobs of pale, hostile perversions of humanity, other than by being in Coventry city center at three in the morning?\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Horizon Babylon's Fall.\n\nGame: Babylon's Fall\n\nReviewed: 2022-3-16\n\nSo far, this quarter's been dropping out heavy hitters like a trapdoor in a domestic violence shelter, but we find ourselves in an in-betweeny sort of week, so let's look at something that might've fallen through the cracks, or indeed, something that fell out of a crack, and then proceeded to do a lot of crack. I tried out Babylon's Fall, Platinum's new live service hack and slash-a-thon on PS5; or had a crack at it, if you will.\n\nNot that it made it easy; first, it wouldn't even start without a PS Plus subscription, even though I only wanted to play single-player because, you know, humanity. It's like a highway bypass: I understand why it needs to exist, but I'd rather not have one in my house. Got past that, and Babylon's Fall still wouldn't unbutton its top until I also signed into a Square Enix account. What the fuck possible benefit do you imagine I'd extract from signing up for another fucking account, Square Enix, other than one more excuse to never check my email? Christ, this is like trying to get through airport security with an inflatable novelty suitcase nuke!\n\nBut eventually, I got through it all, and when I was on the other side of the metal detector, putting my shoes back on and admiring the new tag they'd punched through my ear, I cast a look around and thought to myself, \"Ooh! This looks like shit!\" As in, it literally resembles fecal matter, decked out mostly in glistening browns, except for a streak of vibrant blue from an accidentally-swallowed whiteboard marker. It looks like a PS3 game, all brown and flatly lit, with characters textured and animated like a papier-mâché diorama about kitchen utensils; it even has a classic case of cheaping out on the cutscenes by just panning over still images with increasingly agonizing slowness. I thought the download size was suspiciously small.\n\nBut I figured, \"Hey, have some faith, Yahtzee! This is PlatinumGames; they have Bayonetta and Nier: Automata, and that Anarchy Reigns thing they probably hope no one will ever bring up again! There's nothing wrong with eschewing the ridiculous graphical standards of today in favor of a deliberately retro look; they might be a few years too early for the PS3 nostalgia wave, when brown and bloom will come back into fashion, and we must resignedly headbutt the nearest wrought-iron fence spike, but someone's got to be the pioneer.\" So I gave it a chance, and swiftly determined that Babylon's Fall hasn't so much gotten ahead of time as gotten its head on a subway track.\n\nOnce you're through the nine levels of DRM Hell, the game opens with the protagonist getting conscripted into some kind of militia and told that their job is to work their way through all the levels of the Tower of Babylon in order to finally defeat the Blue Meanies and presumably in some way profit. The tutorial section walks us through the first, last, and only gameplay thread of Babylon's Fall: \"Go to the next room and murder whatever baddies show up.\" To achieve this, we have the ability to equip four different weapons at a time: one in the light attack hand, one in the heavy attack hand, and two ghost ones that hover awkwardly behind you like two Comic-Con attendees who've just noticed an attractive woman.\n\nSo with four \"Attack\" buttons and a jump and a dodge, we defeat each serving of generic baddies, and then, in the grand PlatinumGames tradition, get an award for our performance; and in the grand \"Yahtzee playing Platinum games\" tradition, I invariably got \"Stone\" every fucking time. But in my defense, PlatinumGames, you've thrown an awful lot at me in one go to get my head around, and also, it's difficult to time my dodges well when your visuals keep making my eyelids reflexively slam shut. Maybe I'm overly sensitive, but I always feel personally attacked by this \"performance award\" bullshit. Who are you to judge me, Babylon's Fall? Maybe I'll give you an award after every combat section! Hmmm... that was another five of the same dudes I've been fighting for the last hour, and the targeting system continues to be as reliable as a roller skate on the roof of a moving Volkswagen Beetle. I hereby award you the bit of shiny foil that was still stuck to my Creme Egg after I thought I'd unwrapped it and put it in my mouth.\n\nAnyway, after a tutorial boss fight against a tortured fallen knight - which kind of cemented the vibe I was getting of \"a typical PlatinumGames combat system being pushed through a filter of original PS3 Demon's Souls in all its unrefined, potato-y glory\"- the actual game starts, and here, we encounter the central challenge aspect of Babylon's Fall: figuring out where the actual game is. I suppose it must be buried under all these menus somewhere. What with this being unashamedly a live service game, your first port of call after every mission is the hub town area, full of NPC merchants and service providers with icons of unclear meaning over their heads, resembling belt buckles purchased at a renaissance fair, none of whom do anything so mundane as sell you new equipment for in-game money; no, it's all checking how far you are on the daily bonuses track and getting upsold armor packs, so you can theme yourself to your preferred brand of cast-iron cookware.\n\nAlso, this is the place where you take all the indistinct prizes you found in the last mission, shake off all the blood and cum, and figure out if you're supposed to swing them, shoot them, or wear them on your balls. Now, since the combat system involves having four distinct weapon slots, and each weapon has different attacks depending on where you equip it, this obviously creates a lot of variance, especially since you basically have to switch everything out for your newest shit after every mission to keep up with the difficulty curve. And that being the case, you'll want to try out your current weapon layout before you go on a mission with it; you'll want to, but you can't. You can't attack outside missions, so if you've, say, equipped one of those magic staffs where, after every use, your character has to stand there picking sultanas out of their teeth for three seconds before they can dodge the encroaching giant sword the size of a beached whale, then there's no way to know that until you're locked into a mission and fucking stuck with it, as I was in the first boss fight with... Go on, have a guess. \"A tortured fallen knight?\" Ayyy! Petty Officer Pattern Recognition's on the bridge!\n\nNow, I've known my share of damage sponges, but this motherfucker was a damage three-tier wedding cake with edible floral arrangement; hitting his health bar with a fully-charged hit from my multi-bow was like licking the end of a gigantic stick of rock with the word \"cunt\" written down the side. But he wasn't the least bit hard; I could easily dodge everything he threw out, so I just hopped around outside his attack range, firing arrows, picking at his health like it was the wall of a prison cell and I had twenty years to kill. Would probably have won after about an hour or so, but I got killed after 45 minutes because the target-lock system mysteriously stopped working, and the auto-targeter thought it more important that my arrows be aimed at the nearest box ottoman instead.\n\nBut I felt like I'd seen enough of Babylon's Fall; I was so bored and sick of it already, and both my middle fingers had reflexively extended so far, they started to mess with the ceiling fan. Fuck you, Babylon's Fall! I only reviewed you 'cos the alternative was Shadow Warrior 3, and that was too short to say much about. \"How short is it, Yahtz?\" Well, put it like this: it was—\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Horizon Forbidden West.\n\nGame: Horizon Forbidden West\n\nReviewed: 2022-3-9\n\nLet's face it, Sony: you and I haven't been seeing eye-to-eye lately. You refused to give us a Ratchet & Clank review code; I called you out on the video. You didn't send us a Horizon Forbidden West code before launch day; I came over and pissed through your cat flap. But I want you to know that I believe maintaining my journalistic integrity is more important than keeping up a petty, one-sided feud. I say that to disabuse any notion of bias being attached to the following statement: I hate Horizon Forbidden West, and I hate you.\n\nBit confusing, actually; Horizon Forbidden West doesn't feel that much different to the first one, and I don't remember getting a hate-boner for that. Truth be told, I don't remember very much about it at all. I went back and watched my review of it for a refresher, and my past self was actually vaguely positive; certainly no mention of the main character being a total fucking charisma vacuum who only ever talks in a breathy monotone, constantly... pausing like she's trying to... work out a... kidney stone, making her voice performance the aural equivalent of Chinese water torture. Maybe it's my ever-solidifying antipathy towards the standard Jiminy Cockthroat model for AAA open-world games. Maybe Elden Ring spoiled me. Maybe I'm just in a bad mood from the way a cat flap recently snapped shut on my bellend. I did extract some amusement from the way all the characters are dressed like an abandoned farmer's market in a high-graffiti neighborhood, and then, in conversation, just awkwardly stand around, sweating under ridiculous headdresses, fidgeting and mumbling like a bunch of teenagers chatting outside a cinema where none of them want to be the one to suggest they go home 'cos it's a school night.\n\nAnyway, back in the post-reboot mumblecore future of Horizon, Aloy, having spent the last game learning how to transcend her outcast status and learn to work with other people, promptly chucks all of that development in the bin so fast, it makes the lid spin around. When it transpires that all the shit she did in the last game to save the world didn't actually save it properly, and she has to journey to the titular \"forbidden west\" to save it for realsies, she is fucking chomping at the bit to get away from everyone she knows. Oh, but don't you see? It's too dangerous for them; she's the only one who can shoulder the burden of saving the world, and it's not like anyone else has an investment in helping her succeed in that goal! What a selfish fucking bint!\n\nAloy comes across like she holds everyone who doesn't have her old-world technology cheat sheet in total eye-rolling contempt; whenever quest-givers are telling her the problem, she's like a disgruntled computer science teacher's assistant watching an old person type. \"Ugh, get out of the way; I'll do it!\" It's the classic problem of an overly competent protagonist who's already had their character development, wedged into the middle of the story like a fucking unmoving tree trunk with half the charisma.\n\nBut here's the punchline that makes it twice as obnoxious: she's not actually competent! Or at least, she doesn't come across as such in gameplay. She swans about the cutscenes, going, \"Yeah, no worries; I'll just go overcome the current adversity in my unflinching ginger finery. Want me to pick you up some baby wipes while I'm out? \", and then she runs out into yet another fight with robot dinosaurs and gets screamingly batted back and forth between two giant metal thagomizers for five minutes, while having to constantly scarf down healing berries like a Sony QA tester with a bottle of caffeine pills. (At least, she does when I'm controlling her.)\n\nI was a bit underleveled, 'cos I was trying to rush through critical path for the review; I did try a few random side-quests, but all of them were variations on, \"Oh, please rescue my close friend/family member, who went alone to confront a robot/group of bandits in order to prove themselves, and didn't realize you need protagonist status to get away with shit like that!\" So, direct combat with robots was mostly me getting nine-tenths of my health blasted off by an unexpected tail-whip or missile barrage and having to frantically roly-poly into cover to suck down three açaí smoothies. But I can only assume that's how it's supposed to go, because all the combat areas are absolutely carpeted in berries; it's like the hemorrhoid ward synchronized swimming team out there.\n\nOh no, I'm out of berries! \"Don't worry; just press a button to refill your berry pouch from your stash.\" Well, what's the point of even having a fucking stash mechanic if we can just teleport stuff out of it whenever? Are we trying to smuggle shit through airport customs? Oh no, I'm out of berries for real! Not to worry; there's a small health potion in my consumable quick-select. Just have to scroll through to find it. Trap, trap, trap, stamina potion, trap, medium health po-- I haven't got any medium health potions! Why is the icon still cluttering up the fucking quick-selec- oh, I just got thagomizered again.\n\nSee, this is what's driving me nuts about Jiminy Cockthroat games: always bloated with game mechanics layering over each other and getting in the way, none of them with enough focus to provide a solid core to the experience. It's like trying to appreciate your spouse's naughty underwear while they're also wearing baggy pajamas, and a Sou'wester, and the back half of a pantomime horse. Go to the upgrade menu and the game proudly unfurls multiple distinct gameplay styles with separate upgrade trees: warrior, trapper, hunter, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich. But on closer inspection, half the upgrades feel kind of inconsequential - \"Add 30% damage to ranged combat while critically low on health, as long as it's before 9 P.M. and you're wearing a sombrero.\" - or just add more exotic combat moves I'm never going to remember that I have in a pinch.\n\nI was trying to focus on stealth, 'cos surprise attacks do ridiculous damage compared to whaling on dudes head-on; it's the difference between throwing knives at a condom full of guts and flicking gumballs at a breeze block. But mandatory combat kept coming up, so I looked at the warrior upgrade path, and the first thing was \"Gain the ability to hit an enemy to build up energy, then tap a button to infuse them with energy, and then shoot an arrow at them to do extra damage.\" Anything else I need to do for this process, game? Take down their names and addresses, perhaps? How about just \"More damage\", or a standard melee attack that doesn't look like we're trying to forcefully eject our own spine?\n\nSo, Horizon Forbidden West wasn't the best. The highest praise I could offer is that its world offers frequently quite spectacular visuals somewhere behind all the GUIs and objective markers, and omnipresent tutorial text that seems eternally worried I'll forget where the \"Quick Berry Refill\" button is. I note the visual spectacle gets brought up a lot in other people's positive reviews, and to those people, I would like to pose a small question: have you ever tried pressing on your eyelids? If some pretty shapes and colors really can sell the experience for you, then you might save a bit of money in future if you just sat on the couch, pressing on your eyelids. Also, you can add the experience of listening to Horizon's dialogue by doing it while pouring cold porridge down your ears.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Elden Ring.\n\nGame: Elden Ring\n\nReviewed: 2022-3-2\n\nI've had a lot of trouble with elden ring, but my doctor tells me it's perfectly natural for my age, and I should add more fiber to my diet. \"Very droll, Yahtz; now tell us if this fucking game's any good so I can decide if I'm taking this gun out of my mouth!\" Umm... well, yes; it's a FromSoftware Souls-y game, and therefore, good, and characteristically light on overt storytelling. But this time, I told myself I was going to really concentrate on parsing the dialogue and item descriptions and figure this shit out upfront. A little later, that vow kind of fell by the wayside, because chiefly what I remembered of the prior two hours was getting mashed into farmhouse chutney by a dude that looked like an owl pellet got rogered by a semi-truck.\n\nTurns out, Elden Ring's hard. \"Is it, Yahtz? Well, hold on while I run cold water over the blisters that searing insight gave me.\" Look, I've been getting run over by the Souls train for years; I'm a fucking vet! And I swear, ever since we all figured out the \"roll behind them when they attack and stab them in the bum\" cheat code, FromSoftware have been upping the bullshit difficulty with every new game. Seems like a lot of the early bosses fall back on what my schoolyard chums used to very inappropriately call \"spazzing the fuck out\" and wail on you too fast for you to react or keep your guard up, like everyone's taken the Manus, Father of the Abyss correspondence course and grafted on at least one extraneous limb.\n\nBut let's roll back a bit: Elden Ring is open-world Dark Souls. None of that Sekiro-brand piddling about with grappling hooks and stealth elements; this is mainline Dark Souls classic, meaning you're an immortal dude in a decaying medieval fantasy setting where all the dragons are dying of crotch rot, and you've got a sword and a shield that spends more time in front of your face than your prescription spectacles, and if your spine doesn't yet resemble a McDonald's logo, then you haven't dodge-rolled enough.\n\nWith the usual fussy bitch alteration of terminology, we collect Runes rather than Souls, Crimson Tears instead of Estus, and to upgrade our weapons, instead of Titanite Shards and Large Titanite Shards, we collect Smithing Stones and Smithing Stone (2)s. That's fucking weak, Elden Ring! What, is it the sequel to Smithing Stone (1)? This is a communication issue; the first time I picked up a Smithing Stone (2: This Time, It's Personal), I assumed I'd picked up two Smithing Stones. That was an embarrassing moment to the blacksmith's shop.\n\nIf you are a Dark Souls vet, the old instincts will require a little adjustment; it takes two button presses to switch to two-handed mode now. Ugh, how unintuitive! Fucking ruined forever, FromSoftware! They've had to rearrange the face buttons a bit to accommodate the \"Jump\" button. Ho yes; a linearly-structured environment might be able to get away with a \"Jump\" control that feels like playing lawn darts with a bag of damp cement, but in Open-World Land, you need a proper \"Jump\" button in case we get caught between a hitbox and a hard place. Sensible, but little did Elden Ring know it had sown the seeds of its downfall with that little addition.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Here's my beginner's gameplay tip: never heavy attack if you can jump heavy attack, 'cos it's all the damage with none of the windup time, and stuns anything with Poise below ten squillion.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "((ooc: Weave this into your narrative: \"Mimic the sound of a cycling refrigerator.\"))", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "If it's in range and not fast enough to hop out of the way, then it's getting cobblestones for breakfast. Not a universal strategy, but it gave me enough edge to counteract the Spazz-Out Brigade.\n\nAnd of course, the open world also brings with it horse-riding and mounted combat, another thing that's fairly easy to cheese; how can it not be when you can attack and then be two post codes away before the victim can so much as glimpse your license plate number? That's probably why your horse disappears as you enter one of the more traditionally Souls-like sprawling castles or dungeons, like a fussy dad is insisting we take our shoes off at the door. Fun though it might've been to ride my charger straight through a skeleton-haunted catacomb like a snow plow in a popcorn factory, riding around the open world feels like being let out into the playground for recess, until we eventually have to come back inside to get once more bent over the vaulting blocks for the P.E. class that never ends.\n\nI had my misgivings about Dark Souls: The Open World; felt like, if anything, the Souls-ies should've been above the general industry trend to gravitate everything to arsing about in a bush. My misgivings about the fucking crafting system, I was quite justified in mishaving; usually, when you find stuff in Souls-y games, it's a time for celebration. \"Ooh, new weapons! Ooh, upgrade stones! Ooh, a small porcelain cat with a mummified finger in its mouth! Don't know what the fuck this is, but maybe I'll just yeet it at a boss and see what happens.\" Not so much of that in Elden Ring when, half the time, it's just more fucking crafting materials to add to the six tons of garbage we're hauling around in our horse's invisible U-Haul trailer.\n\nBut generally, this isn't the laundry list of grindy busywork that Ubisoft calls a \"sandbox\" when it can get a word past the dicks in its mouth; this is a case of \"pick a direction and ride, and adventure will ensue\". See, when the game signposted the path to the first castle, and the bouncer at the door greeted me the way a starving chimp greets a satsuma, Elden Ring was trying to tell me something, I eventually realized; it was saying, \"Don't follow the signs! Go off-road; explore! You'll get stronger; you'll get experienced; you'll get pounded into wet sand by a giant crab with anger issues.\" So, I explored; I took what paths I could find until I hit a difficulty wall, saved the spot for later, and then tried somewhere else. It was like that thing you do with choose your own adventure books, where you keep your fingers marking eight previous pages in case you're fucking things up.\n\nElden Thing's open world actually feels like an elevation of the trademark Souls-y spectacular backdrops and drop-tacular backstabs, and there's a lot more to it than can be discussed in five minutes, or indeed, played in one week. Sadly, my time with it ended on a sour note; I'd just gotten to this one puzzle boss fight where you can't hurt them 'til you break their magic shield by finding the three random low-level minions powering it and smacking them 'round the head with a rolled-up newspaper, and it felt like a fucking \"do the thing three times\" boss from Super Mario, but whatever. Every FromSoftware game gets one weird shitty boss; it's in the company charter, I think. But then it turned out, oh, this was just the first phase, and the actual boss fight comes after. And every time that boss killed me - usually quickly, 'cos I was still trying to learn their patterns - I had to do that whole fucking first phase again, which wasn't fun or interestingly hard; it was just a slog! I'm here to serve up a sizzling footlong of meaty death to this moony cow, not run around her minions for ten minutes, handing out finger sandwiches!\n\nAnd then I ran out of time before I'd beaten it. So it's a shame my last memory of the game had to be two pillowy mouthfuls of buttock; maybe I'll try to get through the game in my one hour of daily spare time after the kids have gone to bed. So ask me again how I feel about it around the time California slides into the ocean, or... George R. R. Martin puts another book out.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Not For Broadcast.\n\nGame: Not For Broadcast\n\nReviewed: 2022-2-23\n\nFMV games have gone through something of a redemption, haven't they? I remember back in the 90s, when \"FMV\" stood for \"Fuzzy Mammaries and Violence\", and the gameplay of FMV games chiefly involved clicking on the bloodstained tits to look at some different bloodstained tits; also, the games either came on enough CD-ROMs to construct a functional soapbox derby racer, or the videos were so massively compressed, you'd have better luck masturbating to an image of a fully-dressed softcore porn actress holding up an embroidered picture of a fruit bowl.\n\nBut in more recent years, FMV games, while still having file sizes that sit atop your solid state drive like an overweight Saint Bernard on an unprepared lap, have gained a certain amount of prestige, thanks to games like Her Story and... Her Sto-- oh, I already mentioned that one. Umm... maybe I should've thought about this before I started talking. In any case, here's a second one for the list: Not For Broadcast, just out of Early Access, an FMV title that gamifies the experience of being a live TV news broadcaster creating an edit on the fly, set in a satirical alternative version of contemporary Britain whose most bizarre and otherworldly quality is that people still seem to give a shit about TV news.\n\nGameplay takes place on a few layers; at the top is keeping the edit interesting enough to stop the audience switching over to the fucking bake off or whatever. Keep the camera on who's talking; cut to a noddy shot if they drone on about pies for too long; hit the \"Bleep\" button whenever someone swears, 'cos I guess every single audience member's maiden aunt is visiting, and they're all going to slam the \"Off\" button at the very first utterance of \"bugger\".\n\nSo that's the equivalent of the document-checking in Papers, Please: the moment-to-moment challenge of reflexes and attentiveness that \"Game Over\"s you if you fuck it up. On the next layer down, you also have to make choices; choices that matter, if you will. You have to decide if you're going to follow the instructions that come in from the increasingly totalitarian government to bleep out dissenting voices, or support the burgeoning resistance by airing their tapes and bleeping propaganda; during certain breaking news events, you have to decide if you're going to keep the camera on the dear leader looking heroically defiant, or on all the juicy shots of protestors being police-murdered.\n\nNow, I know what you're thinking: \"Oh boy, another Not Tonight/Watch Dogs: Legion-type plot about near-future dystopian Britain, that wants to get its 'I told you so! 's in early before the post-Brexit UK finishes shrivelling up and disappearing up the angrily flaring anus of modern history!\" Actually, while the plot kicks off with an upset election win by a radical populist party with an agenda that clearly isn't thinking in the long-term, headed in part by a blue-collar man-of-the-people-type spokesman whose off-hand is permanently groping for his next pint of brown ale, the politics swiftly get fairly broad; some of us might say too broad. Some of us might say the satire's so lacking in subtlety, it's blocking out the fucking sun. So we have a conservative politician talking about the importance of moral integrity as his personal gimp attempts to escape from a cupboard in the background, which is one of many gags that keep going on way too long after the actual point has been made.\n\nAnd as one must expect of a choices-matter game, there's a slightly obnoxious both-sides-ism at play that, with one breath, decries the government's unwarranted seizure of inherited wealth, and in the next, portrays rich people as braying twats complaining about having had to give up their eleventh pony. So the tone tends to wobble up and down like an erection in a unisex bathhouse, when the serious chin-stroking about government accountability switches over to facetious song-and-dance routines about how great it is to live in fascist autocracies. Honestly, though, despite all that, I was gripped; it might be unsubtle, but you can still get invested in something that's beating you over the head, because you probably don't want to get beaten over the head, and if you pay attention, you might be able to dodge the thing that's beating you over the head.\n\nThe humor does land somewhat often enough, but more importantly, I got invested in the characters; as the government becomes stricter and stricter, and the news is forced to cover less actual events and more cats sitting on celebrities' heads, I really felt for the presenters, as they either disintegrate or become dead behind the eyes. Honestly, the character I absolutely cared the least about was myself, for all the game's efforts. When you're not working in the control booth, there's these visual novel segments that detail what's happening in your home life and how you're personally affected by the changes you're facilitating, but I honestly couldn't give that much of a shit, probably because I and my family were purely hypothetical entities from the world of plain text, and the news readers have actual faces that make big sad eyes at me when the revolution is exploding outside, and they're only allowed to report on how a popular footballer helped an old lady down from a tree.\n\nNot For Broadcast's peers are games like Papers, Please and This War of Mine, and how those games work is by threading the moral aspect through the core gameplay challenge and making it hard to be a good person. You don't want to contribute to the enshittening of your society; you don't want to burgle old people or send blameless immigrants to the mysterious shed with the big chimney. But you've got your own life and main gameplay tasks to worry about, so let go of the fucking doorframe, Grandma; I've got to atomize two more of your family members before I can so much as break even today.\n\nAnd Not For Broadcast just doesn't pull that off; the choices you make don't actually affect your moment-to-moment experience much. You can select what ads to play, and that might boost the value of stock you own, but your financial situation doesn't seem to matter; it's not like you can spend the money on gameplay effects, like upgrading your knob-twiddling stats. Some of the gameplay challenges, like twiddling your knob to keep the sine-wave happy or editing to a rhythm during music videos, just feel like asinine busywork to give you something to do while the game makes its point.\n\nAs for whether our choices actually matter in this choices-matter game, I'd put it at around a 7.5 on the Matter-O-Meter; some of the plot hairs have a pretty explosive case of split ends, and there's a princely fourteen possible endings. Fourteen endings, Not For Broadcast? Wow, that's the sort of detail that could really drive replay value, isn't it? Welp, see you! ...What? You're interesting, but you're not \"fourteen rewatches\" interesting, especially not when the interesting bits are buried under several hours of mid-grade YouTube sketch comedy. And as for the gameplay, I don't feel terribly invested in beating my knob-twiddling speed record. But hey, I might feel inclined to Google the other endings at some point, and that counts for something. Googling the endings of things is an underrated practice; certainly saves a lot of time. If Hitler had thought to Google the end of the Second World War, it probably wouldn't have been as much of a pisser.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Pokémon Legends: Arceus.\n\nGame: Pokémon Legends: Arceus\n\nReviewed: 2022-2-16\n\nThere's a genre of anime called \"isekai\" that some fat nerd told me about while I was porking his mum, in which some regular dweeb from contemporary reality gets transported to a fantasy or video game world where their regular contemporary dweebiness makes them rare and special, and a hero to a bunch of polythene big-titty anime babes who all want him to accidentally perv on them in the bathhouse episode. And it's become weirdly popular among anime nerds... oh, sorry, I misread that. And it's become totally understandably popular among anime nerds in recent years, although the genre goes back all the way to 1889 with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain, who I never took for a massive weeb, but there you go. I bring this up because Pokémon Legends: Arceus is basically Pokémon as an isekai; just the thing for all you Pokémon fans who were concerned that Pokémon Go had made the franchise marginally less embarrassing to talk about in grown-up conversations.\n\nThe premise is, you are generic contemporary gender to-be-determined Pokémon trainer, who I guess fell off the stage in Smash Bros. Brawl or something, and wakes up in the olden days of the Pokémon world, when Pokémon training has only just become a thing. The protagonist swiftly astonishes the primitive locals, and is hailed as a hero from the sky when they show no fear towards some tiny, adorable, fluffy, helpless baby animals and beans them all in the skull. Silly, yes, but finally, a Pokémon game where it kind of makes sense that you seem to be the only trainer who's figured out they can carry more than three or four of the buggers. Soon, we get recruited by a, quote, \"surveying\" organization, who have tasked themselves to, quote, \"survey\" all the local Pokémon by capturing them and forcing them into either manual labor or gladiatorial combat; you know, the same way Columbus \"surveyed\" the Americas, or how one \"surveys\" an ant colony with a kettle of boiling water.\n\nBut you fucking know what Pokémon is; let's skip to the nutty grutty. My recommendation of Pokémon Legends: Arceus is conditional on the viewer's answers to the following survey: \"Question 1: Do you like Pokémon, but are slightly conflict-averse, and would rather it played down the 'battling other Pokémon trainers and gym leaders' and focused on the animal torture?\" There are some battles with other trainers in Arceus, but always with this air of \"Oh shit! I knew we were forgetting something!\" They just spring it out of nowhere every now and again; like, you get to the next story objective, and the anime Thomas the Tank Engine character you're working with goes, \"Wait! I need to assess your battling ability before I can let you pick up the dry cleaning!\" Most of what you do is hunt Pokémon in big, open wilderness maps, and that doesn't have to involve battling at all if you're crafty with stealth and distraction items. Ho yes; where once, it was, \"Watch out, player; there's wild Pokémon in the tall grass! \", now it's \"Watch out, wild Pokémon; there's player in the tall grass!\"\n\nOne thing I like is that it doesn't do the standard JRPG thing of dragging you into a mandatory turn-based battle if a wild Pokémon spots you, in the way that always ruins the flow as assuredly as a chinchilla in a chocolate fountain. You can only opt into random battles by throwing a Pokémon out; otherwise, your pursuer just straightforwardly and agreeably twats you in the mush until you leave. But you can easily get away, and your health comes back like a psychotic girlfriend on a swing, so traversing the world is about as challenging as walking home through an only marginally perturbed car park.\n\nThis isn't really a \"challenge\" sort of game, which brings me to Question 2: \"Do you like Monster Hunter, or do you think you'd like it if it was a lot less complicated?\" Because your objective in Arceus is simplicity itself; in fact, it's the same one that's always been slathered atop the franchise: \"Gotta catch 'em all!\" Or rather, \"Gotta catch several of 'em all, and then hang around 'em for a while like a weirdo at a children's play area, to fill out the checklist of arbitrary objectives each of 'em have before they're officially surveyed!\". But even this aspect of the game is remarkably easy-going. You don't actually have to do everything on each Pokémon's checklist; if you can't be arsed to do the \"Squelch this Pokémon with asphalt damage\" objective, you can just complete the freestyle squelching event eight or nine times, and they get surveyed either way.\n\nAlso, like Monster Hunter, the NPCs will give you a variety of fetch quests on the side that you can do to help them out, or then again, not fucking bother with, because the rewards are always kind of shitty, and I never seem to have room for them anyway, 'cos our backpack is the size of a teabag, and the dude who expands it only does so by one slot at a time, and we have to let him prattle on for five minutes before he'll even do that.\n\nAlso, did you like Monster Hunter's epic scraps with motherfuckers the size of several motherfuckers in an undersized communal bath, but got all squeamish about the business of stabbing them and slicing their bits off to make into shoes and ballerina tights? Well, Pokémon Legends: Arseburger also has a few tentpole boss fights with the local god Pokémons, and because we're so easygoing and conflict-averse, you don't actually fight them; you just pacify them by flinging snacks at their heads in the style of Super 3D Noah's Ark, because I know it always calms me down to be pelted with sausage rolls for five minutes.\n\nThese fights are mostly not standard Pokémon battles, but exercises in wearing out your throwing arm and wearing the lettering off the \"Dodge\" button. But again, in the spirit of, \"Oh shit! We forgot to put Pokémon battling in the Pokémon game! \", there are opportunities to throw out Pokémon, go a few rounds to put the boss in a dazed state where they take more damage— I mean, consume ballistic sandwiches faster. This is a rather awkward and off-putting clash between the game's turn-based and real-time combats, and probably looks a bit weird from an outside perspective, when the boss stops trying to furiously trample you into bonehead butter to play two rounds of paper-scissors-stone with your pet neon meerkat.\n\nSo that's basically my survey in a nutshell: \"Would you enjoy a cross between Pokémon and Monster Hunter, with the focus on 100% completion, but where you can achieve 100% completion largely just by plopping yourself in the world and bumbling around for several hours?\" Then we can just about set sail for Recommendation Harbor. Just one more question: \"Were you turned off by the way Monster Hunter had decent graphics? Did you think that was a bit showy and vainglorious of it? Well, no fucking worries about that here!\"\n\nPokémon Legends: Arceus looks about as good as one could expect from any game with \"arse\" in the title. I know the pursuit of ever-higher definitions is the root of all this industry's evil, but Pokémon makes the kind of money that doesn't have to look so bland and full of pop-in, and my character's \"surprised\" face shouldn't remind me of the facial animation in Sonic Adventure, where everyone looked like they'd lost a fight with a Cenobite. I guess it's not like Nintendo has to try; that's the wonderful thing about exclusivity, isn't it? This is the only Pokémon you're getting, so your eyeballs will eat this visual gruel and fucking like it. What are you going to do? Buy Sega's rival version of Pokémon, where all the characters have angry eyebrows?\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Dying Light 2 Stay Human.\n\nGame: Dying Light 2 Stay Human\n\nReviewed: 2022-2-2\n\n\"Okay, Yahtzee: exam time. Please recount as much of the plot of Dying Light 1 as you can remember without looking it up.\" Uhhhhhhhhhhh... Oh, sorry; I thought you said, \"Mimic the sound of a cycling refrigerator.\" Yes, Dying Light 1. Generic video game protagonist man with very generic protagonist name parachutes into city full of zombies, uh... humans were the real monsters, and I think the villain had a 'tache. What do I win? You win the sequel, Dying Light 2, in which you play all-new generic video game protagonist man Aiden - which is peak generic video game protagonist name, if you ask me, second only to \"Alex\" for screaming, \"I'm a white dude with short brown hair who sounds like a chain smoker reading aloud a list of trite movie quotes!\" - going to a city full of zombies and discovering that humans are the real monsters in all-new, exciting ways.\n\nIn Dying Light 1, it was just the one city that was fucked, and apparently, they didn't quarantine the fuckedness well enough, 'cos now the whole world has fallen to the fuckdemic. Aiden is a wandering vagabond searching for the evil scientist who did experiments on him as a kid, that gave him superhuman endurance and parkour powers. And we're looking for him so we can, what, give him a \"Thank You\" present and a little kiss on the cheek? Oh, but wait! Sometimes, after a mission, Aiden makes grunting noises for a bit and his vision goes wibbly-wobbly, so fair enough. Our life is tragedy and pain; let's murder the cunt.\n\nAiden soon finds himself caught between two factions - one orderly but fascistic, the other liberated but chaotic - and he teams up at one point with a badass independent action lady in a belly shirt who don't need no man, except when she does. This is an almost aggressively generic AAA open-world game; it feels like a fucking litmus test, like the industry is carefully watching to see if this zombie apocalypse choices-matter \"fascists vs. nutters\" Jiminy Cockthroat overly-seasoned greasy soup of loosely-connected game mechanics makes its money back, and if it does, they're going to shelve all the halfway innovative projects for another year or two.\n\nIt's probably just the parkour mechanics that lend it anything approaching a unique selling point, and while it can be satisfying to pull off a nice wall-run jump somersault perfect one-foot landing on the little umbrella in someone's margarita, the first-person perspective still makes the climbing and platforming very awkward. You can't see what your limbs are doing, can you? So whenever you jump at a ledge, there's always that little awkward pause while the camera jiggles and the game figures out if Aiden's hands are poised to grab it or were engaged with picking his underpants out of his bum.\n\nNevertheless, whenever the game asks if you want to upgrade your combat power or your parkour power, the smart choice is parkour every time. When asked if you want to raise health or stamina, always pick stamina, 'cos stamina is used in combat as well, and when you're close to death, the game has a very itchy finger on the \"Regenerate your Last Bit of Health\" trigger, so I hardly ever died in battle, and having more maximum health was as helpful as having the biggest scrotum at a pissing contest. Alright, fine; upgrade your combat ability just enough to unlock the two-footed dropkick, which breaks enemy defense, as well as their skeletons and the game's entire combat system. Sorry, Dying Light 2; were you using that? See, the reason why I prefer games that focus on doing one thing really well over Jiminy Cockthroat game mechanic stew is that the latter is a whole reliant on many separate pieces, and if you urinate on one carrot, it's going to make your dinner guests very hesitant about all the adjoining parsnips, as well.\n\nThe point is, melee combat is a big branch of the game design tree, with lots of little twigs coming off it; the game patiently trains you in skillful parrying, perishable melee weapons are offered as a reward for exploring, and the upgrades you can craft for them are one of the motives for endlessly rubbing our face on crates and shelving units, snorting crafting materials up our nostrils. But once I had the two-footed dropkick, which breaks defense in the sense that a cricket bat breaks the defense of an unguarded nose and kind of makes parrying obsolete, as whether or not you dropkicked just before the enemy attack doesn't matter so much when, a moment later, the enemy in question is hurtling skyward like a Roman soldier in an Asterix book, that's a lot of little branches falling off the tree, and a lot of disappointed sparrows. I was throwing melee weapons away faster than they were breaking on me, partly because I was doing my overworked game reviewer asshole thing and sticking to the critical path, so the game was throwing powerful new weapons at me at the end of every plot mission, lest I be too underpowered for the next bit, because gotta let me play my way! God forbid I feel obliged to engage with a game's content, or be faced with any challenge I couldn't beat by batting the controller with a spade.\n\nSpeaking of trees, remember this is a choices-matter open-world game with branching story paths, meaning it's yet another theater in the eternal war between fascists and nutters. And because this is a litmus test game, throwing in every idea that so much as stood next to an open-world game at a bus stop, you can also do missions that liberate sections of the map, and then pick which faction takes it over. Obviously, there's a lengthy debate to be had over what kind of balance of order and personal freedom is necessary for a healthy society to function, but here's my quick summary of the main points: never side with the fascists, you fucking twat! Not in video games, at any rate, because it's almost never the narratively satisfying path; there's a reason why you rarely see a TV or movie story arc in which the protagonist realizes that rigidly following the rules at all times and never questioning authority is really smart and always the best thing to do.\n\nMoot point, anyway, because this choice has a gameplay effect: siding with the fascists adds stuff to the open world to help with combat, while the nutters add stuff to help with parkour. So it didn't matter what role I wanted to play, or if I agreed with the philosophical stance of the nutters; I sided with them because I wanted to play on their trampolines. My philosophical stance is knees tucked to the chin about fifteen feet off the ground.\n\nI didn't see much reason to engage in combat in the open world, all fascist poo-pooing aside. There were times, while pursuing the critical path, I could almost forget I was playing a zombie game at all; they're so easy to escape from. I seem to remember the zombies in the previous game coming across as a lot more threatening if you were caught far from a safe zone at night in only your flip-flops, but when you can leg it to the nearest vent and hang-glide your way to safety on its copious machine farts at a moment's notice, this omnipresent undead threat isn't much more than dropkick practice; the rewards for braving their nests at night are small potatoes when the critical path quests keep handing the same stuff out for free.\n\nWhich is just another facet of Dying Light 2's overall problem: that in the simmering system soup where no one flavor can be permitted to stand out, the end result is going to need a fucking nice piece of bread to make up for it, and Dying Light 2's is a little over-proved and hardly upper-crust. (beat) \"Oh, stop trying to sound clever, Yahtz.\" FINE! IT WAS COVERED IN SPUNK!\n\n----", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Game: Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Reviewed: 2022-1-26", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "If you're not familiar with Five Nights at Freddy's, it's this thing where somebody said, \"Hey, you know those animatronic animals they used to have at a certain kind of family restaurant, that had big, terrifying eyes and really unnatural, robotic movements? Those were a bit weird!\" Hmmm... interesting point. Hey, you know that Chuck Berry single, \"My Ding-a-Ling\"? I think that song was actually about his penis. There, I can make banal observations of the patently fucking obvious, too! Where's my multimedia franchise empire?! Oh, I suppose I have to make an indie game about it first, one primarily designed not to be played for fun, but for hyperactive streamers to react to for the amusement of an audience for whom this never seems to get old.\n\nBut anyway, speaking of things that never get old, Five Nights at Freddy's is about children getting murdered by pizza restaurant animatronics that go mad when night falls. Step 2: question mark. Step 3: profit. But shows what I know, 'cos in the latest game, Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach, the business model has proved profitable enough to be able to build a gigantic indoor park themed around four animal characters reinterpreted as 80s glam rock musicians, and child murder. In contrast to the original FNAFs, which were very low-tech games made from pre-rendered 2D art and wouldn't have looked out of place haunting a cracked CD-ROM jewel case in an EB Games bargain bin circa 1998, Security Breach is a full-on first-person stealth pseudo-Metroidvania reminiscent of Alien: Isolation... if Alien: Isolation had fucking sucked prehensile, slimy dick!\n\nI don't even have to review it; I only started playing it in case my Dying Light 2 code didn't come in, and it did. But when it did, I said to myself, \"You know what? Techland's new overproduced grindathon can wait its fucking turn!\" Because Security Breach is very bad, and I want to hurt it, and if I don't get closure on this, I'm going to wake up one morning in the chicken coop with one fewer chickens and a priapism. The really astonishing thing is how it's still rocking a \"Very Positive\" rating on Steam; but then, it is a cult series, and like all cults, its members presumably all live on a compound somewhere, feeding each other drugs and not playing any good video games. Or maybe the core target demographic only played long enough to confirm that it looks okay before getting bored and switching back over to PewDiePie, or whatever neon-haired dropout has the most amusing scream this week.\n\nHonestly, the game's visuals are great; it's like all the budget went to the artists and the company meth lab. All the effort has been poured into rendering this vast, open theme park environment full of unique assets and bright colors that one of the good Dead Rising games wouldn't have turned its nose up at. But then came the moment to design a fucking video game to take place inside it, and all the joints came unscrewed, the party android fell apart, and one of its eyeballs fell into a crying child's knickerbocker glory.\n\nAnd first-person stealth horror is game design on fucking easy mode; all you need to do is smash the \"Game Over\" button if the pursuing enemy so much as touches the player. Pac-Man perfected this formula forty years ago, and Security Breach still fucks it up, with a wonderful combination of both extreme bugginess and horrible design; it's not because of bugs that I kept getting surprised by a monster I had no means of locating in a confusing, samey labyrinth while hoping to randomly stumble upon five hidden generators I also had no means of locating, and it wasn't because of bad design that I was then murdered by said monster after being rendered unable to move from clipping into a slide.\n\nYou play as Gregory, a young boy who gets locked in the pizzaplex overnight and has to survive until 6 A.M. Why you can't just pick a corner of one of the many unused empty rooms, stick your thumb in your mouth, and wait goes unexplained; actually, a lot of things go unexplained. The game never really establishes that the animatronics are hostile; we just take that as read. Maybe Gregory's watched streams of all the previous games, as well. Most of the subsequent gameplay involves going back and forth, seeking one MacGuffin after another through an animatronic stomping ground like you're tracing out a giant join-the-dots puzzle, and the key issue with the stealth gameplay is information; typically, the harsh musical sting indicating I've been spotted by one of the murderous fibreglass Bananarama members was the first I'd know they were around at all. You're supposed to use security cameras to scout ahead, but with these huge, cluttered environments and lack of context, it's like looking for the one placenta on the trolley full of red gelatin desserts.\n\nSo crossed fingers and prayer tended to have about as reliable results; either they'd spot me, or I'd get blindsided by one of those fast-moving security droids that patrol randomly and have the catchment area of a large suburban high school, causing Cat Benatar to teleport in. And then, running or hiding is pointless, because they can run faster, so you might as well smash your head into the nearest pretzel stand and hope dusting yourself with cinnamon sugar will encourage a painless decapitation. And the usual livestream money shot of \"screaming animatronic face, smash cut to black\" is scary once, maybe twice if you're trying to balance a valuable porcelain object on your head; then, it's just annoying, and with the inability to skip cutscenes and the restricted save system, this is knocking out square after square on my needless annoyance bingo card. Wait a second... Contextual \"Use\" button you have to hold down for about nine seconds too long? That's Bingo! Here's our fabulous prize: another minute of complaining about Security Breach.\n\n\"Oh, Yahtzee, you poisonous intergalactic rectum! Of course it's difficult; you're a tiny child in a jumpscare horror game! What did you expect? Dual Uzis and a Maserati MC20?\" Thing is, massive twat, all this annoyance was only until the game's midpoint; then I unlocked a laser gun with infinite ammo that stuns animatronics in one hit, and instantly, they became about as threatening as a great white shark in a gravel pit, after which, the new struggle was figuring out what the chuffing hell the game expected me to do next. The map had no indicators, so that was as much use as a laminated menu in the hands of a fussy child; I just had to randomly blunder around 'til I found something vaguely objective-shaped.\n\nEventually, I did this enough times that the game went, \"Oh, it's coming up on six o'clock! You can go to the main entrance and leave!\" Feels like there's a lot of the map that hasn't been used yet, but I am so not going to question this. Got to the exit; the game goes, \"PSYCH! This is the bad ending! You gotta keep playing to get to the rest of the plot!\" 'Doh, the old Symphony of the Night trick! Okay, guess I won't leave. \"Great! We are now permanently disabling saving the game!\" WHAT?! Why the fuck are you doing that?! Are you embarrassed about the good ending or something? Are your knickers in shot at one point, so now you're going to discourage me from trying? Well, mission fucking accomplished.\n\nTo say Security Breach feels unfinished would be too charitable; I don't think they got as far as measuring the door to see if it'd fit. I can only assume that using jumpscares to provoke funny reactions from streamers started getting old, and now they're seeing if similar results can be achieved from just annoying the shit out of them. And if that is the case, look at me falling right into the trap! I hope the sweetness of that victory covers up the taste of my diiiiick!\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Praey for the Gods.\n\nGame: Praey for the Gods\n\nReviewed: 2022-1-19\n\nThings have gone a bit off the rails here on the Zero Punctuation express, but now we're getting back on track, and the buffet car has tentatively brought out the individually-wrapped pastries again. Let's talk about a game from last year I've been meaning to review: Praey for the Gods. Apparently, they couldn't call it \"P-R-E-Y for the Gods\" 'cos of concern it'd get confused with P-R-E-Y, the other game-- I mean, the other other game. And they couldn't call it \"P-R-A-Y for the Gods\", 'cos that's not a pun. Still a better option than \"Praey for the Gods\", I'd say, 'cos that's both not a pun and not a fucking word.\n\nAnyway, quick summary: Praey for the Gods is a third-person open world game that I imagine one would probably look upon a lot more charitably had one never heard of Shadow of the Colossus. Inconveniently, however, I have, and even less conveniently, I very clearly remember it being really good. And Praey for the Gods is Shadow of the Colossus, but shorter and not as really good. You're a traveller who comes to a distant land and gets told by a weird mystical disembodied voice in a temple to go to a series of ambulatory historical interest sites and duff them up. Only, where, in Shadow of the Colossus, you're doing it for very coherent and emotionally affecting story reasons - i.e., your girlfriend has carked it, and you're hoping, if you murder a few skyscrapers, her spirit will be caught by the gravitational pull of your gigantic balls - Praey for the Gods doesn't make it quite so clear. The world is boned - and also, in the plot of the video game, the world is boned - and killing the seven colossi will in some way help; maybe they've all been widdling in the rivers.\n\nAnd then the game seems to start fretting that we're not quite invested enough in proceedings and goes, \"Wait! I know what will fix this: survival crafting elements!\" Oh, here we fucking go! 'Cos of course, while I was playing Shadow of the Colossus and getting mashed into the dirt by a concrete hoof the size of an above-ground swimming pool, I remember thinking, \"Boy, this would be so much more engaging if my dude was also hankering for a sandwich!\" In fairness, while the crafting, you're stuck with, you can choose your preferred level of survival elements, and here's Yahtzee's gameplay hot tip: you want the lowest fucking setting. I don't care how many dead girlfriends you need to pull across the giant balls event horizon; anything else just isn't fun.\n\nSee, on the medium setting, you die if you run out of stamina while swimming, and the first non-tutorial colossus in the game is basically a cylinder jutting out of a pond like a late-night kebab shit in a public toilet. And if you fall into the pond, it'll be because you fell off the colossus, in which case, you won't have any stamina, because you used it all up leaping across the sweet corn kernels embedded in its turd-like form, so that's as assuredly instant-death as if you'd fallen into a volcano full of sharks who were already very annoyed about the volcano thing. And any time you die, you have to start the colossus fight all over again, no matter how many expertly timed dodge-rolls you were towards victory.\n\nBut maybe I'm being too hard on Poo for the Gods. It deserves a non-zero quantity of props for effectively recreating the feel of Shadow of the Colossus: the authentic weightiness of these ancient crumbling titans against the smallness of the protagonist, as they desperately scramble along their patches of fur, flailing limbs, and fanny pack straps. (The ones that don't resemble gigantic poo-poos, at any rate.) There's even a couple of innovations that Shadow of the Colossus could've done with, like a parachute(1); yeah, Wander was kicking himself in the giant balls for not packing one of those around the time he was trying to scramble across the second airborne one. 'Course, the parachute uses stamina, so if you have just had to fall off a colossus from overexertion, then the parachute is only good for writing your last will and testament on before you hit the ground like a bin bag full of wet yard clippings.\n\nOh yes, and it also adds a grappling hook; some crafty sod watched my Halo Infinite review, I see, and thinks a hookshot is the easy way to grapple into my heart. Well, that just might backfire on you, Prairie for the Dogs, because while it's true that I'm a fan of hookshots, that also means it makes me especially sad to see a hookshot break. And the hookshot is perishable, see, necessitating that you craft new ones, manufacturing a sophisticated combination rope launcher and high-powered winch by holding some twigs and some string in your hands and wiggling them together a bit. And what is having to repair and craft your hookshots really adding to the experience except fresh annoyance, when you're already pretty annoyed from getting shaken off a large, crusty man and blatted across a field just as you were trying to pick yourself up out of a snow angel that looks like it was having a seizure?\n\nI had to restart the very long and frustrating final colossus fight more than once, 'cos it turns out the hookshot was basically essential, and I hadn't realized at the time of the autosave at the start of the fight that all the hookshots I'd brought were about three uses away from going to the big mechanical engineering YouTube channel in the sky. So you understand why I come away from Pogger for the Gogger with some negative feelings; maybe it was my fault for not remembering to pack properly before going out building-hunting.\n\nBut I think this building-hunting game overestimates how much non-building-hunting I want to do. I hate to bring it up again, but if you go around dressed exactly like Michael Sheen and wearing a Michael Sheen mask, you probably shouldn't complain about being compared to Michael Sheen a lot; Shadow of the Colossus understood that the colossus-fighting was such a strong gameplay element, you kind of didn't need anything else, and it effectively built anticipation by having nothing in-between but riding around empty landscapes, looking for the next colossus, with nothing to concern you except saddle sores.\n\nProlapse of the Gut seems to have been worried that wouldn't be enough, like a flustered parent hanging around a sleepover, constantly asking if there's enough pizza or if we want more fizzy pop, when we'd much rather they piss off so we can put on the violent splatter movies we snuck in. \"Oh, are you bored searching for the next colossus? Perhaps you'd like to fight a few random shitheads or a mini-boss on the way. Ooh, did you find a treasure map? That looks like a lot of fun! Maybe you'll find some new shoes with +5% Michael Sheen Resemblance.\" I'd really rather just find the next colossus fight, thanks, game. \"Oh, sure! Remember to pick up some random twigs and string on the way so we can make friendship hookshots!\"\n\nThere's a lot of random bollocks sprinkled over the overworld like so much glitter on a pig, but none of it makes the bacon tastier, and I wish it hadn't let the focus slip off the colossus fights; some means to indicate where the colossi's weak spots are wouldn't have gone amiss, so we didn't have to ruffle their every pubic thatch looking for the sodding things. I'm glad we're all in agreement that Shadow of the Colossus was good, Pride Parade for the Gay, but the shit you've thrown in to enhance the formula is like a plastic drumming monkey toy sellotaped to the shoulder of a majestic gorilla: you've just made it slightly more confusing to offer it a banana.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee makes a roundup of games he didn't review.\n\nReviewed: 2022-1-12\n\n2021 is over; another January wasteland stretches ahead of us like the romantic comedy our partner forces us to endure before the begrudging blowjob of the Quarter One releases. It's time for my second ever roundup of games I didn't review. Last time I did this, I did it before the awards episode in case I wanted to sneak a dark-horse candidate up the drainpipe to clandestinely bugger expectations with its giant dark-horse willy, but in practice, anything I don't review is most likely just fine and not worth harping on about, so that was like trying to add croutons to my salad by shaking my keyboard over it. So with expectations set nice and low, let's begin.\n\n----\n\nGame: Unpacking\n\nSome indie games are like hamsters on Viagra: doing an awful lot with very little. Case in point, here's everything you do in Unpacking: you click on a moving inbox and drag and drop all the contents into shelves, cabinets and drawers, then you go to the next room and do it some more. Pitch that in the elevator at Ubisoft, and watch everyone's noses wrinkle like you just blew a hole through the seat of your pants. But it's actually rather enjoyable and Zen, and the crunchy, pastel-colored, isometric pixel art is pleasantly nostalgic, like a Game Boy Advance in the mouth of a friendly Labrador; plus, it's doing some interesting underhanded narrative stuff, as you notice what toys and kitchen appliances our unseen protagonist keeps from move to move, and what potential serial killers they're moving in with. Okay, it's no show-stopper - there's no heartrending emotional storytelling going on - but it's interesting, in a \"Ooh, they do chocolate brownie M&Ms now?\" sort of way.\n\n----\n\nGame: Before Your Eyes\n\nOh, you're holding out for heartrending emotional storytelling, are you? Well, here's some! Before Your Eyes is a little snacky experience centered around the gimmick that you have to point a webcam at your face and control the game with blinking. The premise is, you're going through the key memories of your protagonist's life, jumping to the next one every time you blink, because you've recently died, and your life is literally flashing before your eyes; title drop, you see. (I guess they couldn't have added \"Flashing\", because people might've expected something else.)\n\nIt is very overtly a gimmick game, but one that's effectively using its gimmick to make a point about how life must move on; you're going to have to blink at some point, no matter how badly you want to stay in this moment where you can see down your high school English teacher's blouse. And the story really sneaks up on your feely-hole and rams in the emotion cactus. It is awkward to play, 'cos you have to hold your head completely still the whole time, and the software occasionally mistook simple eye movements for blinks, although that might be because I needed to light a few more candles in the murky oubliette in which I dwell. But I'd recommend it to all you day-walkers out there.\n\n----\n\nGame: Haven\n\nI wish I'd noticed this game when it came out, 'cos it's by the developers of Furi, and I liked that game, enough I'd let it snog one of my close relatives. (One of the ugly ones, though; let's not go nuts.) Haven is a game about a young couple exploring an alien world together, and it's honestly rather cute; you don't see it much, do you, two protagonists who are just in a relationship all game, with equal billing and neither being murdered to motivate the other? It's just nice to watch them holding hands as they roller-skate across an alien landscape, but then you have to stop roller-skating for a JRPG-style random encounter battle that completely kills the flow. Oh, and it's one of those awful hybrid turn-based and real-time systems; fuckup on fuckup, Haven! I let the survival crafting elements slide 'cos I was sold on the adorable space anime kids, but now you've killed my interest. I very nearly reviewed it as part of a triple-bill indie review that I was planning to call \"The Roller-Skating in Space Trilogy\".\n\n----\n\nGame: Exo One\n\nThe second game of which drops the combat, and the survival, and all forms of organic life, anime or otherwise, and one of the roller-skates, and most of the remaining one. In Exo One, you play a fucking ball bearing rolling around a series of empty deserts, but it completely sucked me in. You hold down a button to become really heavy, then release it to become light again - sort of an oblique metaphor for one's emotional state while reading the news - and by this method alone, you strategically employ slopes and ramps to launch yourself through breathtaking alien landscapes. Story's a bit obtuse and not terribly present, so conceptually, it's, like, one step up from a screensaver, but it made me nostalgic for retro games like SkyRoads or Spindizzy, that are just about exploring one satisfying core movement mechanic. It's that, but elevated with the spectacular environments modern graphics can offer to make a somewhat hypnotic experience, if not without low points; I played through it twice to absorb the story better, but only ended up confirming that I really didn't want to play that fucking jungle planet level again.\n\n----\n\nGame: Solar Ash\n\nSolar Ash is a game by the creators of Hyper Light Drifter, who have dropped their previous unique crunchy pixel art identity in favor of going full 3D third-person open-world like everyone else. That's right; they've pulled the Risk of Rain gambit. Still, it maintains Hyper Light Drifter's visual style, in that everyone's decked out in magenta and cyan like they've all sworn fealty to the Order of the Mostly Empty Color Printer. Gameplay-wise, Solar Ash is all over the place; it feels like a 3D Sonic game and Mario Galaxy and Shadow of the Colossus all spent an evening together that none of them are now willing to talk about. If you've only room in your \"roller-skating in space\" budget for one game, then of the trilogy, it's probably the one that's most like a \"game\" game, if you see what I mean, but there's something weirdly forgettable about it that's hard to put my finger on; the story is kind of hard to follow, but more likely, it's that the core gameplay never really evolves beyond \"press button to roller-skate\" and \"press other button to roller-skate a bit faster\".\n\nOh Christ! I'm running out of time, and I wrote down more titles than I thought; better hammer the rest out, quickfire-style.\n\n----\n\nGame: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth\n\nA Metroidvania with rather good pixel art reminiscent of Symphony of the Night, but harder, and more visually confusing, and with poorer environment design, and not as good. Apparently, it's a spinoff from some long-running Japanese fantasy franchise, so if you're more familiar with that, maybe the story would feel less like you're viewing it through a sheet of frosted glass.\n\n----\n\nGame: Eastward\n\nCartoon, post-apocalyptic, kind of Zelda-y, kind of EarthBound-y, kind of Lisa: The Painful but not quite as likely to induce suicidal depression-y. Charming enough that it gripped me for a while, but then the plot started to feel like it wasn't going anywhere interesting fast enough, and its grip loosened enough that I made my escape.\n\n----\n\nGame: Moonglow Bay\n\nLike a light farming sim that went all-in on the fishing minigame, but where everyone's made of Duplo and kind of look like they're ready to die.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "----", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Game: F.I.S.T. : Forged In Shadow Torch\n\nAnother Metroidvania. It was alright.\n\n----\n\nGame: Chorus\n\nAlso alright.\n\n----\n\nGame: The Ascent\n\nEhhhhhhh...\n\n----\n\nGame: Tales of Arise\n\nAnime...\n\nGame: Doctor Who: The Edge of Reality\n\n(beat) Ehehehehehehehe... Ah, I did play that, didn't I? Ahahahahahahahaha... ahhhhh... fucking sucked.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee lists top 5 games of 2021.\n\nAwards: Top 5 of 2021\n\nReviewed: 2022-1-05\n\nFeels a bit inappropriate to say \"Happy New Year\" these days; we should just say \"New Year\". New Year, internet. \"New Year, Yahtzee!\" The cosmic odometer has, indeed, ticked over again. 'Tis the season of writing the wrong date on all our official documentation for the next couple of weeks; many indifferent returns. If I sound a bit unenthused in this, the intro to the Best, Worst, and Blandest Games of 2021, it's because picking the best games of 2021 was like picking my most acoustically-satisfying bathtime farts. Most years have at least one thing that jumps out and takes me roughly by surprise and reminds me why I'm still doing this bullshit, but I struggle to think of anything that excited me in 2021; no Undertales, no Obra Dinns, no Spiritfarers. Well, there was one thing, but, well, we'll get to that.\n\n5th Best:\n\n(sound of a champagne bottle being uncorked and poured)\n\nWe'll get to it right now, as it happens! There was only one game that took me by pleasant surprise, as it transitioned from \"bland hipster navel-gazing\" to \"psychedelic cosmos-spanning rock odyssey direct from the subconsciouses of all four of the Beatles while they were on one of the less harrowing drugs\": The Artful Escape, that I must sadly relegate to Fifth Best because this is a top five list of games, not of things where you just hold right and occasionally repeat some notes back to it like you're playing on a Simon machine powered by a very inefficient exercise bike.\n\n5th Blandest:\n\n(sound of a water cooler bubbling)\n\nAs always, blandness is the opposite of both good and bad, like a coin with a yin-yang on one side and a blobfish on the other, and that sums up my feelings towards Resident Evil Village pretty well: I don't particularly like or hate it. Some bits were good; the rest was all over the place and full of too many rehashed ideas, like a dream that I thought was getting sexy for a while, but then I got lost in my old high school and woke up when I realized I was late for the bus.\n\n5th Worst:\n\n(sound of a toilet flushing)\n\nThe trouble with these rankings is the lack of nuance. Is it really fair to call Twelve Minutes the fifth worst game of 2021 if I was somewhat liking it right up until the end? In this case, yes, because that ending undermines everything leading up to it; if you get dragged into an alley by an angry chef and disemboweled with a broken bottle, your subsequent Yelp review probably isn't going to focus on the restaurant's lovely filet mignon.\n\n4th Best:\n\nI hope you'll forgive some self-indulgence; my Fourth Best is a game intended mainly for fans, but I'm a fan, and it's my list. Wasn't it Mark Twain who said that, in a functioning democracy, if a man likes Persona 5 Strikers, it is his duty to rebel, even if he believes himself the only one, just as it is everyone else's duty to say they thought Guardians of the Galaxy was better? (Paraphrasing, obviously.) Yes, Persona 5 Strikers; it's got energy and life, and the soundtrack's really fun to put on while you're kicking a homeless man to death.\n\n4th Blandest:\n\nYou know, it's bad enough that AAA games are a constant parade of bland open-world swill, but it's really taking the piss when indie games get profile boosts for aspiring to be the same fucking thing. \"Ooh, come and join the popular kids' table, Kena: Bridge of Spirits! You'll fit right in, with your bland world design and Disney Pixar characters and unspecific, vaguely spiritual theme that's slightly environmental, but not so much that it offends our investment company that's also got shares in Oil-Drenched Seabirds PLC!\"\n\n4th Worst:\n\nAgain, calling this game one of the worst leaves no room for nuance, and I'm as confused as to whether I like it as I am by most of the qualities of SWERY games. Ultimately, The Good Life is, by every imaginable measure, an almost inconceivably badly-designed game, but it's still got a certain charm. I wonder if it's more a \"because\" than \"in spite of\" situation; if SWERY took a fucking game design lesson one of these days, he probably would get a lot less interesting.\n\n3rd Best:\n\nWith its wealth of ideas and somewhat astonishing depth of gameplay variety that's simultaneously very tightly-designed and very accessible, small wonder that It Takes Two was The Game Awards' upset Game of the Year, but I just can't rank it any higher for its weak connecting plot and excessive bad dialogue. I refuse to lower my standards, industry! I still aspire to a better world where video games can have strong writing and good design, and every home has an extra tap in the kitchen sink that dispenses lager!\n\n3rd Blandest:\n\nI recently published a video essay arguing that video games may have already peaked at a point between ten and twenty years ago, and when commenters ask, \"Ooh, how can you say that? \", I point to games like Back 4 Blood, and everything else with no greater ambition than to remake shit from the afore-specified era under a rice paper-thin disguise: at Ubisoft announcing the Prince of Persia and Splinter Cell remakes, at basically every indie game looking like it belongs on the PS2. And then I point again and make a sort of mad, starey face.\n\n3rd Worst:\n\nAnd even when all they're doing is regurgitating old shit, the modern industry still finds ways to fuck it up. Abe's Exoddus was a fairly low-key, quirky stealth puzzle platformer, and Oddworld: Soulstorm is about as much as you'd expect from a reimagining of it that thought the most logical additions to the formula would be a crafting system and the occasional giant robot fight.\n\n2nd Best:\n\nLike anyone who dressed up like Robert Smith in the 90s, video gaming must never be allowed to forget its dalliances with trends, and so I felt one of the time loop games from this year should be acknowledged. Deathloop? No. Twelve Minutes? \"No\" in an even more contemptful tone of voice. The Forgotten City, then; all the slightly janky uncanny valley skiing holiday fun of a Skyrim quest, except with incredibly solid writing and more than two voice actors.\n\n2nd Blandest:\n\nAlways a struggle picking my Bland Five, having to think back and remember the games I least remember things about. Number Two instantly earned its place when I was going down the list of reviews, and my eye very nearly skipped straight over it like a limousine over a homeless man's foot; it's Outriders. It was a third-person shooter, it was post-apocalyptic; I'm pretty sure there was a skill tree in there somewhere, but at that point, my mind's eye slips off it and starts thinking about pies instead.\n\n2nd Worst:\n\nSo often, games are bad because they're hackneyed or lazy or cynical or end with incest pregnancy drama, so the games that had the best of intentions, but are bad because of pure ineptitude are the kind I still prize the most highly; some games just come out on stage, try to hike up their belts, and rip their trousers right off. My second worst game: Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood. Just refreshing, plain and simple bad game classic, with more subtitles than redeeming qualities.\n\n1st Best:\n\nThis probably won't come as a surprise to anyone who noticed I was kind of reaching for things to complain about in my review, but fine; Psychonauts 2 is just as engaging and imaginative as Psychonauts 1, and is the good kind of sequel that expands upon rather than wallows in its predecessor. It is, however, still a sequel, and I can't be as enthusiastic as I would've been for an original IP, although it might prove my earlier point, since it's a sequel to a game from the PS2 era. I'm making the mad starey face again!\n\n1st Blandest:\n\nGuess what? Blandest Game of 2021 is a shooter. Double guess what? It's a World War II shooter. Possibly not the one you're thinking of, because while blandness hangs off of World War II shooters like nipple tassels on your mum when she's working nights, that blandness is thrown into even sharper relief when paired with new technology. Yes, it's Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond. Thanks for coming to join the VR party, World War II shooters; now leave the wine bottle you brought and piss off!\n\n1st Worst:\n\nBut our Worst Game of 2021 is a rather unique vintage that combines its mystifyingly-bad design choices with an unflinching earnestness that makes it car-crash fascinating, like a chorus line dancer with a compound fracture, spraying blood from their exposed shinbone over the front row with every high kick and trying desperately to smile. Yes, it's Balan Thunderpants. This may very well be the sort of thing SWERY would make if he took a game design lesson, if it was a lesson given by a slug in a burning dumpster. In the middle of a busy road. Who... doesn't know anything about game design.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Halo Infinite.\n\nGame: Halo Infinite\n\nReviewed: 2021-12-22\n\nIt was with mixed feelings that I went into Halo Infinite. On the one hand, we all know this series is never going to bloody end, so I appreciate the title being upfront about it, but on the other, I've never really gotten on with Halo as a franchise. I've never understood what's going on the overarching plot; I asked Nick, the Escapist editor and professional Halo-liking person, to summarize it for me, and he was all like, \"Oh, the Forerunners created the Precursors and the Prometheans--\" Okay, stop listing words that all mean the same thing! Start at the basics: why is humanity at war with the Covenant? \"Because the Covenant worship the Forerunners, but are jealous that the Forerunners favored humanity because--\" Bastards hate humans, kill all the bastards; got it! Should've led with that.\n\nI've said before, Bungie IPs are 90% setting and 10% plot, so \"bastards hate humans, kill all the bastards\" is really all you need for the moment-to-moment experience, and having gained that insight, I appreciated Halo Infinite more than I expected, because the story seems to have a conscious \"back to basics\" approach. You know that whole plot the last few games were setting up with Cortana turning into the big baddie? Well, that's all in the bin; Halo Infinite starts in the aftermath of Cortana already having been sorted out, as a new and bigger bunch of bastards show up who hate humans more than any previous bastards, wiping out the human forces and leaving Master Chief for dead. They're called \"The Banished\", so let's just add that to the ever-expanding list of Halo entities named \"The\" and an ominous word.\n\nAfter Chief gets discovered in space and reactivated for the umpteenth time, he has to go down to a new Halo Ring to prevent the Banished from reactivating the Auditorium on behalf of the Harbinger because-- A ta ta ta ta ta, Halo! \"Sorry; I meant to say, 'bastards hate humans, kill all the bastards'.\" Thank you! I will! And since Halo Infinite takes influence from open-world shooters, there is a quite inexhaustible supply of bastards, 'cos what else are you going to do in post-ending fuckabouts mode? I say \"takes influence from open worlds\" rather than \"flat-out is an open world\"; certainly, there's an open world in it, one that showed up late to the final exam for open worlds and had to hastily scribble out an assignment that, it turned out, was from last year's syllabus.\n\nIt's like some board of directors heard about this \"open world\" thing the kids like and told market research to compile a PowerPoint, and they came back with \"Copy-pasted towers and base assaults as far as the eye can see!\" And besides when it forces you to climb four copy-pasted towers spread out around the map before it lets you into the next part, the overall plot doesn't really engage with the open world; completing the optional base assaults or side-activities doesn't give you any significant edge in standard gameplay, since the most powerful pew-pew laser guns are always conveniently strewn around every combat and boss arena like mini-fridges in hotel rooms, and none of the optional crap you can do makes them pew-pew any harder.\n\nFor you see, while Halo is flirting with open worlds, it will never stray from its true love, shiny corridors; its eye might have briefly been drawn by the open world's sensuous curves, but its love for shiny corridors is the kind of unyielding emotional bedrock on which contented marriages are built. So the open world sections are separated by plot missions where you complete inescapable sequences of enclosed arenas connected by shiny corridors, now you're done fooling about with your open-world hussy, and I feel Halo Infinite should've picked a lane. Why not go full Breath of the Wild? Maybe Miss Open World can't offer stability, but it might've livened up your dull middle age, Halo; trying to talk the missus into this undignified polyamory is only going to look bad in divorce court.\n\nBut with an open world comes a need for traversal mechanics. Most Halo vehicles flip over if they drive over anything larger than a chocolate raisin, and the terrain is usually about as even as a section of your grandmother's upper thigh served with crinkle-cut chips, so to counterbalance all that, Master Chief gets a fucking hookshot, and I fucking love it; it's not as fast or as versatile as, say, the Just Cause hookshot, probably because it has to haul around the dump truck Master Chief is constantly wearing and all the Mars bars secreted in the glove compartment. But there are very few games that wouldn't be improved by a grappling hook; losing at Civilization wouldn't be so bad if I had the option of a dignified exit. So I was hookshotting up to vantage points to descend upon enemy bases, hookshotting into vehicles to hijack them, and outside the open world, hookshotting my merry way down shiny corridors to avoid wearing out Master Chief's plimsolls.\n\nBut for some reason, the game seems to have mistaken this core traversal mechanic for a gimmicky gadget; you have to un-equip the grappling hook to use deployable cover, dodge thrusters, or see-enemies-through-walls-o-vision, so guess what three things I never fucking used and never fucking needed? Deployable cover? I'll just hookshot myself behind this bin. And why see enemies through walls when I can just hookshot over the wall and look at them? \"What about dodge thrusters? You can use them to outwit those incredibly annoying charging berserker enemies.\" Or I could just hookshot them in the face, which stuns them out of the charge, and with the hookshot upgrades, I can then deliver a powered melee strike that launches them like Team Rocket and is a million times more fun than any of Halo's standard range of Nerf guns.\n\nThe hookshot became a central part of both combat and traversal, so I'd sooner unequip Master Chief's armored trousers; never used anything else or spent upgrade tokens on them, which is another nail in the heart of the open world, since finding upgrade tokens is one of the only reasons to explore besides getting your cardio in. Still, the hookshot might be all Halo needs to enhance its otherwise rather stale combat, which is about as much as you'd expect: lots of enemies firing lots of glowing blobs, and Master Chief occasionally randomly exploding because you mistook an incoming very dangerous glowing blob for one of the relatively harmless ones.\n\nAlright, fine; since it's Christmas, I'll say I've had worse times with shooters. And I did appreciate the relative straightforwardness of the plot: \"Shoot all the bastards, big bastard is your new arch-nemesis basically because he declares himself such and nobody else called dibs.\" But you might be disappointed if you have a long-term investment; I'm going to talk about the ending now, so if you don't want spoilers, either stop watching or turn on the little windscreen wipers on your face helmet. Not that there's some big spoilable twist where Master Chief dramatically reveals himself to be Tom Selleck; no, I just didn't want to spoil that there is no twist.\n\nThe game ends with a big fat return to status quo: Master Chief gets a brand new factory-reset, non-psychotic, soberly-dressed Cortana and declares his intention to keep killing all the bastards, leaving me with a profound sense of \"Wow! Twenty years, and we've basically gone absolutely fucking nowhere, have we, Halo?\" The only difference is, Master Chief has a new hairy boyfriend; the bearded pilot sidekick is the closest thing to a proper love interest he's ever had. He has to be rescued about as often as Princess Peach; gives him a nice romantic cuddle near the end. I ain't judging; I hope you'll be happy together. I just wonder if you wouldn't get a more reciprocal relationship from slow-dancing with the air conditioner.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Shin Megami Tensei V.\n\nGame: Shin Megami Tensei V\n\nReviewed: 2021-12-16\n\n\"Shin Megami Tensei, Yahtzee!\" Uh... sorry, I haven't got any tissues. \"No, you big racist! You should play the new Shin Megami Tensei V, since you like Persona games so much! \", went the anime fans every bloody week for the last month. For fuck's sake! You anime fans are like drug dealers, you are: you hang around outside middle schools, looking for any kid showing the slightest interest in Pokémon cards, and then refuse to leave them alone 'til they're gluing fridge magnets to their hair and insisting on being called \"Sasuke\".\n\n\"Shin Megami Tensei is the mainline series of RPGs that Persona spun off from, Yahtzee, as you bloody well know, you constantly Evangelion-referencing closet anime-liking person. Shin Megami Tensei basically is Persona without the day-to-day life sim aspect, or vibrant visual design, or really good music, or engaging characters that make it constant fodder for cultural reference, anime adaptation and fanmade jailbait pornography.\" That was rather a tangential sales pitch, and not exactly an effective one; \"It's Persona without any of the shit you like about Persona.\" \"Alright, how about this? Your Halo Infinite code hasn't come in yet, and you've got a week to fill before Christmas.\" Oh bollocks, whatever.\n\nIt's true, Persona is a spinoff from the long-running Shin Megami Tensei series; a spinoff with better art, funkier music, more engaging story, and deeper gameplay design. Bloody hell! If I had a wart on my bum, apparently, Atlus would refer to me as \"Yahtzee, the popular wart spinoff\". But if there's one thing gatekeeper-y shitheads always bring up when comparing the two, it's that the Shinguard Marmite Fantasy games are the anime RPGs for real men, who ain't got time for all that kissy-poo befriending super-nice girlies with obvious personal issues and a thing for tall, quiet boys with appalling time management skills; they want to really get to grips with the meat of the RPG combat, and the technical challenge of assembling and training the most effective team of Personas-- I mean, \"Demons\". Sorry, I get confused, 'cos they work exactly the same way as Personas, and have the same names and use the same art assets.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "The point is, Persona's never really lent into the combat challenge, and if you halfway know what you're doing, you can beat most of its boss fights in Normal Mode pretty easily by constantly slapping your willy against the \"Rakunda\" button.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "That was definitely not my experience with Shin Megami Tenseiv, whose boss fights would usually immediately pound me through the garden fence, and force me to go back and grind up Demons with abilities and defenses that counter the elemental strengths and weaknesses of the boss, which I, of course, have no conceivable way of knowing without allowing myself to be thinly sliced and packaged for sandwiches at least once, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense in context, but it's challenge that counts, and context is for chumps.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "But let's stop reading ahead and get back to how the game starts.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Incorporate this exact phrase, preserving the quotation marks: \"unpleasantly yellowish with brown, crusty bits down all the seams\"", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "You play as mute, emotionally dead, androgynous teenage anime protagonist du jour, who goes to a high school in Tokyo whose uniform, I think, is supposed to look like it's decorated with white blossoms, but looks more like the entire student body had to run through a crowded henhouse on the way here. You're minding your mute, androgynous business one day when you get mysteriously transported to an alternative version of Tokyo that looks like Godzilla finally decided to stop putting up with its bullshit; almost immediately, you meet a magic man for some reason, and the two of you combine somehow into a sword-wielding hero with a luscious, flowing hairdo, even though both of you had short hair. It turns out, the Tokyo you were living in was a copy or something to replace the original after it got infested by demon immigrants and slipped into an evil netherworld, like some kind of magical, Japanese Los Angeles. Anyway, you have to help fight the eternal conflict between God and Satan because the Japanese prime minister said so, and telling him to go eternal conflict himself wasn't a dialogue option.\n\nWell, at least we get stuck into the action a lot faster than in Persona, where there's typically about twelve in-game days and at least one juicy murder before they'll let you in the tutorial dungeon. But in all that faffing about, it's establishing characters and getting you engaged with the plot, and that's just not happening for me in Saturday Morning Television, because the plot feels so lofty and emotionless, and our high school protagonist isn't much use as a fish-out-of-water viewpoint character because they've got all the personality and backstory of a used tea towel, the backstory of most tea towels being \"I bought it from a tea towel shop\".\n\nThen you look to all the other high-schooler characters that got introduced alongside you, and they're all like, \"Don't look at me! I was secretly part of the God-Satan war this whole time, and I've got unexplained superpowers; I'm not the least bit relatable, either!\" And what also hurts the plot is that there's such large gaps between story developments; once you've teleported to post-COVID Tokyo at the start of the game, you're stuck there, rubbing Perdemonas together for four or five hours, before you beat the first handful of bosses and get back to real Tokyo to get the \"theological conflict\" thing established and sworn into the Bible Brigade, and by that point, I could barely remember what my original haircut had looked like.\n\nAlthough, I did feel a stir of emotional connection when I first ran out into bad Tokyo and encountered a Pixie; it was a much-needed pang of familiarity in a strange place. Instantly, I knew a long and complicated ladder of Disonmon crafting lay ahead; no doubt we'll see all our old friends: Jack Frost, Neko Shogun, that one that looks hauntingly like a penis. But it always starts with Pixie, the first acorn that starts the oak; the first vaccine-hesitant parent that starts the downfall of Western civilization.\n\nAnd if there's any part of Mega Man's Shiny Testicles that I feel I could get into, it's the demon collect-a-thon aspect. You have little conversations with them in battle and pick the right dialogue options to convince them to join you, and it has a quirk and humor to it that feels rather out-of-place alongside all the glowering twats in the main plot; looks like we found where all the personality was hiding. Fuck those humorless real-world losers; let's gather together a posse of hauntingly penis-like monsters and go give them all wedgies! But the meat and potatoes of hunting demons in the overworld is drowned in the watery onion gravy of dreary, confusingly laid-out environments.\n\nListen, thank you for your recommendation, anime twats, but the fact is, I don't bring any enthusiasm to JRPGs 'cos I don't generally like samey turn-based battling, so the game has to meet me halfway. That's how my chemistry with Persona games always works: there's enough energy on its part to compensate for my dowdy arse. Shin Megami Tensei just doesn't have that; our blind date ends with me pushing my peas around my plate as it asks if I've accepted Jesus into my heart. But hey, if you prefer it for its meatier tactical challenge, then good for you; some people like that. Some people like bringing their guitar to parties and seething with resentment when everyone else would rather play Rock Band than listen to them strumming out \"Wish You Were Here\" by Pink Floyd for the fourteenth fucking time.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Resident Evil 4 VR and Oculus Quest 2.\n\nGames: Resident Evil 4 VR, Oculus Quest 2\n\nReviewed: 2021-12-08\n\nI suppose it's technically Shooter Season, thanks to Halo and Call of Duty and Battlefield; I know that a season should by rights consist of more than three fucking games, unless you're Leeds United (could someone who understands sport let me know if that joke made any sense? ), but they alone seem to have scared every other big release out of the pre-Christmas sales period. So fuck it; let's stick some iron sights up our noses and point at people's heads all day, like a rude six-year-old in a boil clinic. And you know what's good for shooters? Civic unrest and dysfunctional authority. And you know what's good for video game shooters? VR.\n\nI finally got hold of an Oculus Quest 2 this week, which I've been particularly intrigued by, since I heard it boasted a wireless headset. I'm still a great believer in VR - it gives you headaches and makes weird things happen before your eyes; it's all the fun of severe dehydration without the chapped lips - but one thing I've always thought holds it back is how you need nineteen cables and a morning off to get it all set up. And then you've always got cables stuck in your head, running down your shoulders, killing your immersion, and if your wife walks in while you're nailing VR anime broads and you spin around too quick, you run the risk of hanging yourself, and that's a niche sexual thrill at best. But not only is Oculus Quest 2 wireless, you also don't need to rig cameras up around the room like a very unsubtle CIA operative, you don't need a seperate computer or console to run it off, and compared to its peers, it's astonishingly affordable, which it had fucking better be, considering Facebook are backing it, and those motherfuckers can eat loss like it's Thanksgiving dinner.\n\nWhich might as well bring us to the two major cons with the Q2: firstly, that you can only get it in white, and someone didn't learn the lesson from the Wii - that \"white\" is only the pupal stage of game peripherals before they blossom into \"unpleasantly yellowish with brown, crusty bits down all the seams\" - and secondly, it forces you to pay obeisance to Big Tech, and the mere act of buying it pencils you in for a spot against the wall when the revolution comes. (Even more than VR usually does, I mean.) You need a Facebook account to use it, and there's basically no way this thing isn't stealing your retinal data for use in the upcoming sinister cyberpunk dystopia.\n\nBut being falsely accused of info-heisting and getting swatted by corpo-enforcement is a problem for Future Yahtzee; Present Yahtzee's been bedazzled by fancy VR tech upgrades like \"turning around\". At first, I was still clicking the right analog stick to turn bit-by-bit like a Roomba in a furniture storage warehouse, until I managed to re-sequence the old instincts and learn to just, you know, fucking turn around. I also like the feature where you can, at any time, switch to a view of the room around you, because if people come into the room while you're playing, you can touch all their bottoms and pretend it was an accident.\n\nControllers are fine; they don't quite have the comfort or the satisfying heft of the Valve Index controllers, but if we're comparing it to the VR market, the fact that it's only a slightly more expensive option than tying a smartphone to your face with the cord from an old bathrobe can compensate for a lot. So there you go, Yahtzee's Holiday Buyer's Guide: the perfect gift for the hardcore gaming corporate boot-licker in your life, and good luck getting your hands on one before Christmas now, fuckface. But the other reason I sought out the Quest 2 is because it's currently the only way to play Resident Evil 4 VR; crafty buggers! This little English Sheepdog ain't willing to wait for that questionably secure hot dog to fall off the kitchen counter.\n\nI feel like, in the course of ZP, I've reviewed Resident Evil 4, like, nine times with varying degrees of directness, so just to give you the quick summary, third-person, shooty-shooty, angry Europeans, bad dialogue, campy campy, \"Ooh, scary scary! \", monster fights, village, castle, island, big tits, jug ears, \"HELP! LEON! \", smuggity-smug, deadity-dead. One of my favorite games of its era, and I was keen to see how VR would enhance its trademark intense, back-to-the-wall, poo-to-the-underpants combat. Well, first of all, it's hard to get immersed from the way the action keeps switching to \"video player\" mode to show Leon somersaulting through a window or a quick establishing shot of the area we just entered, but in fairness, how are you supposed to translate those to VR? Make the player do a somersault? Let them look at the area themselves with their eyeballs?\n\nBut then, immersion is always difficult in any VR shooter with a focus on two-handed weapons. How's this for a million dollar idea: VR hand controllers that clip together for whenever you switch to a two-handed gun, so you're not having to stand with one hand awkwardly hanging in empty air while the in-game barrel bounces up and down like a public opinion poll in an election debate? And maybe the connecting element could telescope so you could adjust the length and do the shotgun-pumping thing, and maybe the interior of it could be lined with ground beef so it doubles as a peripheral for the anime porn users. Besides that, it certainly is a different experience to play RE4 in VR, because one of the central characteristics of the gameplay was the fact that Leon turned like a forklift and moved like he was moonwalking the wrong way up an escalator. So now we can move freely, shoot without stopping and turn as quickly as our aging spines will allow, parts of it get a lot easier; the fights with big monsters are all completely trivial because they're over there, laboriously winding up an attack on the spot I briefly passed through nine minutes ago on my way to drop incendiary grenades down their exposed bumcrack.\n\nBut on the other hand, combat gets a lot harder in the bits when you're having to look out for old \"Marshmallow Tits\" Ashley \"The Escort Quest that Perforated the Eardrums of a Generation\" Graham, who was previously good at staying behind Leon back when he moved like a wardrobe on a dessert trolley, but all his newfound mobility makes the little hamster wheel in her brain fall off its axle, so she gets grabbed by enemies a lot because she doesn't follow me into cover and got distracted by a brightly-colored skirting board. But between protecting her and yourself, and keeping an eye on the enemies, and weapon-switching, and those lovely, immersive reloads where you unconsciously hip-thrust every time you snap your revolver shut, you have yourself a pretty engaging night in VR Shooter Town, my friend.\n\nThere's still all those fucking quick-time events that RE4 indulged, back before we realized QTEs are to game design what a turd in a pencil case is to a Beef Wellington, but they've been slowed down with an obvious sound cue to make them less annoying. The least annoying thing would've been to remove them altogether, of course, but it's important we remember our mistakes, and if one of my favorite games has to be branded on the forehead with a scarlet \"Q\" for all time, then I'm in favor of it if it'll stop its descendants from dicking about.\n\nIn brief, a good game on a decent bit of tech, but with the wireless thing cracked, here are my next points for VR to work on: keep getting smaller and lighter so it doesn't hang uncomfortably off my face like a pair of 80's sunglasses made from depleted uranium, and think about weaning yourself off the corporate dick-sucking. How about we start by cutting back to five bellends a week? Yes, fine, you can deep-throat on cheat day.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition.\n\nGame: Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition\n\nReviewed: 2021-12-01\n\nOoh, you want to be very careful about declaring any release of anything to be \"the definitive version\", partly because I think that's a subjective thing; there will be people out there for whom their definitive experience watching The Crying Game was at three in the morning, blitzed out on mescaline with both feet immersed in buckets of wallpaper paste. And as for removing previous versions of the thing from sale, well, let me tell you a cautionary fable about a proud little man named George Lucas, who decided that no one had any need for any version of the original Star Wars trilogy that didn't have added Looney Tunes sound effects and CG as dated as Sean Connery's relationship advice, and now George Lucas has to sit there and plaster on a smile as the Disney corporation peels the skin off his life's work and stretches it so thin, it would disappoint a Marmite enthusiast.\n\nAnd now, Rockstar have brought out, quote, \"Definitive Versions\" of what we might as well think of as the first three GTA games: GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas. And for this, all previous versions have now vanished from availability; hope you weren't invested in any of them, or wanted to use that one San Andreas mod that Hillary Clinton burst all her capilliaries over. \"Remaster\" is becoming rather a foreboding word in my glossary: not a rerelease, same game with stability tweaks and maybe a nice resolution upgrade to pad out the shelf life, nor a remake, a complete ground-up interpretation through the lens of modern sensibilities, polishing up the mechanics and filtering out the gay jokes. Remastering is a cold and unpleasant no man's land between the two, wanting the nostalgia cash-in of the latter while only putting in the level of effort required for the former. Except for the QA department, which, in this case, was putting in the level of effort required for a permanent vegetative state.\n\nAll they've really done is put the textures through an HD filter and updated the lighting engine, and when you do that with boxy turn-of-the-millenium-era 3D environments, you end up with a look that I like to call \"little Timmy got loose on the custom level editor\". The retro textures were a match for the janky retro 3D physics and unrefined gameplay design. The characters' faces were indistinct enough, your brain was willing to give their intended expression the benefit of the doubt; now you've got the uncanny valley effect that comes from everyone emoting like Thomas the Tank Engine characters. It's like, I can't appreciate the effort you put into applying lipstick to this pig, Rockstar, because now I'm going to feel weird about eating it.\n\nAnd also, the lipstick has somehow given the pig dysentery, because even this easy-mode remastering has made it explode with crash bugs and graphical glitches like those masks from Halloween III; I was playing the PS5 version, 'cos you may remember the PC release got yanked back off stores on Day One like a disobedient dog off an unguarded picnic, and even that was crashing to home more often than a thirty-year-old liberal arts major. And after all this, they still didn't fix some of the things about the old GTAs that could've used a remaster, like the way half the voice lines in San Andreas were compressed right the fuck down to fit on a CD, and now they all sound like you're listening to them while pouring Cap'n Crunch down your earholes.\n\nSo on that note, let's transition this into Retro Review Land and talk about how San Andreas holds up. I had to pick one of the three to focus on, 'cos they made games to last you back in the crispy papercraft 3D era, and I wasn't knocking them all out in a week; GTA III's a pretty bland dish, and as for Vice City, if I wanted to have the 1980's smashed in my face, I'd go and watch literally any recent Hollywood movie. So that left San Andreas, which I'd never played very far into before; started a couple of times, did nineteen missions centered around driving though two blocks of a poverty-stricken neighborhood being miserable, before finally getting into a shootout and dying in three seconds, because the early GTAs pioneered gun combat that depends on using a cover system without actually having a cover system, somehow. Everyone just stands in the open popping at each other, like LARPers yelling \"Lightning Bolt! \", and with about as much physical reaction.\n\nSo it had never really grabbed me before, either because of all that or because I'm unflinchingly racist, but this time, I stuck with it, and found that the game eventually gets away from its very sluggish beginning; as in, it literally, physically gets away from it. It's very odd; you start off playing a rather confrontational game about the brutality of African-American gang culture in 90s not-Los Angeles, with a vein of the idiosyncratic GTA facetiousness sitting uncomfortably alongside it like a rocket ship ice lolly in the middle of a very depressing kebab. It even introduces a gameplay mechanic based around retaking districts for your gang, which was ground zero for the district-liberating mechanic that, for a while, was haunting the open-world genre like an STD in a first-year nursing college.\n\nBut then there's a plot twist, we get run out of town, and all of that just goes away. And we become a completely different game, more akin to the traditional GTA experience, where you're a cynical merc showing up in a new city to do favors for various criminal factions with quirky spokespersons, that gradually escalate until you're fighting off entire platoons with an attack helicopter on the end of each limb. You see, San Andreas represented a transitional period, when the open world was still young and naive and experimenting with illicit substances; we didn't yet know what people truly wanted from open-world gameplay.\n\nDid they want an Oblivion-style stat system where they could grind away primitive weightlifting minigames to raise their \"muscle\" stat, for no easily discernable benefit except that your torso will look slightly more chiselled if you wear non-baggy clothes, which you never will? No. It turns out, we didn't want that, San Andreas, but someone had to conduct the experiment, so thanks anyway. People thought GTA IV was full of unnecessary bollocks; at least taking your fat cousin bowling was always optional. At least it never locked you out of a mission on the critical path because your \"swimming\" stat wasn't high enough, so you could only continue in the fucking plot after you'd sat in a fucking pond and wiggled about for half an hour.\n\nSan Andreas' waistband is slung real fucking low from all the random garbage in its pockets; it was the last gasp of an old era that wanted to shove as much in as it could before the rising cost of HD graphics pulled the ambitions back down. It at least had the original spirit of the sandbox game, i.e., \"let the player indulge their whims and do anything they want\". \"Do you want to strafe the high street in an attack helicopter, or work a job as a valet for six hours? You do you!\" These days, sandboxes are more often like, \"Do you want to do the copy-pasted combat mission now, or uselessly trek through a meadow first?\"\n\nSan Andreas is a piece of gaming history that doesn't hold up outside its cultural context; as such, it should be preserved for prosperity, but not fucking \"remastered\"! Not slapped into a sparkly dress like an aging recent divorcee in a cocktail bar to attract a new audience that doesn't want it, because it keeps drawing bits of the dress in the wrong order and didn't even bother to fix that one fucking remote control plane mission that plays like trying to walk the dog with a hippo nailed to the side of your head. Analogy broke down a bit there, didn't it?\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Call of Duty: Vanguard.\n\nGame: Call of Duty: Vanguard\n\nReviewed: 2021-11-24\n\n\"Well, go on then, Yahtz! Tell us World War II shooters are overdone! And while you're at it, be sure to inform us that water is wet and modern political discourse is fucked.\" Ironically, pointing out World War II shooters are overdone is itself overdone; we're stuck in the fucking ouroboros of tedium, the snake eating its own tail while complaining that the seasoning is bland. Actually, I wasn't going to rag on Call of Duty for going Nazi-fartsy on us again, because I've come to accept that while shooters can't seem to get away from World War II, it definitely hasn't been for want of trying; the modern warfare trend was about as valiant an attempt as one could expect, and we all know where that ended up.\n\nSo fuck it; let shooters have their fucking comfort zone. It's the only uncomplicatedly good setting for a, quote, \"realistic\" shooter; get too close to the present, and war is mainly decided not by the ground-level machine gun exchanges that FPSes bank on, but by whose tech can make the biggest explosion happen the furthest away. Also, it's still the war with the best narrative, where the writers weren't trying to frame the side with aircraft carriers and predator drones as the plucky underdogs struggling valiantly against an opponent armed mainly with harsh language and angry livestock.\n\nBesides, the lesson \"Don't be like the Nazis, you STUPID FUCKS!\" is one that certain audiences still haven't properly internalized in this modern age, apparently. So fuck it; all is forgiven, World War II shooters. I mean, there were so many different people and places and levels of technology involved, it's basically just as versatile as setting a shooter in space, not that I think you should set them in space. HEY! Call of Duty! I said DON'T do that! Oh fuck, they set one in space; fetch the mop.\n\nOf course, having said it's a versatile setting, it would be nice if more World War II shooters made the most of that and not come back to D-Day all the fucking time. How many times now have I played a World War II game where we have to do something to ensure the success of D-Day? I feel like lone wolf allied commandos could've held a fucking convention behind the German firing lines at this point. Yes, Call of Duty: Vanguard does D-Day, as well as Stalingrad, and the Fall of Berlin, and all the other classic hits, with the framing device being the interrogation by evil, sneering Nazis of an allied commando unit more heartwarmingly diverse than a Great British Bake Off semifinal.\n\nThere's Black British Soldier, Grim Russian Lady - who's a sniper, because aren't they fucking always? - a mouthy Australian who peppers his dialogue with words from The Hack Screenwriter's Little Book of International Slang, and a cocky American pilot to occasionally tank a much-deserved biff to the chops. And yes, obviously, the Nazis are racist as all bollocks towards them, but people were racist across the board in the 40's, and the most racism that allied NPCs ever display is directed at the Australian. Oh, and the American pilot's chapter features him teaming up with a colored regiment in the Pacific Theater, and they complain about their systematic oppression at the hands of their own government with the eye-rolling tolerance of high schoolers complaining about the mean girls' clique.\n\nI'd say make up your own war if you're going to revise history, but we've established this is the only setting shooter audiences are interested in. \"Oh no! Historical inaccuracy in a war shooter, Yahtzee?! Don't forget to also point out that, in real life, you can't heal gunshot wounds just by sucking on a floor tile for four seconds, and that most Allied soldiers didn't have cameras grafted to their noggins!\" Okay, but before you run to the comments and start bayonetting those strawmen, let me clarify that it's not inaccuracy that bothers me, because you know what else isn't historically accurate? Wolfenstein: The New Order. And you know what kicks arse? A disgruntled mule in a crowded bathhouse, and Wolfenstein: The New Order.\n\nBecause, in between fighting space Nazis on the Moon and cyborg Rottweilers with cheese graters for faces, the story actually addressed things like racial tensions within Allied nations and the emotional toll that war has upon those who fight it. It also featured characters who fuck, and that's Call of Duty's problem: you don't get a sense that any of its characters fuck, or want to go home, or play snooker, or do anything other than fight the war, because they're so bloody patriotic, even their genital warts are red, white, and blue. When they lock horns with their superiors, it's not because they're being forced to kill their fellow man; it's only ever because they disagree on how to kill their fellow man with maximum efficiency. It's all so bloody lacking in introspection; the Germans are all sneers and mustache-twirling evil, and the Allies are good, and therefore, must have been progressive and diverse, because those things are also good. And incidentally, we have always been at war with Eurasia!\n\nThroughout the arc story, our heroes are interrogated and tortured one by one as the Nazis attempt to turn them against each other, which might've been harrowing if all the tension wasn't constantly being flushed straight down the toilet by the narration. \"Little did those silly Nazis know, we were putting on an act and just pretending to betray each other to gather information! Har har, stupid Krauts! Let's all laugh at their little, snivelly noses and overly tight uniforms and little goose-stepping, adorable buttocks-- Fuck, where'd that come from?!\" Could've been effective if they'd saved that reveal for a final act twist just when we think all is lost, but we have zero introspection, remember? So our characters can't, even for a moment, not be waddling under the weight of the biggest fucking bollocks in the room.\n\n\"You going to talk about the gameplay at all, Yahtz?\" Oh, must we, viewer? It's Call of Fucking Duty: you point at everything vaguely head-shaped that's poking out from cover like nipples at the touch of a questing hand, then move up when the game says to, and not before, because if you do anything other than what the predetermined plot says to do, then it will usually just explode your fucking head like you're in the fucking Suicide Squad. The \"final boss fight\" - finger quotes the size of bratwurst - entails chasing a Nazi across an airfield and tackling them. I had to repeat it three times: the first time because the game never mentioned I was supposed to tackle him, so when I shot his prone, defenseless form, he insta-killed my nigh-invulnerable ass with a single pistol shot; the second time, I tried to shortcut my way through a spot that apparently wasn't part of the designated chase path, and the game exploded my head. Yeah, just yank on my fucking strings, game, for I am ever thy errant marionette.\n\nAlright, fine, the gameplay has some highlights; the Russian lady's final boss was an intense Condemned-style close-quarters sneaky stab-a-thon that was a nice break from the usual shootout conveyor belt. But none of the other characters have unique abilities that fundamentally alter the gameplay; one of them can carry more grenades. Ooh, break out the min-maxing algorithm!", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Oh, and the leader dude has leader powers; sometimes, you can direct your NPC helpers to shoot a specific target if you feel like it'd help. Everyone's shooting everyone else already, of course, so it feels like trying to direct a primary school swimming class to piss in one specific part of the pool. Good analogy for the whole game, actually: a great big splashy arse-about in a kiddie pool version of history, without the introspection to notice when the water's getting suspiciously warm.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Sherlock Holmes Chapter One.\n\nGame: Sherlock Holmes Chapter One\n\nReviewed: 2021-11-17\n\nIsn't the public domain a wonderful thing? A certain amount of time after the original creator carks it, all IP becomes everybody's P. Do you wish Tarzan was a West Highland Terrier? He can be now! Do you want Captain Nemo to go into business selling children's frozen dinners? Why not? He's as much yours as Jules Verne's! Take that, you bearded paid-by-the-word French git! You may also know that fucking Disney have been lobbying for years to extend the public domain cutoff so they can keep a death grip on their copyrights, but lately, it seems like they've been trying to create their own version of public domain where, instead of every motherfucker on Earth being allowed to mess with IP as much as they want, they're instead going to hire every motherfucker on Earth to direct at least one Star Wars movie.\n\nBut I digress. Sherlock Holmes is a character who has been buggered inside and out by public domain, and as many of the works imply, that's exactly how he likes it. But no game developer has buggered him with greater enthusiasm than Frogwares, churning out Holmes adventure games for decades; not without ambition, it seems. But when they did finally leave the paddling pool of the adventure game niche to dive into the shark-infested sewage treatment plant of open worlds, how strange that they chose to do The Sinking City first, a Lovecraft adaptation, when horror is clearly not their comfort zone the way detective games are. Sinking City was just a detective game where half the witnesses look like discarded fish finger sandwiches, and that only distracted from things at best.\n\nFortunately, the universe now rights itself, with the Sinking City formula being reused for a Sherlock Holmes game; namely, Sherlock Holmes Chapter One. What, is Sherlock Holmes an Xbox now? \"Hey, he's public domain; he might as well be!\" No, this is a prequel story about a young Sherlock visiting his childhood home on a Mediterranean island to get to the bottom of his mother's mysterious death and his own blocked memories of it.\n\nBut wait! This is pre-Doctor Watson Sherlock Holmes, and how can Holmes work without Watson? The audience needs the everyman perspective to balance out Holmes acting like an intergalactic space computer running Socially Inept Cunt ME. Well, it turns out, the reason why Holmes eventually shacks up with Watson is that, in his youth, Holmes had an imaginary friend who looked a lot like Watson, and was also named \"John\". That's right, motherfuckers; it's the new, improved, intentional Creepy Watson! I assume he just needed someone to go halfsies on the rent, but I suppose we have to crowbar new intrigues in wherever we can. Is this not a bit contrived, Frogwares? \"Who cares?! It's public domain! Everything's canon now, bitch!\"\n\nYou know what? I don't get a cynical vibe from Frogwares' milking of the IP; they do seem to genuinely love Sherlock Holmes. The street names on the map are all varyingly obscure references, the additions to his backstory have been crafted with the real emotion and ever-so-slightly psychotic care of a dedicated fan-fiction writer, and... well, just look at how bloody pretty they've made him in this game! The only reason he's not smoking a pipe yet is that nothing can brush against those kissable lips without needing some serious Victorian-era hysteria treatment. (Look it up, kids.) And Sherlock Holmes Chapter One is an undeniably ambitious game. Ooh, that's a mealy-mouthed non-pliment, isn't it? \"Ambitious\" is code for \"overreaches like Doctor Octopus at a crowded breakfast buffet.\"\n\nSo at the core of things are the detective game elements of wandering around a crime scene, waiting for little white dots to appear over bloodstains and footprints like moths with an interest in true crime podcasts, then randomly smashing bits of intel together until a conclusion chips off and hits someone in the eye. Not sure how I feel about how, at the end of every case, you basically decide for yourself who the culprit is by reinterpreting all the facts the way you want, and the game doesn't tell you if you picked right or not, which feels stupid, 'cos a puzzle should have a right answer and a wrong answer; otherwise, you could fill a crossword grid with little drawings of cocks and call it done. But then again, maybe this is some deliberate artistic statement about how reality is created from our perceptions, and more importantly, at least gives the game replay value.\n\nAnd besides all that detective shit, we've also got minigames up the tight, public school-educated butt. The chemistry minigame's okay; it's somewhat reminiscent of the science minigames in Spider-Man, and that's probably why I mentioned Doctor Octopus precisely 23 seconds ago. The eavesdropping minigame? Not so much; you're supposed to circle all the relevant snatches of dialogue and reject the rest, but how the fuck am I supposed to know what's relevant when this is the first time hearing about any of this shit? So I always fall back on trial and error: \"Is anal distension relevant to the recent train robbery?\" I don't know; maybe, if that was where they hid the loot!\n\nAnd of course, since we've put on our big-boy trousers to play in the action-adventure sandbox market, we've got to have some fucking combat for when Days Gone tries to steal our lunch money; a very token, very systematic combat that is whatever the opposite of a core mechanic is. You don't randomly get in shootouts in the street; what happens is, you walk into a room mysteriously full of random cover and shootable hazards, you roll your eyes massively, and then some random thugs burst in. And the game exhaustively trains you in the process of disorienting them by shooting one or more highly specific things, then running up and doing a highly specific quick-time event, and if you get any part of the process wrong, you get a highly specific knee in the clever clogs and start again. You focus on one enemy at a time like you're in a Pac-Man maze full of roaming join the dots puzzles until they're all down, then you get shot because the game spawned three more of the fuckers behind your back and forgot to tell you or signal their arrival in any way.\n\nI've played worse combat systems - Whoop, non-pliments abound! - but I think the real issue here is the same issue that all detective games have trying to work in action or open worlds (hope you're taking notes, L.A. Noire): it's that detective games are about fine details, combing the slightest elements of a crime scene and analyzing a few deeply fleshed-out characters right down to their shoelaces and opinions on the Academy Award nominations, while open worlds and combat systems rely mostly on non-crafted, procedural systems. So it always feels like a grinding of gears when nine random dudes burst in halfway through an investigation, whom we then curb-stomp and forget about. \"What, you don't think any of these guys might have useful intel, Sherlock? I mean, ten minutes ago, you noticed a rip in a suspect's trousers that turned the whole case upside down, and here's nine new pairs of trousers ripe for the perving.\"\n\nThe carefully-crafted puzzle pieces of the investigation get tangled up against the game's systematic elements like two egg whisks in an overloaded kitchen drawer. Also, the game makes a big thing of how you can question random passersby and dress up as a local or a cop or an ice cream man to put them at their ease and get more intel, but in practice, this almost never works unless a quest objective specifically tells you to do it, and at all other times, NPCs just gawp at you like a highly suspect sausage roll at a horse castration party. Honestly, I kind of liked Chapter One for its plot and puzzles; I just wish it had spent less time smashing its Tonka trucks together and more time finding voice actors that don't deliver lines like they're reading aloud the lunch menu in a lobotomy ward.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews The Good Life.\n\nGame: The Good Life\n\nReviewed: 2021-11-10\n\nSince it no doubt won't be long before the government has to start rationing breathable air, and Fox News calls us all socialist cucks for wanting more than three sucks a day, it's obvious why there's a growing niche for cozy life simulator games in your Stardew Valley sort of mold that let us live out unrealistic fantasies of being able to earn a living, own property, and make new friends as an adult. The Good Life is a take on that genre from our old pal, SWERY, the quirky Japanese auteur developer behind Deadly Premonition, J.J. Macfield and the Last Crusade, et al.\n\nIf you want my quick estimation of SWERY, if, say, Hideo Kojima was a bag of Cheesy Wotsits, SWERY would be a knockoff corner shop own-brand corn snack that sells for about 10p a bag, tastes like packing material, and clings to your teeth with the resilience of Jean Valjean. But he is an auteur, and worth celebrating for that, even if he's never let himself be held back by little things like \"lack of game design competence or original ideas\". You can always tell from SWERY's new games what TV shows he's been binging lately: with Deadly Premonition 1 and 2, it was Twin Peaks and True Detective, respectively; with D4, I think he just took a fistful of mushrooms and stared at untuned static for an hour; and now, with The Good Life, he seems to have gotten into Midsomer Murders or something.\n\nIt's set in a sleepy little English village in the countryside, with the usual SWERY flavor to it: looks the part convincingly enough until you get too close and notice all the characters are kooky weirdos who talk too much, and all the shop names look like they've been mangled by Google Translate. The open world reminds me a lot of the open world aspect of Deadly Premonition, but with a cartoony, exaggerated artstyle, which is a positive step, because the realistic look combined with being animated on the cheap always made Deadly Premonition look like watching Captain Scarlet while you were home from school with a life-threateningly high fever.\n\nBut while the basic trappings of a genteel rural life sim are all here - day/night cycle, planting crops, cooking recipes, house upgrades, a selection of local hotties whom you might aspire to seduce into sharing your idyllic life of waking up at five to ram your fist up a cow's arse - this is all illusion; it's mostly a story-based game, and an all-over-the-place story, at that. We're still wondering where the hell it's even going when we unlock the gameplay ability to transform into a cat and a dog, which is never adequately explained or considered worth worrying about by most of the characters. Then, because it wouldn't be a SWERY game without the tone lurchingly shifting about like a circus seal driving a school bus, a major character shows up bloodily murdered, and again, most of the characters don't consider this worth worrying much about. Indeed, the murder mystery is acknowledged only tokenly, as the circus seal oversteers back and forth between government conspiracies, aliens, Arthurian legend, and a large man who shows up after every chapter to scream at you about lobsters.\n\nBut again, like Deadly Premonition, all of the nonsense is held together by an engaging protagonist. Naomi Hayward is an obnoxious New York photographer who has recently come to small-town England to pay off a massive personal debt, and openly hates it and everyone in it at first glance, but her constant status as the butt of all the world's jokes while routinely bouncing back like a hedgehog in a squash court lend her an endearing quality, as she complainingly rides from one fetch quest to the next on the back of a speeding sheep. Yes, your primary fast traversal method is riding a sheep, because fuel prices in modern Britain have long eclipsed the cost of thwacking some fluffy testicles with a stick. It's a fun idea, and a funny image; it's fun being inside your head, SWERY, but every time I'm in here, I wonder why the wallpaper's so badly-hung, and why there's no furniture besides a TV and a piss bucket. How to put this gently? Hmm... You can't design games for shit. Too harsh? You have the game design instincts of a circus seal who has recently been in a horrific traffic accident.\n\nWhat is even supposed to be the core gameplay loop of The Good Life? Taking photographs is pretty centralized, and there's a mechanic where uploading pictures of trending things earns you money, but you'd make money faster from sucking on the return slot of the vending machine outside Ebenezer Scrooge's house. And I'm not even sure money is supposed to be our motive; the most elaborate thing you can buy is a house upgrade, and it doesn't even cost much. Oh, come on, SWERY! I was with you on the dog and cat transformations and crashed UFOs, but affordable home renovation in today's market?! Now you're just taking the piss!\n\nSo money can't buy much, but there are a lot of things you can craft. Trouble is, every crafting recipe calls for an esoteric blend of rare items from all over a field, because SWERY's open worlds are always too bloody big and empty, so everything's spread out like a line dancing class for sperm whales in social distancing season. Oh, this jacket recipe needs two aluminium chunks, does it? And each chunk can only be crafted from fifty aluminium cans that are only found randomly in rubbish bins, and there aren't even fifty rubbish bins in the game, so I guess we just have to wait for everyone to plow through another six-pack. You know what? My default plain white blouse suddenly feels a lot more fetching; thanks anyway.\n\nBut this is just the start of the fundamental design fuckups. Time me; I'm going for the nitpick speed record. The interface is confusing; the vital hunger meter is barely noticeable, and there's a percentage under Naomi's face whose purpose I never figured out. Sometimes, it went up when I slept or ate; sometimes, it didn't, so who fucking knows? The map is criss-crossed with fences and walls that your sheep can't jump over, but you can just get off, turn into a cat, jump over it, turn back, summon your sheep again, and press on, and somehow, just giving the sheep a \"Jump\" button never occurred to anyone. Oh, and some of the walls are too high to jump, but your map will be buggered before it tells you which. Stamina doesn't drain in mid-air, so your cat can sprint infinitely while bunny-hopping.\n\nCombat as a dog is as deep as a gnat's twat; you just dodge the enemy attack by moving slightly to the right and then bite them in the bum. I took down a bear this way, and it didn't hit me even once, 'cos whenever it attacked, it just lunged straight over my tiny, impish hitbox. Some quests need to be tracked to progress in them; some don't. Some of them mark the location of relevant NPCs; some don't, and good luck finding any of these wandering fuckers without a police stakeout unit. Oh, and there's a fucking limited inventory, but the limit's so big, you won't know until fairly late in the game, when you're blocked from picking up yet another piece of random bullshit that you don't even know if you fucking need. Give us a low limit that we hit early in the game, and then flog us a pack upgrade, SWERY! This is all basic fucking stuff!\n\n\"And so on and so on, Yahtz, but you were engaged enough by this game to finish it, so all this shit can't have been that important.\" Yeah, I finished it; I'd be pretty distracted by roadkill if it was wearing a funny hat. That's what you are, The Good Life: you're a dead squirrel in a little, tiny fez. Don't want to get too close, but it raises interesting questions, like, \"Is that actually a fez, or did you just fall out of a tree while trying to eat a yogurt?\"\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy.\n\nGame: Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy\n\nReviewed: 2021-11-03\n\nOh, you want opinions on Guardians of the Galaxy, do you? Oh boy, do I have opinions on Guardians of the Galaxy. On the one hand, it's a snot-squirtingly mediocre game that, like so many AAA games of its ilk, has the air of something that was stitched together from pre-existing templates by about nine different teams who haven't been talking to each other since a harrowing experience at the company picnic, but it also has a licensed soundtrack that includes \"Kickstart My Heart\", so on the other hand, it's my Game of the Year; no more questions, please. I can only assume someone at Square must've stolen my high school crush diary, 'cos how else would they know that \"Kickstart My Heart\" is my one weakness? See, there's absolutely no action a living being can take that doesn't become slightly cooler when it's done to \"Kickstart My Heart\"; even finger painting with Grandma takes on a sort of air of euphoric defiance.\n\nAnyway, Guardians of the Galaxy is Square Enix making hay as the Disney contract shines, with a cinematic, strictly single-player, non-live service-y game based on a Marvel movie property to hopefully counteract what they did with Marvel's Avengers and convince us to stop sitting on their head. And they really are splashing that Disney money around for this one, licensing every classic 80's rock song that ever spent a regretful, drink-sodden afternoon in Guitar Hero's love shack; there's even a couple of direct references to Star Wars, that I'm sure someone bought a second yacht over.\n\nWhich makes it all the more weird to me that, as with Avengers, they refuse to just flat-out adapt the fucking movies; they'll use the same aesthetics and the same characters with the same traits, if some slight changes to the backstories, but recast them all with their fucking stunt doubles! Oh, I'm sure there's some cunty bureaucratic reason - I'm sure the fact that it's technically a new adaptation means some twat in a suit banked two paychecks this week - but try explaining that to the heartbroken kiddywinks wanting to know why Star-Lord is no longer lovable, huggable Chris Pratt, but instead, some thuggish frat boy cunt with a steam iron for a face and a haircut that makes him look like the result of the unplanned anal pregnancy of both Beavis and Butt-Head. But like an angel with poor finger dexterity, you know I hate to harp on.\n\nOur story begins with Star-Chode and his motley crew - Drax \"Pro Wrestler Named After a Bathroom Disinfectant\" The Destroyer, Rocket \"My Motion Capture Animation Makes Me Look Like a Tiny Person in a Mascot Costume\" Raccoon, Gam \"I Don't Really Have Anything to Do in this Plot\" Ora, and Rocket Raccoon's pot plant - flying through space, doing their best Cowboy Bebop impression when their latest money-making scheme goes awry, and they get embroiled in a threat against the entire galaxy that they must overcome by finally learning to come together and work as a team, which they do about eight or nine times at a conservative estimate. Because AAA only makes two kinds of single-player games these days: open worlds, and this thing, a tortuously drawn-out sequence of clunkily separated gameplay modes strung together like a collage on the wall of a primary school classroom.\n\nIt's got a token combat element, relegated strictly to samey, enclosed combat arenas; action setpieces, possibly involving quick-time events; or their kissing cousin, the chase sequence, where you die instantly if you do anything other than press forwards. And all of that is spaced out with prolonged sequences of walking very slowly through spectacular skyboxes, occasionally squeezing through very narrow passages so the rendering engine can have a quick swig of energy drink before the next spectacular skybox.\n\nThroughout these slow bits, the characters banter; by the anal fist-work of the Siddhartha Buddha, do they banter! You can't stop 'em; it's like that Spider-Man three-panel daily newspaper comic where Spider-Man has to recap that he's up against Doctor Octopus nineteen times in a single lunch meeting. They bang on about what they're doing, what they just did, what they're about to do. \"Ooh, the boss we're about to fight is supposed to be, like, ninety feet tall, with wings like stage curtains and teeth like an overbooked Ku Klux Klan meeting!\" Which usually turns out to be true, even though it sounded like they were setting up a gag where the boss turns out to be a goat in a hat or something. I feel sorry for the no-doubt small legion of poor bastards they had writing all this shit, because about 75% of the conversations got cut off by me entering a narrow passage or starting the next setpiece because of my infuriating desire to progress in the game at slightly above a slow walking pace.\n\nSee, none of this feels like it exists organically, or is essential for the telling of the story it's trying to tell; it feels like it's there to fill in a template. Why else would Stank-Lord routinely land his ship half a fucking mile from the house of the person we came to visit? Because the next two hours have been earmarked for walking slowly down a corridor until the action setpiece light comes on and the floor promptly collapses beneath us. Then a token sequence where we slide down a hill on our bum ensues, where I might as well strap the controller to my wrist and play by enthusiastically milking an unruly cow for all the difference it makes; then, we return to slow corridor-walking with absolutely nothing changed, except now \"chafed bumcheeks\" have been added to the list of things to banter about.\n\nAnd of course, other parts of the pointless journey have been earmarked for some samey combat arenas so we can justify the token shitty upgrade menu and still call it a \"video game\" with a straight face, in which Stank-Load's standard laser gun attack feels about as effective as tossing glow sticks at the house of someone you hate, who doesn't even realize you hate them, and that makes you hate them even more. So it's more about waiting for cooldowns to end so you can strategically instruct your four chums to use their actually effective attacks, a combat system presumably designed to emphasize Pant-Load's status as leader, as is the super-special attack thing where you can call a time-out, and the enemies weirdly obligingly take a quick piss break while you select the obviously correct dialogue line from two options that gives your team a super-buff and picks a random licensed song to play for the rest of the fight, which, if you're lucky, will be \"Kickstart My Heart\", and if you're unlucky, will be fucking Rick Astley or something, which is like when your nice, hot, invigorating shower unexpectedly switches to dispensing cold sick into your face.\n\nFrankly, the combat also feels like it's more here to tick boxes than offer any kind of smoothly integrated gameplay, but you know what? Guardians of the Galaxy is like the Marvel movies in general: it's an ocean of samey, predictable blandness and meaningless action setpieces that very often feels like it's been machine-produced in a factory where the workforce all speak different languages, but it's got this occasional flash of imagination and good humor that means we have to keep slogging through the rest of it to see if any more happen.\n\nI remember thinking this at the bit in the game where we have to escape from a prison by directing a space llama to a control panel through the repulsive power of Gamora's terrible singing voice; I guess there's not really a core mechanic in that, but it was interesting. Take all the shit like that, cut off about 75% of the plodding through copy-pasted areas, gouge out everything that doesn't progress the plot, pull its legs off, stick them up its nose, wrap its lower intestine around its neck like a pretty scarf, and then you'll have... eugh. Something I'd rather didn't stand on the living room carpet.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Back 4 Blood.\n\nGame: Back 4 Blood\n\nReviewed: 2021-10-27\n\nOh boy, another entry for the hall of thinly-disguised remakes of games made by creators who don't have the rights to the originals anymore! (And yes, it was a lot of work fitting all that on the plaque by the door.) This time, it's Turtle Rock, the original creators of zombie shooter Left 4 Dead, bringing out their new zombie shooter, Back 4 Blood - boy, that disguise is thin even by the usual standards, isn't it?", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "That's like a uniformed policeman trying to go undercover by putting his hat on backwards. - Valve, it seems, not being terribly interested in doing anything more with Left 4 Dead, as it had kind of realized its full potential and Valve prefer to be innovators; either that, or they were all too busy playing that game where they fling a handful of cash at a stucco ceiling and place bets on how much of it will stick. But Turtle Rock were all like, \"What if, instead of Left 4 Dead making no more money, it instead made some more money?\"\n\nAnd thus was planted the seed of Back 4 Blood. The \"4\" in the name comes from there being four playable characters, you see, which is a bit weird, since Back 4 Blood has eight playable characters; yeah, you can only have four playing at a time, but if you're into number puns, there's a lot you can do with eight. \"Running L-8\"; \"Zombies 8 My Face\". Oh, wait, not zombies; \"Infected\". No wait, not Infected; \"Ridden\". Ridden?! That's a word that just reeks of \"we had to come up with a legally distinct alternative\", isn't it? No one in reality would call them \"The Ridden\". What, we up against a resistance group founded by disgruntled domestic horses? I keep misreading it as \"The Riddler\", and wondering if civilization has finally been brought down by Batman's most confounding foe.\n\nBut I digress. As I say, there's eight playable characters, and-- Ooh! I just thought of another number pun title: \"Dead W-8\". Oh, sure, on the one hand, you have distinct characters like \"old woman\" and \"chunky, bespectacled doomsday prepper manwho was probably very grateful that the zombie apocalypse meant he didn't have to go to his court hearing for joining the January 6 riots\", but then you have two variations on \"serious man with beard\", as well as Hot Girl A and Hot Girl B, characters I can only assume were added to the mix in order to have more cosmetic variance with which to fuel the grind machine.\n\nNot that I care much about cosmetics when I'm not in a CVS at three in the morning, desperately seeking a Christmas gift for a middle-aged female relative, but the cosmetics in this game really are pathetic. \"Ooh, be a good boy and grind all your vegetables, and we'll let you have one of three pastel-colored dress shirts that don't have any of the accessories your default look has, but your co-op partners might appreciate the dressed-down look in the three seconds before you're all interchangeably covered in blood and puke!\"\n\nSo as for the gameplay, well, it's Left 4 Dead, isn't it? That's entirely by design: you go level by level through infested streets, farms, and public buildings, headshotting hordes by the hundred, occasionally having to deal with special zombies that are similar to the Spitter, the Smoker, the Boomer, etc., but with nice, legally distinct names that no one in reality would ever use. \"The Hocker\"? What, is it a disgruntled fan of Canadian sports? Although, I feel like the special zombies' abilities seem to be more focused on just dicking the survivors about than strategically separating them; most of them, while incapacitating a player, just sort of stand there in an awkward clinch, waiting for the other players to rescue them like they only read the first half of The Undead Monstrosity's Guide to Speed Dating.\n\nRather than Left 4 Bread's short campaigns, Back 4 Biscuits has one big one, and the loading screen has a little timeline track showing exactly how far along it you are in case you need to plan an upcoming wedding reception around it. But I don't know if I'd call it terribly plot-focused, any more than a communal swimming pool is \"small child urine-focused\"; sure, it's there, but it's fairly easy to put out of your mind and probably not worth worrying too much about. You're part of a community of survivors in the post-apocalypse taking orders from a stock, no-nonsense military bloke, and there's a scientist and some kind of new weapon to use against the Riddled. Honestly, it was hard to keep track of what was going on at any given moment because the explanatory voices tended to get drowned out by zombie violence, and the other players I was with just wanted to press on and continue working towards the next pastel-colored dress shirt.\n\nThat, at least, one could avoid by playing with bots, of course, but if you do that, you'll quickly find that the bots can be relied upon about as much as a Ryvita seatbelt; when they're not having difficulty outwitting a dastardly-placed corner or knee-high fence, they're just standing there, not doing anything, because they need someone to tilt their head until their brain rolls back into place. One time, I found two of them somehow both clipped inside the same bit of wall; I didn't know whether to restart the level or congratulate them on the upcoming marriage. I wouldn't even bother attempting the final boss in solo mode, 'cos I seem to be the only one who realized we were supposed to be shooting it in the weak spots rather than stand around comparing eyebrow length or whatever the fuck they were doing. Oh yeah; there's a final boss.\n\nSince there's only so many ways we can rephrase \"It's just like Left 4 Dead, but with lift-up flaps\", we might as well catalogue all the ways 2 Back 2 Furious differs from it, and one of those ways is with monster bigness; as well as the final boss, there's a recurring boss that's a giant colossus made of expired delicatessen meat. But to dwell on which game has the biggest displays of pork products in its trousers is to miss the point; after all, it's not like these bosses really add anything to gameplay besides provide big, obvious bullet-sponges on which to hone our ability to point at a big thing.\n\nThe point is, if Left 4 Dead had any subtlety at all, with its giant, screaming zombie hordes and big fat dudes with weaponized bulimia, Back 4 Blood excises it; it's more interested in throwing endless parades of special zombies at you than in building Left 4 Dead's characteristic peaks and troughs, where the game would pull out the bum dildo for a few moments to let you get your breath back and appreciate the times when it isn't buggering you senseless. Without that, Back 4 Blood is just a stream of noise, and I struggle to remember any standout moments from it. But what are you going to do, Left 4 Dead fans? Play all the other new Left 4 Dead content that's coming out thick and fast? No; this is the only new Left 4 Dead you're getting, and you're stuck with it, so you might as well try to smile as the bum dildo slides home.\n\nIt's not even that it's bad, really; it's just not that interesting. \"But Yahtzee! You haven't even mentioned the deck-building element! Surely, there could be nothing more interesting than a deck-building element obliging you to sort and select your cards before you start playing, akin to James Bond not being able to go to his next globe-trotting action scene until we spend five minutes watching him decide what underpants to pack. Surely, Yahtzee? ...Yahtzee? ...Yahtzee? ...Surely? ...Say something, Yahtzee.\" Um... breasts?\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Metroid Dread.\n\nGame: Metroid Dread\n\nReviewed: 2021-10-20\n\nMetroid Dread is, sadly, not a game about space bounty hunter Samus Aran ill-advisedly putting out a vanity reggae album, but a new Metroid game on the Switch that leans a little bit more into the space horror theme that lurks at the bottom of a lot of Metroid games like all the tasty, cheesy bits in an ineptly-tossed salad. It's also a direct sequel to Metroid Fusion on the GBA, but you kids of today probably won't appreciate that much. \"GBA? What's that stand for? 'Granddad's Babbling Again'?\" No, you little bastards! Game Boy Advance, a significant handheld in the annals of gaming. \"Look, we don't want to hear any more about what kind of advances you've been making on gay boys, Yahtz, least of all annal-related ones.\" BAH! How could you nipple-chafers understand the significance of a new Metroid game that actually adds to the canon and isn't a prequel, or a remake, or an interquel, or something best cauterized out of memory like Metroid: Other M?\n\nBut since it is building on the plot developments in Metroid Fusion, you might be confused by a few things if you aren't up to speed; most significantly, the fact that you don't fight any Metroids in Metroid Dread. The main threat is The X, the shapeshifting parasites that Metroid Fusion introduced, and which are slightly hard to take seriously because they're little, colored blobs that look like they'd be cast as the baddies in an animated toothpaste advert. Anyway, Samus Aran goes off to explore a mysterious, labyrinthine planet - partly because of something to do with The X, and partly because that's all she ever fucking does - and predictably enough, something kicks the shit out of her and nicks all her power-ups, so she has to start the long journey of gathering them all back up, stripped down to her underpants like she forgot to bring her P.E. kit to school.\n\nBut you know how it is with tentpole Nintendo franchises; they're a slave to routine: Mario fights Bowser, Link fights Ganondorf, Samus Aran fights her own urge to self-harm every time she finds another secret pickup she needs the fucking power bomb to get. So obviously, it's a 2D Metroidva-- well, just \"Metroid\", I guess, with Lava Land, Ocean Land, Jungle Land, Boring Land, etc., gradually opened up by acquiring the same power-ups as always: Varia suit, grapple beam, space jump. Samus gets to call her thing a \"space jump\" because she's from the space region of space, for everyone else is just a sparkling double-jump.\n\nBut for every nine thousand established things a Metroid game has to have, it's entitled to one new thing, and that's where that lean into horror I mentioned comes in; each area features a big, chasey robot what you can't damage, and which insta-kills you if it catches you. I say \"insta-kill\"; you can escape it if you pass a blatantly unfair quick-time event, that's like having to kill a fly with the swatter taped to your elbow. You're supposed to stealth around the robot, but it moves so quickly and unpredictably that there's a lot of frustrating trial and error, and if I dread these moments, it'd only be in the sense that I dread walking through a park full of small groups of very judgmental teenagers while wearing my silliest hat, if it weren't for the slightly disquieting way the robot holds Samus down and jams its big probe inside her.\n\nYou defeat each robot by finding a room with a giant spunk-beam of death that can only be used once, because it has to turn itself over and go back to sleep for a while before it's ready for another round. \"Oh, look at Yahtzee seeing sex metaphors everywhere just 'cos the main character's a lady, and he's about as woke as a sloth on nitrous oxide!\" Hey, don't tell me this series has never played up the \"lady\" thing; look at Metroid: Other M, or to give it its more accurate title, \"Babies: Other Babies\". Even in Metroid Dread, the power armor around Samus' thighs has gotten noticeably double-C \"thicc\", shimmying those child-bearing hips back and forth like two basketballs on a swing. Samus must be getting on in years by now, right? Wonder if she has ever thought about settling down and giving birth to something horrifying.\n\nSorry, was I doing a game review? Shit! Better review the game, then! If you like 2D Metroid games, then you'll like this, because it's largely just another 2D Metroid, isn't it? Explore the map, shoot the things. It was a little irritating having to keep in mind the various combinations of buttons that make the beams work, especially with those Joy-Con shoulder buttons designed for people whose fingers don't occasionally get mistakenly covered in sauerkraut by absent-minded New Yorkers, but isn't that largely my fault for not having gotten around to paying kindly Uncle Nintendo another seventy bucks for a Pro Controller that doesn't stick drift like a glue tanker on a wet road-- Jesus Christ, when did I write that?\n\nThe process of navigating the maze and developing your map-reading skills is broken up by the odd exciting boss fight against a giant horror and several considerably less exciting ones. It is a bit disappointing how much Metroid Dread repeats itself in the boss department; firstly, there's the non-consensual probing robots that are all dealt with in the exact same way, only with increasingly better detecting ability, because that power armor is only making Samus' armpit stank get worse over time. Then in the latter half of the game, there's an armored dude with a spear, who either keeps showing up in different-colored armor with exactly the same attacks and counters, or has a lot of twin siblings and their mother had to keep track of them with coordinated outfits.\n\nI'm also not a fan of how the story's told. It's like Metroid Dread has two stories: the one that starts and ends things, and the one you're in for all the rest of the time. The dude who duffs up Samus at the beginning and reduces her to naught but her bottom layer of power armor she normally only wears when house-painting only shows up again right at the end for the final boss fight. Although, his story does get touched upon at roughly the midpoint, when we stumble upon a character who might as well be named \"Exposition Q. Dumpington\", who stands there in an otherwise empty room and explains the entire plot to Samus in one ten-minute monologue. I know it's hard to work plot exposition into an action game without killing the pace, but there were more elegant ways than this! What, was this Skeksis-looking motherfucker waiting here the whole time, rehearsing his speech? It was like going into a men's bathroom in a classy nightclub, and the attendant wants to stand next to you while you're pissing and explain the entire history of urinal technology.\n\nMeanwhile, the rest of the game is telling us a story about Samus having to deal with the constant threat of terrifying sexual assault robots that escalates as the robots become more and more dangerous, before - and I guess if you don't want to hear a spoiler, now is the time to cover your ears, run screaming out of your house, and get run over by a bus - the last of the killer robots just gets punked in a cutscene and kicked out of the way so the final boss can take over the plot. Just feels like we've been spending this whole time fending off these robots' advances, and then that whole aspect of the game gets cheated out of a proper payoff.\n\nI'm not asking that they line up all the robots with canes and top hats and have them do a song-and-dance routine... or maybe I am, thinking about it. It'd grab headlines, wouldn't it, Nintendo? Probably stay in the news cycle longer than casting Chris Pratt as Mario did.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Far Cry 6.\n\nGame: Kena: Far Cry 6\n\nReviewed: 2021-10-13\n\nWell, hijack my helicopters; I can't believe there's been six Far Cry games already! Surely, the concept of liberating an open world sandbox from a charismatic fuckface by clearing out base after base with a silenced sniper rifle and occasionally having to shake a mountain lion off your todger is still as fresh and exciting as a dissipating fart in a locked sauna. So what original new setting is the premise being air-dropped into now, Ubisoft? Liberating a chain of remote Scottish islands from charismatic football hooligans? Liberating an Antarctic research station from a charismatic penguin? \"No! This time, you're liberating... a tropical island!\" Um... you mean, like in Far Cry 3? And Far Cry 1? \"No, of course not! You're in the Caribbean, for a start; that's slightly more equatorial than the last two tropical islands, probably. And anyway, this time, you're liberating the tropical island from a charismatic totalitarian dictator!\" Like the one in Far Cry 4? \"Look, if you like freshness so much, why don't you piss off to your local Whole Foods and stick your head under the intermittent broccoli-misting device? I mean, this game was made by a multicultural team of various religious faiths and...\"\n\nDid anyone else get a five off of Far Cry Vibe-- I mean, a vibe off of Far Cry 5 that the series was feeling kind of done, based on the fact that it was set close to home in the U.S. rather than some comfortably distant hypothetical foreign clime, and not really much else? Oh, unless you count a little thing like IT ENDED WITH A FUCKING NUCLEAR APOCALYPSE?! (Spoiler alert!) Do you think that could've ever-so-subtly hinted at finality as a theme? As such, Far Cry 6 has this air of tired obligation, even before you get into the recycled setting and concepts; even the box art looks like it's going to go back to bed as soon as the cameras are off.\n\nWhatever. On the fictional tropical probably-slightly-more-equatorial island of Yara, a charismatic totalitarian dictator with the emphasis on \"dick\" is oppressing the people, and you are a generic ex-military type with ties to the resistance and a mysterious tendency to go on violent rampages as favours for people you've just met. You're planning to get on a refugee boat and escape to America where you will happily live out your days getting blamed for all the nation's problems like chronically obese people in motorized wheelchairs, but moot point, because you're going to escape about as surely as the annoying fly in my kitchen when I'm holding the back door wide fucking open.\n\nSo of course, your boat gets shot up and all your friends die, and you wash up on the beach. Interestingly though, this doesn't change your motive; you only sign up with the rebels so they'll give you another less shot-up boat to escape to Disney World in. Which they do, also interestingly, at the end of the first chapter, wishing you the best of luck with your Burger King application. So I'm looking at this boat, thinking, \"Hang on! This smacks of that 'joke ending' thing the last couple of Far Crys have done, where you can make your character flat-out not start the game and piss off home instead.\" And I was buggered if I was going to play the whole first chapter again, so I just meekly went back to the rebels and magically became a die-hard, dedicated revolutionary because the premise demanded it.\n\nThis annoyed me because, in previous games - well, mainly just 3 - I enjoyed the way the main character and his motives developed organically over the course of the plot, but this feels like they're asking me to do all the work! What, do I just invent my own reason for why my dude abandons his escape plan and joins the rebels? Fine; I'm also going to invent that he secretly draws gummy bears porn and has a model 19th century sailboat instead of a cock. Whee! This is fun!\n\nSo, having been peeled off the beach like a used condom in Brighton about an hour ago, the badass resistance lady now tells us that we're the best guerilla ever and we must now leave her to travel all around the country, showing everyone how good we are at guerilla-ing, which is the tactic I always used to get rid of the annoying girl in middle school. And so begins our quest to find just one fucking character who isn't, \"stock badass violence-liking person\" or \"stock wacky violence-liking person\", neither of which will trust us until we go to the one enemy base that's the specific stray pube in their own personal zipper and silenced-sniper-rifle our way through all the available heads like a superpowered worm in a bowl of apples.\n\nAs is the standard template for Far Cry now, they put all the characterization eggs in the main villain basket, so every few missions, we get to see charismatic psycho du jour do a little speech as we sit watching like little doggies at the dining table, trying to catch a few crumbs of emotional investment before getting back to the daily grind. But little doggie cannot live on crumb alone, and it's the lack of character development that's the main thing failing to spark my engagement here, in both the story and gameplay department. Ooh, segue! There's no upgrade tree, really, at least not for your dude; you can upgrade your bases with a thing that lets you do the fishing minigame or the \"read three pages of a choose-your-own-adventure book\" minigame, none of which allows you to parachute onto enemy bases more efficiently or makes bullets come out of my silenced sniper rifle any faster.\n\nOne thing that has mixed up the formula is that enemies have specific weaknesses, so you can't insta-kill headshot dudes unless you're using the right bullets - armor-piercing rounds on soft, regular heads just ghost right through their skull, apparently, pausing only to do a little tidying-up and leave a business card in the hypothalamus - so what that meant in the long run was that I had to bring TWO silenced sniper rifles to every base assault. Finding better weapons and weapon attachments is the main way to upgrade your violence capacity, and that falls by the wayside once you have picked out a decent enough arsenal, and then it's just air-drops and skull-shots over and over again, like the two least popular brands of Halloween candy.\n\nSorry if I sound tired, but you know how it is: if a game sits yawning at me over and over again, it's only a matter of time before I start yawning back, and to reiterate, Far Cry 6 really seems like it wants to go back to bed. There was one car chase plot mission I had to retry, like, seventeen times, 'cos I was stuck in the back of a speeding truck with no fucking cover while enemy trucks just freely drove right up and riddled me with lead, because I couldn't control where my car went 'cos my driver kept getting distracted by lollipop ladies, and the whole mission just felt very carelessly slapped-together as far as game design goes.\n\nAs for whether the overarching story is worth it, well, you'd have to ask someone who finished the game. The above-mentioned mission was strike one, but even after I finally beat it by waiting for a few lucky breaks in a row with the enemy pursuers' A.I. fucking up and failing to outwit the deceptive cunning of several passing stationary objects, the rest of the game just wasn't keeping my interest alive; reused setting, none of that interesting magical realism element that 5 leant into a lot where reality keeps breaking down 'cos you're on so many drugs, you've forgotten how to tell your arms from your legs and keep picking your nose with your big toe. So, sorry, but I don't see why I should put the effort in if the game won't; tug of war with only one player is just some twat holding a rope.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Kena: Bridge of Spirits.\n\nGame: Kena: Bridge of Spirits\n\nReviewed: 2021-10-06\n\nI don't indulge hype. Watching pre-release trailers and gameplay videos at any time other than E3 feels like watching someone scoffing birthday cake on any day other than their birthday: unaccountably wrong, and I feel sorry for the small children whose party it was supposed to be. So for that reason, I neither knew nor cared what Kena (HRUUH) Bridge of Spirits was when the review code dropped into my lap, but now having played through it in full, one of those facts has changed; I now know what it is.\n\nThis review is going to be a bit difficult for me, 'cos I finished Kena (HRUUH) Bridge of Spigots on day two of the five days I had set aside for finishing it, and then spent the subsequent three days trying to beat my record for most whiteboard markers shoved up a single nostril; definitely one of the shorter open-world exploration games I've had to dodge-roll through. So I'm already having trouble remembering it, even before factoring in its utter forgettableness. Fortunately, if I do start to struggle, I can just bring to mind the character design, and the way those freakish, gigantic eyeballs bore into my soul like those of a hungry barn owl to a timid field mouse.\n\nThe protagonist - presumably named \"Kena\", but the Zelda games have confused this issue for decades - is one part Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn, one part Jade from Beyond Good & Evil, and one part What's-Her-Name from Legend of Korra, living in a classic example of \"video game generic, primitive, spiritual society that's a little bit Viking and a little bit Ancient Japan and just enough Native American that it keeps insufferably bringing it up in social settings\". Kena is a spirit guide, who has come to a ruined village to help the ghosts of the newly dead move on to the next world by getting over the lingering embarrassment they feel about whatever poorly thought-out wank accident claimed their lives while, at the same time, getting to the bottom of the disaster that has filled the land with evil, corrupt monsters and purging them with her nice, good, not-corrupt magic. We know her magic is nice because it's teal and white, while the monsters and the blobby things they hang around are red and black, and therefore, corrupt. Smacks of profiling, if you ask me; oh sure, purging a forest grove of red, blobby things and restoring a luxurious carpet of green grass is all very well until you get the bill for having to run the fucking sprinklers every morning.\n\nStrike one against Kena: Sprinkle of Biscuits is that it's not exactly effervescent with exciting new gameplay ideas. It's a slightly Zelda-like - Zeldesque? - open world about going to the blobby, red, corrupted areas of the map in turn and restoring life and tealness to the land, generally by beating up a few angry, corrupt things with some utterly bog-standard combat featuring Mr. Light Attack, Mrs. Heavy Attack, and their delightful children, Dodge, Block, and Parry; broken up with some puzzling here, and some climbing around a highly selective sequence of highlighted ledges there.\n\nStrike two is that our engagement with the story takes a hit from Kena, the protagonist, not having any personal connection to events; basically, she's a roaming janitor, who's come to sweep up someone else's mess so she can put it on her CV or something. She meets a sequence of restless spirits, and then, after fighting a series of generic humanoid boss monsters, stands off to one side with a slightly condescending look on her face as the spirits talk about all the very interesting things they did in the run-up to their deaths, and how it's a shame Kena missed them and now has to be in the middle of things, bringing all the energy down with her general presence.\n\nIt probably sounds like I have an axe to grind - or at the very least, a machete to twerk - for Kena: Smoky Bacon, but I really don't; while it doesn't do anything mind-blowingly well, it doesn't really fuck anything up, either.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "For a modern open-world game, there's surprisingly little extraneous bullshit: no multiple varieties of meaningless collectibles; no elaborate action setpieces; no equipment system to let you trade out your +0.7% liquorice damage Legend of Korra costume for a +1.2% elbow stamina Legend of Korra costume identical, but for slightly longer turn-ups.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "None of that; just a rather bare and autumnal upgrade tree, and everything wrapped up in two gameplay sessions.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "It's refreshing, at least; just not the sort of thing you'd write fan-fiction about, or aggressively defend in the YouTube comments of video reviews by people who couldn't give two pumps of a second-hand Fleshlight for your opinion.\n\nAnd the lack of upgrades or equipment does present the problem of having little with which to reward the player for exploring and doing side stuff; the solution the designers hit upon for that was hats, possibly after being bitten by a radioactive Team Fortress 2. There's these tiny, adorable potato-men who fuel Kena's special attacks, and who hang around staring at her like dogs when you linger near the treat cupboard, and half the time, the only thing hidden chests contain are little hats for your potatoes to wear. I wouldn't mind this if all the optional chests contained hats; then I would know not to fucking bother with side stuff at all, because I've got better things to do than play tater tot dress-up. But when you take on a tough challenge, hoping for upgrade points or extra potato-men, and come away with nothing but a root vegetable-sized tam o' shanter, it's hard not to feel a little bit kicked in the spuds.\n\nBut that's more of a minor fingerling issue than a great big deal-breaking King Edward. As I say, there's nothing particularly wrong with Kena: Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, which is probably why the couple of things I do find irksome stand out all the stronger, like choking hazards in my morning porridge. And the biggest, most notable fish hook in the oatmeal for me - and I stress, this might just be a me thing - is the character design.\n\nThey've gone for a Disney Pixar-inspired look, so everyone's got that \"Elsa from Frozen\" face, with the manipulative doe-eyes so gigantic that if you intend to get lost in them, you should probably pack at least twelve days' worth of provisions, and the chubby cheeks and tiny noses, and slightly unsettlingly-realistic hair, and constant lopsided, condescending expression like they're expecting the photo for the movie poster to be taken at any moment, and the general look like they've just been through Jeff Goldblum's wonky teleporter with a gerbil who, in turn, had just gone through Jeff Goldblum's wonky teleporter with a balloon animal. This is an art style that suits goofy family musicals about friendship, not the humorless, po-faced psychopomp shit going on here; you look at their feet and slowly track upwards, and your brain goes, \"Normal proportions, normal proportions, normal proportions, JESUS FUCKING CHRIST! The gerbil got into the helium cupboard!\"\n\nYeah, I'm probably harping on it too much now, but its constant presence was a little burrowing terrier in the back of my head for the entire experience, constantly holding me back from fully engaging with it. As I say, this might be a me thing; I am, by all accounts, a miserable bastard. I broke up with my last ex for maliciously-excessive smiling; that'll teach me to stop going out with dolphins.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Lost in Random.\n\nGame: Lost in Random\n\nReviewed: 2021-09-29\n\nA lot of games these days start with the story or theme and pick the gameplay elements off the peg, as it were: a nice coat of open-world, a sweater of stealth-action, large, unflattering underpants of crafting bearing the skid marks of, like, fifteen previous wearers. Personally, the games I find more interesting are the ones that started by coming up with some unique gameplay element, and then tailored a story and setting around that; Pokémon would be a good example, the game set in a society that almost completely revolves around cockfighting to the point that even the nurses have trained fighting roosters as personal assistants, which would be like if, in the UK, footballers were employed at every level of society, like they hire a few to hang around hospital corridors, kicking donated organs into operating rooms.\n\nAnd then there's this week's subject, Lost in Random, a game that clearly started with a combat system based around combining random dice rolls with deck-building and real-time combat along some Hand of Fate-y sort of lines, and then had to contrive a setting and story entirely based around that. For a start, it takes place in the land of Random; as in, that's literally what it's called. Fucking hell; even Pokémon isn't flat-out set in Wounded Poultry-Topia. In the distant past of Random, everyone had a dice, and all conflict was resolved in dice battles, where warriors threw dice to score points and spent the points to use the cards in their hand to make weapons manifest. We aren't told how this whole arrangement came about; seems like a lot of middlemen could've been cut out of this process. What's wrong with just twatting each other with sticks? Or how about this: twat each other with the dice? Line the corner up right, you could probably gouge an eye out.\n\nAnyway, this all changed when an evil queen arrived and destroyed everyone's dice except her own, with which she now rules over all of Random, decreeing that whenever a child comes of age, they must be taken away from their families and forced to live in whichever of the six conveniently-numbered cities her dice decrees. The story focuses on Odd and Even, two young sisters who are lowly peasants living in Onetown, or \"Oners\", as they're known; I'd have gone with \"Wonkas\", myself. After Odd rolls a six and is taken away by the queen's minions, Even vows to journey across the land to rescue her from her new position of wealth and high status and resume their happy, carefree lives in the sewer where they belong. On the way, she joins forces with the last of the magical dice, allowing her to fight back against the queen's army of robot enforcers by mastering the art of random fighting, and not in the sense of the thing I always do when forced to play Mortal Kombat.\n\nThis is probably one of those reviews where all the comments will be like, \"Ugh, why are you playing this game I personally haven't heard of, instead of the latest installment of Broody Anime Swordboy and the Hottie He Persistently Fails to Snog Adventures?\" But you should know by now that I'm attracted to quirkiness, and Lost in Random has a lot of that very specific Tim Burton-y, American McGee's Alice-y flavor of quirk where the environment designers have never heard of a straight line, and all the characters look like factory-reject plushies made from stitched-together discarded fish carcasses.\n\nActually, if I were to summarize Lost in Random's theming, I'd go for, \"It's American McGee's Alice if Lewis Carroll's estate sent the frighteners around and told them they had to take out all the references to Alice in Wonderland, and then another set of frighteners from Isaac Newton's estate came around and told them it couldn't have any jumping, either.\" It does feel weird that the game doesn't have a \"Jump\" button - yeah, Even's got pipe cleaners for legs, but that never stopped Sonic the Hedgehog - and the lack of vertical movement hamstrings a lot of the environment into corridor mazes which no amount of trapezoidal doorways can make terribly interesting. Nor, indeed, can a terribly quirky, artisanal map screen that's absolutely bloody useless for actually figuring out how to get to places.\n\nOn a similar note, while there's a lot of creativity in character design, the characters don't do much. So you'll have a dude with four eyes and a head shaped like a chesterfield sofa, and another that looks like a character from SpongeBob SquarePants recreated in decaying chicken skin, and they're all just standing around, waiting for you to talk to them so they can send you on one of the suffocating wastes of time they call \"side-quests\", which generally entail going out of your way to talk to another weirdo across town, then reporting back on what they said. Then, you get rewarded with a card you've already got and don't use much anyway. Unrewarding? Lack of movement options? Hard to understand map? Bunch of weirdoes standing around? What is this? The San Francisco bus system?\n\nSo in gameplay terms, at least, Lost in Random has gone all in on the combat system; how that works is, you build yourself a deck of cards you've collected, then when you're in the combat arena, you use your harmless slingshot weapon to burst a few of the enemies' protruding blackheads so you can gather enough magic pus to draw a few cards. Then you roll the dice to get a number of points that you can then spend on activating the cards, so you activate a \"Big Twatting Stick\" card to equip yourself with a twatting stick with which to twat the enemy. Yeah, I know it sounds like an awful lot of unnecessary steps in the way of twatting things with sticks, but it's having to deal with the random element that adds the extra spice, isn't it?\n\nMaybe you needed to spend the points on healing this round; maybe you didn't have enough points for the twatting stick, and had to go back to bursting zits for a few minutes or make do with a castigating tube. Maybe you didn't draw a \"Twatting Stick\" card this round, so you have to lay down a trap, or that one that makes your dice friend explode after nine seconds. Bitch, I don't know where the fuck I'm going to be in nine seconds; I've lost control of my life! Or maybe you'll draw the card that shoots a laser as powerful as a stream of cold piss between you and your dice friend, that you might be able to politely ask the enemies to stand in the way of if you're lucky. Or maybe you won't, 'cos you didn't put that card in your deck, 'cos you're not a fucking dunce!\n\nHybrids of turn-based and live-action combat rarely turn out for the best; in this case, all that really matters is damaging the enemy. No method they give you is more efficient than a big twatting stick or some explosive arrows, and while you're waiting for one of those to come up, you can just dodge-roll the enemy attacks; it's not exactly strategic. And you can tell they were struggling to come up with ideas for cards, because there's only about thirty, and a lot of them are useless, and by the end of the game, the fucking card merchant, literally bellend on the kitchen worktop, ran out of cards to sell me, and then, whoops! In-game money and everything I could do to get it suddenly had no purpose!\n\nBut I don't hate Lost in Random; there was creativity on display. The story hits in the right places, and it was, after all, an experiment, and that's laudable; experiments are how we learn. This particular mix of injections made the guinea pig's brain die off. No worries; chalk it up, bring in a new guinea pig. What do you mean, \"Get out of my pet shop! \"?\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Deathloop.\n\nGame: Deathloop\n\nReviewed: 2021-09-22\n\nYou know what? Fine; maybe time loop games can be a genre. They're a nice, neat way to formalize the standard save-load function within the context of the plot, and they let us live the fantasy of not having to advance beyond the present day and watch our civilization's gradual transformation into a gigantic consumer electronics landfill. But they can't officially be a genre without a proper exemplar; what Doom is to Doom clones, Dark Souls to Souls-likes, the bitter polyamory of Metroid- and -vania. Yeah, I know there's been half a dozen time loop indie games, but there are so many indie games competing for attention, none of them have a high enough profile; it's like trying to see Magic Eye pictures in television static.\n\nDeathloop comes to us from the creators of Dishonored and Prey - or to give it its full title, \"Not That Prey; The Other Prey\" - and brings their trademark \"play it your way\" AAA immersive sim-iness to the time loop concept, but will it be the game that takes the crown of time loop genre namer? No, it won't, frankly; partly for all the reasons listed below, partly because the name just sounds weird the more you say it. \"Deathloop\". \"Dethloop\". Sounds like a bloke with a speech impediment trying to point out a single-masted sailing ship.\n\nThe premise is, you are Colt Vahn, grizzled mercenary-type - 'cos you can't exactly get a job at the DMV with a name like that - who wakes up with no memories on an island full of good-time Charlies who have deliberately locked themselves in a one-day time loop so they can party forever and never have to deal with the ever-downsliding outside world. And Colt wants to escape from this situation, which is the first glaring plot-hole for me. Fucking hell; air-drop in two crates of hard cider and a RealDoll and show me where to sign, guys!\n\nColt discovers that the only way to kill the loop is to assassinate the eight superpowered nerds who set it up, none of whom are particularly hard to kill, but the snag is, you have to kill them all in a single loop, and they're deliberately avoiding each other, so your quest is to repeat the day until you've figured out the precise sequence of actions that will result in all of them carking it, since they don't remember things from loop to loop, and will always keep the same schedule. And that's glaring plot-hole number two, because why would these party nerds want to set up a time loop that resets their own memories every loop? Surely, from their perspective, it would just be a normal day, one that ends with a grizzled mercenary-type decanting their brain matter across the fucking Twister mat.\n\nThere's a lot about the plot I don't get, that might well be explained in some random document or audio log I didn't notice because it was hidden in an office psychotically cluttered with random, pointless assets between a tray of sandwiches and a dog, but the dialogue's fun and light-hearted, and our goals, at least, are made clear enough, so let's find other nits to pick. It's not a huge game; there's only four medium-sized open-ended levels to pick from for each of the loop's four time periods: Morning, Noon, Beer O'Clock, and Regret O'Clock. It's more about practicing the most optimal routes to take to get to your objectives and embracing your inner speedrunner. It's also about building up your skills and arsenal of weapons, because Colt can spend the wibbly-wobbly time points he accrues to bank any piece of equipment for future time loops, which swiftly means he can wrap the difficulty curve around his grizzled stiffy and bugger it like a bedspring full of ham, because combat's fairly shallow, and it doesn't take that long to fill all your equip slots with endgame-quality weapons.\n\nI found a suppressed machine pistol in Loop One that could accurately bestow insta-kill headshots at any range, and that thing was my friend for life; I named it \"Norman\". Which is a shame, because finding better weapons and improving your capabilities is supposed to be the reason to explore and do side-quests, but once I had Norman and the Nexus power that makes everyone around your target die as well, possibly thanks to magically-induced flatulence, I was pretty much good to go. \"Would you like to equip this weapon mod that improves your range?\" What do you think, Norman? Would you like an extra 10% range on top of infinite? Norman doesn't seem enthusiastic, but that might be the suppressor.\n\nAnd beyond Nexus and the Shift power, which is bluntly the Blink power from Dishonored copy-pasted and with the hue slider shifted half an inch, I never found a use for any of the other superpowers. There's Invisibility, which is just the lazy man's Shift and runs out of power faster than an army wife's vibrator, and there's a thing that lets you pick up one dude and throw them across the room, which I'm sure all the dude's friends will think is a very impressive parlor trick as they subject you to lead-based hip replacement surgery. The combat being shallow and not particularly hard is a pretty severe flaw for a game where mastering the combat is supposed to be one of your main motivators; it might've helped if there were more than one enemy type besides \"substance abuser with gun and fragile, squashy head\".\n\nNot for the first time, I wonder if a time loop game would've been a more effective challenge if we weren't allowed to keep stuff from loop to loop, and we had to work \"find effective weapons and powerups\" into our daily routine between \"breakfast wank\" and \"celebratory post-breakfast wank\". I suppose there's nothing stopping you from doing a self-imposed \"no infusions\" challenge, but if I'm having to design your game for you, Arkane, then I expect a mention in the credits and a consultancy fee. Then again, having to find weapons each time could be an almighty pain in the arse, especially near the end after I had discovered the ten-step program for total super-nerd assassination and had to start all over again because I got killed during Step 9 by a passing multiplayer-liking person.\n\nThat's Deathloop's other big feature; playing single-player mode is like being one of the quiet, studious boys at scout camp: you never know if it's safe to go to sleep, or if one of the rowdy lads from the tent next door will run in and fart on your face. Multiplayer-liking people are tasked with invading other people's single-player campaigns and killing them for prizes in your classic Dark Souls fashion, and I've always hated being forced to socialize ever since Mum made me come out of my room to say hello to Auntie Val. But I probably shouldn't complain, because I was just talking shit about the combat being too easy and shallow, and this does at least bring some tension back in. But every time I was invaded, all they did was hide on a roof and snipe my quiet, studious ass, which tells me that the multiplayer-liking people probably also aren't seeing much benefit from varying their approach.\n\nYou know something, listeners? I wanted to like Deathloop a lot more than I did. I do like time loops as a concept, and a game about perfecting a string of sneaky assassinations is a fun way to explore it; on top of that, there's a nice eye for detail, an energy to its writing, and depth to its characters. But at the end of the day, it's let down by its weak core gameplay leg, and that's a problem, because the legs are what's carrying everything; you can't just show up to a figure-skating contest with one leg in a cast and hope to make up for it with a sparkly miniskirt.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Tormented Souls and Artful Escape.\n\nGames: Tormented Souls, Artful Escape\n\nReviewed: 2021-09-16\n\nWell, I guess the release drought's officially over; we've had so many review codes coming to Escapist Towers, we've had to sell some of them off as gently-used wi-fi passwords. I played the first hour of, like, nine different games this week; it's been like speed dating, but where you get to piss on their face. Can't cover them all, but gratifyingly, I can selectively highlight the ones that actually stirred something in me, whether that be admiration or a second round of contemptful wee-wee.\n\nStarting with Tormented Souls, which, as you might've guessed from the title, is, without hyperbole, the most generic survival horror game in the universe. If this were 1999, that is, because Fermented Balls is deliberately aping old, PS1-era \"Resident Evil, Alone in the Dark\" fixed-camera games, and if you've only played modern horror games where you walk through a funhouse hall of mirrors for two hours andthen get a participation award, then you're going to fucking hate it. \"Why can't I angle the camera to look at the thing that's about to twat me across the room?\" \"Because it's a deliberate homage to retro fixed-camera horror games!\" \"Why does the camera angle keep suddenly reversing and making me spin on my heel and sprint back into the monster I'm trying to flee, like a nervous deer at a busy junction?\" \"Deliberate homage, retro horror!\" \"Why can't I save whenever I want? What if my pet chinchilla suddenly goes into labor?\" \"Don't blame me! Blame deliberate homage!\"\n\nI rage-quit after my first attempt, because I used the first save-game token I found way too early and kept getting killed, 'cos combat's like trying to disentangle two dog leashes with both your hands trapped in Pringles tubes. \"Deliberate homage--\" Oh, piss off! But I started again and powered through, and by the end of the game, I had enough ammo to make combat trivial, and I was having to sell off unused save tokens as gently-used drinks coasters; bit of a reverse difficulty curve issue. But I have to admit, I was somewhat engaged with the gameplay by then, either out of nostalgia for the old Silent Hills, or sheer bloody-minded unwillingness to go back to playing Lost Judgment.\n\nIt wasn't the fucking story, which is so achingly generic, it's like it's trying to set a record for the Guinness Book of Things that are So Lazy, I Can't Be Bothered to Finish This Joke Properly. Wake up in an abandoned hospital with no memory? Check. Monsters are all abominations of humanity who look like they got their brain surgery done by a forgetful orthodontist? Check. Main character seems to have the acting range of a wank sock and gets her tits out in literally her second scene of the game? More a movie horror cliche, I suppose, but fuck it; pile it on. Also, there's cults, and really illogical locking mechanisms, and I guess the secret twist of the main character's origin, within the first thirty seconds. It also seems to be trying to cram in as many stolen ideas from its influences as it can; you have to go to a Silent Hill-esque evil, rusty dark world version of the hospital on two brief occasions. But it was \"evil science experiments\" horror up to then; you can't just right-turn into Hellraiser \"reality embuggerance\" horror and then left-turn straight back again, like a lost dad on a poorly-signposted highway junction.\n\nHowever accurately Torrential Spooge recreates retro survival horror and its classic sense of vulnerability from being obliged to fight off demons while having the combat skill of a man with his elbows glued together, there's something terribly grubby and ramshackle about it. Between the gratuitous nudity, numerous plot-holes, and crazy quilt of stolen ideas, it's like there's no higher thinking behind anything in it, beyond \"other horror games have done it\" and \"titties are nice\". It also uses its soundtrack the way I use urine on a speed-date. No silence, no contemplative moments; just a constant conveyor belt of spooky music and low drones, like we just flushed our earbuds down the toilet in Michael Myers' house.\n\nIn brief, Toronto Smells is exactly what it appears to be on the surface and nothing more, which makes for an interesting contrast with our second game, The Artful Escape, a game that, after the first ten minutes, I really thought I was going to hate. You're a young hipster guitarist whose glasses are as large as his trousers are tight, living in a small town where everyone expects him to live up to his famous guitarist uncle, but he's sad because he wants to have his own identity. And instantly, I assumed we were in Dreamscaper/Sea of Solitude territory: the \"Get the fuck over yourself!\" hipster indie game about a \"boo-hoo, this small town is oppressing my creative, free spirit; why doesn't anyone understand my privileged, conventionally attractive person problems?\" conventionally attractive person, who will probably end up moving to New York and then never leaving their apartment because they're afraid of all the shouty people.\n\nIndie games are supposed to be a place of unbridled creativity unyoked from publisher interference; why do people keep making games about sad people in apartments? Also, it uses split-pin paper cutout character animation, like what I griped about in my Ender Lilies review - the IKEA flatpack of animation styles, where characters stand stiffly around like wet floor signs with poor posture - and has some big-name voice actors like Carl Weathers, and I railed against big-name actors in games in my Twelve Minutes review, speaking of sad people in apartments.\n\nSo I was settling in to massage the hate-boner on this one, but then, a few hours later, my dude was on a neon stage the size of the Greater London Area, dressed like a cross between the Goblin King and Geordi La Forge, playing a cosmic glam rock solo for the benefit of a gigantic, transcendental space-moth while the universe exploded in the background. Yeah, it takes a bit of a turn. After the initial humdrum beginning, there's a point where the game suddenly bursts into this psychedelic voyage of music and visuals, like 2001: A Space Odyssey by way of Yellow Submarine.\n\nYes, it's an intergalactic ego trip revolving around a whiny twerp and his pedestrian guitar solos, but it's stylish enough, I didn't care; Cruddy Holly and his stiff-ass paper cutout animation shrinks to a tiny pinprick against these vast, animated prog-rock album covers, and it sucked me in. I played through it in one session and came away poised to recommend, if it weren't for one thing. No, it didn't turn out to be all a dream; it did fucking seem like it might, and that certainly would've scythed the glittery platform shoes out from under the plot, but thankfully, it didn't. The problem with Artful Escape is - and you're breaking my fucking heart here, guys - it forgot to have any fucking gameplay!\n\nIt's a glorified 2D walking sim; I spent the whole time hoping to God it would finally introduce a mechanic beyond pressing right, occasionally pausing to fight a monster by waiting for it to play a note, and then playing the same note straight back. In context, this is supposed to be us demonstrating our legendary guitar powers that make suns go supernova and every barren female in the star system simultaneously emit two pints of hot climax juice, and any amount of skill challenge beyond just playing Simon for five minutes could've really emphasized that.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "((ooc: For your next response only, include limited dialogue))", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "I guess I still recommend for the sheer spectacle, but ultimately, it's like going on It's a Small World: you spend the whole time on a conveyor belt, wishing you could kick someone's teeth in.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Psychonauts 2.\n\nGame: Psychonauts 2\n\nReviewed: 2021-09-08\n\nAh, Psychonauts; what a great game that was. I hope your fingers are still smarting from the last time I had to bring that across. Sure, the platforming physics were a bit jank, and all the characters looked like their concept art had been scanned in by someone with Parkinson's disease, but it was funny and well-written and weird, because it was a Tim Schafer game from that wonderful golden age of the PS2 era, when games could be weird and culty - I said \"culty\"! - because they weren't expecting to make enough money to pay for the CEO's moon expedition. Unfortunately, they were still expected to make some amount of money, and that's where Psychonauts 1 fell short on initial release, and why I had to start breaking fingers.\n\nFortunately, Double Fine have managed to cling to driftwood long enough to wait for the inevitable twenty-year nostalgia wave to come around, and can now surf that driftwood all the way to Sex Island with Psychonauts 2; yes, they've pulled what's now technically known as the \"Shenmue Gambit\". And, you know, slipping on those old, familiar Psychonauts trousers, I could almost think no time had passed at all; I mean, in the game world, it literally hasn't. But nevertheless, very little about the look and feel of the world seems to have changed much; there's all those clashing color schemes we remember so fondly, and all the old characters exactly as we remember, still designed like plasticine models after they've been peeled out of a waffle iron.\n\nOoh, that fine praise was a trifle damning, wasn't it? Psychonauts 2 certainly has the vibe of a sequel the creators had been hoping to make right after the first one after it had made them rich and respected by their peers; the mechanics have barely changed at all, and the plot deals with a lot of loose strands that were dangling off the first game like hairs on a teenage boy's chin.\n\nPsychonauts 1, a game about a summer camp for trainee psychic commandos, felt like we were glimpsing a larger world of psychic politics through the narrow perspective of a child, like a birthday party at a McDonald's themed around SEAL Team Six. In Psychonauts 2, the horizons broaden as our protagonist, Raz, enters the adult world of the Psychonauts, and must start from the bottom rung of the intern program; for you see, while the look and feel of Psychonauts hasn't changed much, one significant difference is that the people creating it have aged about twenty fucking years, and Crikey Seamus O'Testicles, does that come across at times.\n\nWhere the first game focused on a group of kids Raz's age and their children's problems like bullying and having to go to the psychotic dentist, Raz's fellow interns are all disaffected teenage Extreme Ghostbusters rejects. And the plot isn't even about them much; they just sort of pop up as a convenient peer group whenever Raz needs someone to get embarrassed in front of. It's almost like they're teenagers in a game being written by people who don't really identify with young people anymore! Which might also explain why the plot eventually focuses squarely on the original founders of the Psychonauts and Raz having to fix their doddery old Farrah Fawcett-liking brains so they can help him defeat their one-time nemesis.\n\nSo from the halfway point of the plot, we suddenly have to stop giving a toss about any established characters and exclusively reserve our tosses for the backstories and inner worlds of these hitherto-unexplored vintage scrotes. It's like if most of the second half of The Last Crusade was devoted to a flashback about Indiana Jones' dad: yes, I'm sure Indiana Jones' dad had a jolly interesting and storied life, but I'm kind of here to watch Indiana Jones biff Nazis and snog hotties, and the closest his dad gets to snogging hotties is adding tabasco to his Sunday brunch Bloody Mary. It's a switcharoo on the first game, where the kids were fully characterized and most of the adults were merely props, when we were having to explore and fix the mental realms of dudes who thought they were Napoleon or that the milkman was spying on them, and in all, it was an accurate and sensitive depiction of mental illness the way Jabba the Hutt was an accurate and sensitive depiction of thyroid issues.\n\nAfter twenty years, we clearly want to go about things with more maturity, so this wacky comedy game about psychic spies who look like the cast of Gumby after they got rescued from a horrendous sink disposal accident feels it has to visualize a character's struggles with alcoholism and anxiety with sympathy and seriousness, rather than as a vehicle for a string of silly gags. Thing is, though, I like silly gags; Christ knows there haven't been enough of those since September 10th, 2001, when human society officially peaked. Speaking as someone with a brain that's a fixer-up on a good day, I care more about having a laugh than you paying sufficient respect to people with anxiety disorders and their flag and national anthem (\"I Wanna Be Sedated\" by The Ramones, if you're interested).\n\nMy point is, for me, Psychonauts 2 suffers from having lost its cynical edge; rather than fuck with a mad person's head so he firebombs a hospital, we must now acknowledge the admittedly fucked-up ethics of going into someone's brain and rewriting their personality, and then we must learn an important lesson and apologize and forgive each other, and everyone gets extra marshmallows in their cocoa that night. Not that there's anything wrong with that; marshmallows are nice. But I knew the ethics were fucked; I assumed that was the big joke: that they were teaching wholesome, apple-cheeked summer camp kids the art of hands-free lobotomization. And I struggle to recall parts of Psychonauts 2 that really stand out as comedy highlights, the way stuff like The Milkman Conspiracy did in the first game; maybe the one chapter that's about as obviously about taking drugs as you can get without ever directly mentioning taking drugs, and that's more about the meta-joke, anyway.\n\n\"Ethics?! Meta-jokes?! Stop wanking off that grammar school education you didn't even finish, Yahtzee, and tell me and my easily-distracted moron friends if you recommend the sodding game!\" Well, obviously, I do, unless you consider any of Psychonauts 1's gameplay issues to be dealbreakers, because they're all back and ready to flick your ears anew. Hey there, fiddly combat! Good to see you, annoying platforming physics where you waste half an hour trying to jump off a slippery two-inch perch to grab one last collectible with no actual fucking use! Why didn't you ever call, extremely limited equip slots for traversal powers, so you have to constantly go to the menu and swap them around like a partially deaf switchboard operator?\n\nBut if you can deal with that, then yes, I recommend, because it's the rest of the story that Psychonauts 1 left hanging, and however you shape it, it's a significant net increase in the amount of Psychonauts that exists in the world, and that can only be a good thing. But while I came away from it satisfied, the topmost thought in my head afterwards was, \"Gosh! I should replay Psychonauts 1! \", and that's not necessarily what you want from a sequel; it means that it evoked the original without managing to eclipse or transcend it. It's like I stuck my dick in a sofa cushion and had a lot of fun with it, but secretly. the whole time, I was thinking about the armchair.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews No More Heroes III.\n\nGame: No More Heroes III\n\nReviewed: 2021-09-01\n\nI'm confused, Suda51; I was under the impression there were no more heroes three games ago. Then, you had a desperate struggle trying to find a few to carry the sequel, the way one roots around in a stubborn nostril for the last few scraps of tasty bogey before anyone notices. Then the series went quiet for so long, and I feel like I'd finally come to terms with there being no more heroes, only for you to find a few more lying around for another sequel. Were there ever no more heroes, Suda51? Final Fantasy never fucking ends, Mega Man is blatantly not old enough to shave; I don't know who to trust anymore.\n\nYeah, I know Psychonauts 2 is out; I'm doing No More Heroes III first because, while both games are my jam, Psychonauts is my jam spread conventionally on a piece of tasty bread, and No More Heroes is my jam running down the inner thighs of a high school music teacher who was almost in a successful band and never shuts up about it. Yes, the first kind of jam might be tastier, and a generally more hygienic experience, but the second captures my interest more; as you might've guessed from the Cruelty Squad review, I love surreal, post-punk games stitched together from the singular vision of one very easily bored person. I love stream-of-consciousness shit; that's why I've been inventing swear words for the last fifteen years and making stupid pictures of obscene acts being committed by jars of Branston Pickle on legs.\n\nNo More Heroes III opens with a cartoon of a young boy befriending a baby alien and helping them escape back to their home planet, with a \"Miyazaki does E.T.\" sort of vibe. Then, the mood swivels on a fucking dime when, twenty years later, the alien comes back as a frat boy dickweed wanting to mooch off the planet Earth, along with a horde of alien allies that all look like their color schemes were decided by randomly chucking crayons at a centrifuge. Nerd assassin with poor anger management, Travis Touchdown, is forced to leave his motel room and standard routine of anime, gaming, and masturbating enough that his wrist action could power the Eastern Seaboard, then puts on a flying robot suit to confront the alien aggressors in yet another countdown of ranking battles. So that's, like, nine genres touched upon, and we've barely wanked the surface.\n\nLike Travis Touchdown himself, No More Heroes has been in a sort of masturbator's hermitage for a few years, popping up only for that Travis Strikes Again thing, which I think had a really introspective vibe; felt like Suda51 trying to get back in touch with something, possibly his penis. And Some More Heroes III feels like a return to confidence, with perhaps the most elaborate installment yet; I just wish it wasn't exclusive to the fucking Switch. All my Switch Pro controllers have the galloping stick drift, so I had to use the standard Joy-Con housing where the positioning of the right stick makes it feel like trying to get to second base with someone who keeps one of their tits in their handbag.\n\nBut I digress. No More Heroes III brings back the open-world sandbox of the first game, but unlike the first game, remembers to put some fucking stuff in it; unfortunately, not including a \"Jump\" button, so you do still occasionally have to go fifty yards out of your way to get past a knee-high fence. I'm also confused as to why about half the areas shown on the game's map are permanently blocked off and inaccessible; if you had to make cuts, why not redraw the map? Or would that have cut into the recording time for the prolonged conversations about Takashi Miike films?\n\nYou know what? The map is a metaphor for the whole game, because it's a kaleidoscope of ideas, but at the same time, seems to be weighed down with a lot of unnecessary baggage. For its flaws, No More Heroes 1 was a fresh and breezy experience about an angry, foul-mouthed nerd, who couldn't avoid getting dunked on even in victory because he couldn't grasp that he was fundamentally isolated from humanity. But as he drifted in an author insert sort of direction, he now alternates between \"angry, foul-mouthed nerd\", \"angry, foul-mouthed warrior poet\", and \"angry, foul-mouthed self-aware video game protagonist\". And if there's a point where the game loads its shopping basket with a few too many slightly tiresome pastries, it's when it's doing the \"nudge-wink, self-aware video game\" bit.\n\nLike, fairly late in the game, one of the bosses insists on fighting you as a turn-based RPG battle, which I admit was pretty funny, in the two or three other subversive, self-aware comedy games I can think of that did the same gag. Not here; here, it falls completely flat by having the characters bang on about it for ten minutes. \"Oh, I don't want to do a turn-based battle! Fuck, fuck! Hey, what's going on? Why can't I move? What's that menu doing there? Masturbate, masturbate! This isn't what serious gamers want, do they, kids?\" Oh boy, how self-aware and quirky! Don't look away, Travis! I'm so close! Meanwhile, we defeat one of the other bosses in the game by beating them at musical chairs, then we fight their cartoon octopus friend who can only say one word and can shoot an instant-kill death-laser from their mouth. See, this is the shit I wanted, Suda51: the constant barrage of weird ideas and hard-left turns, not the smug in-jokes. Stream of consciousness, not stream of self-satisfied ejaculate.\n\nThere are many moments when the game feels like it's waddling about with its overloaded trousers 'round its ankles; the series has picked up a few running gags. You know that gag in the first game where it spends ages establishing a new boss and building up to the fight, and then PSYCH, some other character jumps in and insta-kills them, and you fight them instead? Yeah, No More Heroes III does that about five times. I kind of predicted as much, when the game shows you all ten boss characters at the start; to paraphrase Murphy's law, \"No best-laid plan survives contact with Suda51's attention span.\"\n\nIt's disappointing, because the one thing Suda51 games shouldn't be is predictable. But don't misunderstand me: No More Heroes isn't just random bollocks from beginning to end; it's actually tightly structured in the classic \"broomstick up the arse\" Japanese open-world fashion. Can't just whip out your glowing erection anywhere and menace the knee-high fences; combat is strictly regimented, and can only take place in closed-off dedicated areas that have registered with the city and gotten cleared by an officially licensed murder-box inspector, and you have to grind up a few generic fights before you can buy into the next ranking battle. And I've never liked No More Heroes combat much.\n\nThe flow keeps dying a hideous, squealing death every time you get knocked on your arse and have to mash a button to stand up, or when you have to mash a button to recharge your sword, or when you're mashing buttons to whittle down the constant damage-sponge enemies, or to walk across a room or breathe in and out, because mashing buttons is your life now. And when we buy the upgrades that improve our health and attack power, it doesn't feel like we're getting stronger; it feels like we have to do it just to keep up with the ever-increasing levels of damage-sponginess the enemies have. But a new feature in combat is special super-attacks with longish cooldowns, including a super drop-kick, which stuns most enemies and knocks them out of basically any attack. I used that shit as much as I could, 'cos it's essentially a special, dedicated button for when you're bored of mashing and just want to kick something in the face very hard, which both I and my dog were grateful for.\n\nIn closing summary, No More Heroes III is exactly the big, juicy new installment us Suda51 fans were hoping for after Travis Strikes Again, and is like taking a bath in Suda51's head: it's self-indulgent, generally interesting to see what rubber ducks are going to float up for us next, but every now and again, something inappropriate touches my leg.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Twelve Minutes.\n\nGame: Twelve Minutes\n\nReviewed: 2021-08-25\n\nThere's a lot you can get done in twelve minutes: walk the dog, learn a new fact about the Moon, listen to an entire ad break on a commercial radio station. I, for example, can use twelve minutes to extinguish all your enthusiasm for a recent game you thought might've been interesting. (Uh... as long as you watch this video twice.) So not too long ago, I did The Forgotten City, assuming you haven't... forgotten, and I said at the time that time loops are becoming a trend amid a certain breed of narrative-driven adventure game. It wasn't a proper trend yet, because it was only indie games doing it; when something with some real money behind it rips it off and acts like they invented the fucking concept, that's when you know a trend has hit the big time.\n\nTwelve Minutes certainly seems to have a not-insignificant amount of money to swan about with; Daisy Ridley money, no less. Yes, that hot young starlet best known for her show-stopping turns as \"the posh girl from the new Star Wars\" and... (...) Well, anyway, James McAvoy and Willem Dafoe are here, too, to crank the star power up even higher, and guess what? If the game hadn't told me that big celebrities did the voices, I wouldn't have been able to fucking tell.\n\nSo, not for the first time, I have to ask a video game what on Earth the fucking point of hiring that kind of expensive talent was if any jobbing voice-overer could've achieved the same result. I guess Willem Dafoe's voice has a unique character to it - although in this case, he seems to be doing his best Christopher Lloyd impression - but the other two are both putting on American accents, and just sound like generic actor persons the director could've bundled into a van at literally any Los Angeles bus stop. I mean, you only hired them so you could slap their names on the front; why make them talk in an accent that makes them doubly unrecognizable? It's like getting a personalized number-plate with a non-obvious meaning. You blew all that money, and didn't even gain any status; you've just made the dude behind you squint in confusion at your bumper.\n\n\"This is a very minor point to harp on for so long, Yahtzee; it almost seems like there isn't much to say about the game.\" Oh, look, it's Captain Observant, everyone! He must've been let out early from his job pointing out the spelling mistakes in other people's Reddit posts! Yeah, it's a snacky student short film of a game about a twelve-minute sequence taking place in three rooms; it's not what you'd call \"bingeable\".\n\nThe premise is, you're a dude who comes home to his lazy-arse wife who thinks getting two storebought chocolate lava cakes out of the fridge counts as \"cooking dinner\", after which, a very angry man bursts in and, in brief summary, fucks the pair of you up. Then, you get inexplicably transported back ten minutes, and keep getting sent back to that moment every time you die or attempt to leave the apartment. Our hero must repeat the loop until he can avert his fate and eventually get to the bottom of the various dark secrets that are lurking under everything, like a dead spider in a carelessly-poured glass of milk.\n\nI like the presentation; the harsh, directly top-down camera angle creates an effective sense of foreboding, like we, the player, are the Sword of Damocles, waiting to stab our character's pleasant evening with the missus right when he's assessing his blowjob chances. The attention to detail, with the number of things you can do and that other characters will react to, is... well, I suppose it would've been more impressive if there were more than three fucking rooms in the game, but hey; I can steal my wife's phone and hide it in a ventilation duct, and put candles around it like I'm leaving an offering to the god of HVAC engineering, and that's got to count for something.\n\nI found Twelve Minutes to be absorbing up to a point; the home invasion is kind of harrowing at first, but it's interesting how desensitized you get after a few goes around. \"Hmmmm... looks like jumping out of the closet and handing the home invader dessert doesn't do anything. Ho-hum! Guess I'll let him shatter my jawbone against a chair leg again.\" It's probably saying something terribly profound about cycles of violence and our desensitization to horror in modern society, but then the game takes a turn. And I should probably drop a spoiler warning here, because people always jump up my butt if I don't. So here goes: Spoiler warning! My butt is not open to callers today; thank you.\n\nThere's a moment where you think you've got it all figured out; you de-escalate the home invasion, the burglar says he's very sorry, everyone agrees to part amicably with a party bag and a slice of birthday cake, you and your wife embrace lovingly, and then BAM! It's ten minutes a-go again, and you're standing nonplussed at the front door, with your big, relieved stiffy hanging unfulfilled like an unpulled fire alarm at a remedial school. This is the bit where the game effectively channels the middle act of Groundhog Day, when we and the protagonist start trying everything to figure out what this fucking time loop even wants from us. Get the happy ending again, but with slight changes in details? \"Nope!\" Fix it so the invader never shows up at all, and have a perfectly nice evening in with the oblivious wife? \"Nope!\" Murder the home invader, then murder my wife, then murder myself in the face with a gun? \"Nope!\" Wasn't actually expecting that to work, but I was bloody disappointed there wasn't an achievement for it.\n\nThis was all very intriguing, but only until I found the final twist before the \"ending\" ending, at which point, the game kind of fell apart. I think it was the \"ending\" ending; I've consulted with a number of colleagues, and we're all only tentatively sure it was the ending. There was certainly a credits sequence - in which I spotted a credit for Daisy Ridley's voice coach; more needless expense. Was this a fucking tax thing, guys? - but there was still a sense of anticlimax. I won't spoil the last twist, but for the sake of discussion, I'll replace it with something roughly equivalent. After you connect the last dot, it turns out that all along, the main character was a dog molester, and the only way to escape the time loop is to get the game to go, \"You know what? Let's just wash our hands of this whole affair and pretend it never happened.\" And in reply, I go, \"Well, yes, I suppose that would be for the best. Honestly, I'm a little bewildered as to how it happened in the first place; I mean, why would a dog molester want to marry a human woman? You'd think they'd want to settle down with a nice, homely Golden Retriever.\"\n\nBut I still get this nagging sense that I got the unsatisfying bad ending that leaves things unresolved, and there must be some good ending you can get somehow, where you escape the time loop with your wife, and she comes to terms with you wanting to bugger spaniels, and you live happily ever after in a house that backs onto the local animal shelter. But that wouldn't work, because we fucking molest dogs! So I'm left trapped in this confusing mental limbo between wanting some closure for the character we've been identifying with all this time and his long-suffering wife, and not wanting to encourage the rape of Chihuahuas.\n\nBut I don't know if I'd call Twelve Minutes good or bad; it's just weird. It's not Bland Five material, either, 'cos it at least sparks conversation, even if that conversation is \"Get the fuck away from my Labradoodle!\"\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Dreamscaper and Jupiter Hell.\n\nGames: Dreamscaper, Jupiter Hell\n\nReviewed: 2021-08-18\n\nHooray! Drought season's almost over! Woo! We got through another one without self-harming or playing too much weeb shit, but I repeat myself: yay! Now there's only disease, poverty, climate disaster, and political disenfranchisement to sort out, and we can start focusing on the real issues, like developing a controller for a Nintendo console that doesn't give me old man wrist. But let's see out another droughty summer with one last indie double bill, focusing on that one special genre that is to indie games what intestinal parasites are to inexpensive Mexican food: roguelites, starting with Jupiter Hell.\n\nNow, as I'm sure I've said before, I'm tragically decrepit enough to remember that period in the 90's when we called every first-person shooter a Doom clone, and Jupiter Hell made me very nostalgic, because it's a Doom clone.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "But here's the twist, you procrastinating twat: it's not a first-person shooter, but it is undeniably a Doom clone.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Stop TikTokking your amazed reaction, and I will explain how.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "See, you play as a burly space marine who comes to a tech base deep in the solar system's flyover country to find it taken over by demons and zombies, and must battle their way through the depths of Hell one fricasseed demonic ballsack at a time.\n\nIn other words, it's Doom, but it's played in a top-down grid-based format that it refers to as \"turn-based\", but in the sense of those old Ultima games where the monsters were properly-raised good little boys who politely waited for you to do something before they all simultaneously did their next thing. Jupiter Hell is, in brief, a love letter to retro PC gaming of that era, which should be obvious from the way it does its entire GUI ASCII-style, with a big, chunky font that looks like it's trying to beat my eyeballs to death with pixels. It also can't be controlled with anything but keyboard, but for me, that's the point where \"deliberate retro homage\" crosses the line into \"just couldn't be arsed to add controller support\".\n\nThe experience of Jupiter Hell is creeping your way through dingy hallways until an enemy shows up, then you endeavor to inch your way into cover before they can eat your health away, then you sit there, pressing the \"Fire\" key until they and the nineteen friends they have arranged behind them in single-file are all dead. So, translating Doom to top-down, grid-based action certainly loses in exciting violent spectacle what it gains in... what the fuck does it gain, actually? What does Doom have left without the violent, in-your-face, ballsack-distressing catharsis?\n\nIt's not exactly survival-focused, because I leave most levels fucking ankle-deep in the ammo and guns all the enemies drop that I couldn't squeeze into the child-sized fanny pack my dude brought along. What normally happens in a Jupiter Hell run is that I'll get enough levels deep for the enemy to finally graduate beyond fun-sized health bars, eventually get overwhelmed by one ambush too many, die, and then feel terribly discouraged, because now I have to trudge through all the boring, easy, early levels again, and randomly rearranging the specific layout of samey corridors doesn't add enough variety to be more worth my time than quitting the game and rearranging my desktop icons.\n\nThis is the mistake roguelites always make; who fucking cares if your levels are randomly laid-out if the primary gameplay loop is always the same? That's where the fun lies in procedural design; maybe the first run spawns me a nine-millimeter pistol and a shotgun, but then, in the second, maybe I have to get by with a hedge trimmer and a pair of magic shoes that spawns really interesting magazines everywhere I go, and it's a completely fresh experience. Jupiter Hell just isn't that engaging, and the turn-based physics weirds me out every time an enemy mysteriously dies a moment before my rocket hits him, possibly because of vitamin deficiency.\n\nOur second roguelite is Dreamscaper, and this one does remember to have variety in its primary loop. It's got more weapons than a Palestinian car boot sale: sword, hammer, knife, pool cue, boxing glove. Well, the game says that's what they are; your character's so tiny-winy on-screen, she could be swinging around a pair of hairy goat testicles on the end of a serving spoon for all I know. And it doesn't help that the environmental lighting's so spotty, and we're doing the Ori and the Blind Forest thing where all the pickups, projectiles, and half the meaningless background details all speak the universal language of \"nondescript glowing blob\", including your bombs, which explode with all the cathartic impact and destruction of a playful mouse jumping into a bowl of glitter.\n\nDreamscalper is a very Binding of Isaac-y affair; much the same kind of room-by-room treasure-hunting \"keys, bombs, secret rooms, boss fights\" business, thankfully with not quite as much poo. It does, however, throw an awful lot at you right off the bat: light attacks, heavy attacks, ranged attacks, magic attacks, parry attacks, homeowner tax. There are about half as many enemy types as there are ways to kill them, and don't forget to use your slow-motion power so your clunky and unsatisfying standard attacks can get twice as much clunky and unsatisfying.\n\nSo far, so standard; the real selling point of Dreamcatcher is the premise. You're a lady who's moved to a new city from a small town, struggling to get by and make new friends, and when you go to sleep at night, you go on a roguelite action-adventure through labyrinths based on the memory of your life, fighting boss fights against symbolic demons with names like \"Fear\" and \"Regret\" and \"Isolation\" and-- Oh, my goodness! My hand is reflexively making the wanker gesture! See, I was drawn to it from the description saying how the main character has to work on her relationships in the real world to improve her abilities in fantasy battle dreamland, which made me think, \"Oooh! Sounds like Persona! That shit's my jam; as in, 'jam my dick inside it and make several terrifying babies'.\"\n\nBut in practice, it's not that engaging; our protagonist whose name I forget makes friends with various flavors of hipster when they smell her aura of pretentiousness and recognize one of their own. Then, they have a conversation that sounds like something from an overwritten student webcomic from the 2010's, and that night, you get +5 attack on all potato-based damage or something equally not worth it. What might've helped is if all the characters weren't depicted as faceless wooden dollies who summon glowing words over their heads to speak; feels like asking me to emotionally engage with the struggles of two ornamental toilet roll holders.\n\nI'm grouping Sega Dreamcaster with Sea of Solitude under the heading \"arty indie games about people who need to get the fuck over themselves\". What's so fucking hard about the protagonist's life that they need to fight symbolic fantasy battles in the dream world about it? Admittedly, I didn't get to the last level, so maybe it turns out she accidentally impaled her sister on a Twix or something, but I'd expect her dreams to get to that point quicker if that were the case. Jesus Christ! What symbolic monsters do you think homeless orphans in Yemen dream about?! Trick question: they don't dream about anything, 'cos the secessionist terror keeps waking them up.\n\n----\n\nGame: The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles\n\nReviewed: 2021-08-11\n\nI worry I've been doing too much weeb shit lately; tends to draw a certain crowd. Hey, if you like sputtering one out to greasy cartoon tits that jiggle like semi-sentient party balloons, then more power to you; just seems weird to get so evangelical about it. Anime fans are like vegans without the moral superiority, or the-- No, actually; about the same body odor. \"Ooh, Yahtzee, if you liked Ys IX so much, you should try Wonderful Party Balloon Romance Panic 4, as well!\" Oh god, you're all so fucking greasy! You're turning my front lawn into sauerkraut just by standing on it!\n\nLook, anime is like an ice cream parlor: it's a fun treat now and again, but if you go there every day, you'll end up fat and disgusting and being used as a cautionary example for the benefit of the small children with whom you share a hobby, and its variety of flavors and hair colors all kind of taste the same when buried under a pile of gummy bears and blatant fetishization. And when I go there, I usually stick to the low-fat yogurt option, 'cos it's only ever the exceptions that I seem to like.\n\nSo don't go filling the comments with visual novel recommendations just 'cos I'm doing a visual novel now; I only like the Ace Attorney games 'cos of the ways they differ from most visual novels, in that there's actual gameplay that it's possible to lose, and puzzles you have to think about, and you're not just hammering the \"Skip Dialogue\" button with one hand and rubbing your little hairy chapstick with the other. And with that masterful setting of tone, we press on. Ace Attorney is a long-running series of wholesome courtroom adventures about finding just enough of a hole in the seemingly watertight prosecution to cram in the destructive dildo of defense and blow the case apart.\n\nBut they've always had the same problem pre-Like a Dragon Yakuza games had in that you only really need to play one of them; little details change, but the broad strokes are always the same. You're a wide-eyed young lawyer who's clumsy and innocent, but with a good heart and faith in humanity, who spends a slightly untoward amount of time around underage girls, and you're up against a higher-status prosecutor who's way overconfident for someone with no clearer idea of how legal systems actually work than anyone else in the plot. And the only strategy the developers have ever had for mixing up the formula is to swap out the main characters for new ones, who are precisely the fucking same.\n\nHence, The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures, an only recently officially-translated prequel to Ace Attorney starring Phoenix Wright's Japanese ancestor at the dawn of the 20th century. Now, why would Phoenix Wright have a Japanese ancestor? Cough. Surely, the Phoenix Wright games all take place in America. Cough, cough, droll look to camera. Ryunosuke Naruhodo - no, I will not attempt a Japanese accent - is a wide-eyed, clumsy, innocent, good-hearted law student who is forced to defend himself against a murder charge, and through a contrived series of events, ends up traveling to Victorian London on a cultural exchange, befriending several underaged girls and matching wits with a higher-status prosecutor who's way overconfident for etc.\n\nBut lest you think this is just Ace Attorney with top hats and Cockney rhyming slang, they also put Sherlock Holmes in it. Fun fact: \"Sherlock Holmes meets my original character and they become best friends and solve mysteries together\" is arguably the world's oldest subgenre of fanfiction; I'm pretty sure Queen Victoria was writing her own version of that whenever she was demurely fingering herself in a Westminster tea room. And that's what this is, only with Dr. Watson replaced with another underaged girl, but that's par for the fucking course, isn't it?\n\nNow, I do like Ace Attorney games, and I fucking hate Ace Attorney games. But I like them, but ooh, how I hate them! I love how expressive they are, and the character design and animation; I like it when you call out a simpering smug-fuck with a face like the un-besmirched top on a new jar of peanut butter, and mess it up with your butter knife of justice until they're hopping around, banging their head on things like they just found a lioness creeping through their pubes.\n\nAnd with that, I also love the satisfaction of solving the puzzles; as I believe I've talked about before, my one major ask of a detective puzzle game is that it should make me feel clever, and there are plenty of moments in Ace Attorney that do that, when the accused thief is weirdly okay with our suggestion that we search his pockets for the missing diamond butt-plug. And then I remember that he was caught pinching the bums of court officials ten minutes ago, and that we actually need to be searching the bailiff's rectum.\n\nBut as for why I also hate Ace Attorney games - OOH, I HATE 'EM! - part of it's the sameyness. I want to say every fucking defendant in every game inexplicably hides information from you until you can crowbar it out of them mid-trial; even when the main character's the defendant, actually. And afterwards, the same conversation always ensues: \"I'm so sorry that I lied, protagonist! I expect you want to resign as my lawyer now and leave me to be falsely executed.\" \"No, client! I will not resign as your lawyer!\" \"GWUH?! But why?!\" \"Because it's a lawyer's job to have faith in their client, and I don't believe lying should carry the death penalty, 'cos I'm just that bloody great.\"\n\nWhich brings me to the main reason why I hate Ace Attorney games; it's the same reason I hate most visual novels: that they never use ten words when ninety thousand billion will do. Getting to the point feels like pulling teeth while you and your dental patient are riding different escalators. \"I believe we should search the bailiff's rectum!\" \"GWUH?! But the bailiff didn't steal the diamond butt-plug!\" \"Hahaha, my learned friend has clearly forgotten who is on trial here, smug smug!\" (Smash hands on desk like a short-tempered DJ who's just seen a cockroach.) \"Not at all!\" \"Huh?!\" \"I cement it as perfectly possible for the diamond butt-plug to be in the bailiff's rectum without them being the one who stole it!\" \"WHUH?! But how?!\" Jesus Christ! If they just let me bend the fucker over the witness stand and yank his trousers down, we could all be at lunch by now.\n\nAnd this hurts the all-important \"making me feel clever\" factor, because I did feel clever nine hundred text-boxes ago, but now the game's dropped so many obvious hints, a fucking sea lion with dropsy could've figured it out. Games like this need more than just a \"fast text\" option (which, incidentally, doesn't even make the text go by that much faster, but that's a different niggle entirely); it needs a fucking \"fast brain\" option that replaces half the dialogue with meaningful eyebrow wiggles. Still, I suppose it's all pacing; my favorite parts of these games are when you're nailing a lying witness to the wall, and the cool music's playing, and everyone's acting like they're getting slapped with wet trouts again and again, and we're speedily descending the slopes of Mount Justice on our truth toboggan. And that wouldn't be as satisfying without a long and arduous climb to the top of Mount Justice beforehand.\n\nAnd thinking about it, since detective games inherently lack replay value, it's not so bad for the games to be formulaic, as long as there are new mysteries to explore; Columbo's formulaic, and I love Columbo. That's what I want out of Ace Attorney: I want to feel like Anime Columbo. But that'll never work, 'cos the raincoat would cover up his miniskirt.\n\n----\n\nGames: Death's Door, The Forgotten City\n\nReviewed: 21-08-04\n\nMan, looking for indie games worth reviewing is like that one Monty Python sketch sometimes. \"We've got Souls-like, egg and Souls-like, bacon and Souls-like, Souls-like, egg, sausage, and Souls-like, and isometric hack and slash exploration games with RPG elements and Souls-like\", Death's Door being an example of that last one. In Death's Door, you play a little crow, who is one of many crows employed by some kind of celestial bureaucracy, and your job is to venture into the world and capture the souls of the newly dead, who are generally newly dead because you just killed the absolute motherfuck out of them, but that's quotas for you.\n\nAfter your latest assignment gets stolen from you, you find yourself having to travel to the... uh... the three corners of the Earth to harvest powerful souls from big bosses, in order to open the titular \"death's door\" and complete your assignment. And no, you can't fly there, despite being a bird. You probably can't fly 'cos you're carrying the weight of a great big sword to do all the hacking and the slashing with; I think this is that \"min-maxing\" thing people always go on about. Anyway, Death's Door is a game I would classify as \"story-rich and cash-poor\". It's built a nice little world to take place in; it's got that very indie game artstyle you see in games like Ashen, where it looks like everything's made of folded craft paper. There's some fun dialogue to be had with interesting NPCs, who have that Dark Souls quality of adding texture and life to the setting while being absolutely no bloody help whatsoever.\n\nIt's just, I find the gameplay to be generally a bit flimsy. Part of that might be the isometric look, which I think might be becoming one of my least favorite graphical styles, at least for action games; it makes it hard to gauge depth, the characters are so tiny on-screen, you can't read the slogans on their hilarious souvenir T-shirts, and it's too easy to get lost when the areas go past a certain size. In a third-person open-world game, if I'm trying to remember where the Tower of Bollock-Scraping was, I could look to the horizon for its telltale spherical, round parts, but in Isometric Land, I can only go, \"Oh, it was somewhere in the easterly quadrant of this giant sheet of graph paper I can only see ten square yards of at a time.\" And Death's Door doesn't have a map, so no bollocks are getting scraped today.\n\nThe environments just feel like completing labyrinths with different wallpaper, and whenever I picked up a new ability that opened different areas, I'd be like, \"Well, I did once see an area I needed this ability to get to; I also once found a coffee place in Melbourne that did amazing croissant French toast, and I'm fucked if I can remember where that was, too.\" So, I felt very disinclined to go hunting for optional secrets or extra weapons, especially since I plowed through all the story bosses with very little trouble using nothing but one of the first weapons you get in the game, because the combat's the other thing that's a bit flimsy. You can mash \"Attack\", or you can dodge, or you can use a ranged attack, and granted, it's impressive for a flightless bird to have any repertoire that goes beyond \"eat seed and hop about\", but it's not the most nuanced gameplay in the world.\n\nAll in all, probably for the best that Death's Door doesn't outstay its welcome; I mean, just three big bosses to find, and then back here for the inevitable plot twist and dramatic climax? Sure; I can rattle that out in one shift and be home in time for ThunderCats. So that's Death's Door, the Souls-like equivalent of a packet of Monster Munch: some interesting flavor to it, but I'll stop thinking about it the moment it stops troubling my digestive system.\n\nSo the next game I tried out was The Forgettable Title-- Oh, sorry; I meant The Forgotten City, a sort of thinky-thinky talky-talky investigative adventure game thing that didn't get off on the best foot with its name and playing like something that got hacked off a reject Bethesda game, complete with the traditional very offputting fixed boggle-eye-contact conversation, and with looking like it was pieced together from the example art that came free with the 3D modeling software. But somehow, it drew me in.\n\nThe premise is, you're a generic present-day chucklefuck who's too busy staring at their modern gizmo to avoid falling down a time portal to two thousand years ago, where a group of ancient Romans are trapped in an underground city ruled over by a central doctrine that if any of them commit a single sin, then all of them will die. And if you're anything like me, once this has been explained to you by the city's overseer, you'll go, \"Whatever, Granddad! \", forget this isn't Skyrim, and immediately loot some coins out of the chest in his bedroom, whereupon a spooky voice will loudly denounce your sin and unsettle your entire breakfast, and you'll be forced to sprint back to the time portal as the world collapses about your ears and half-digested Pop-Tarts tumble down your legs.\n\nThen, you get teleported back to the start of the same day. Yes, you're stuck in a time loop! Jolly original idea, if it weren't for Outer Wilds, and Sexy Brutale, and Elsinore, and Minit, and all the other ones; bit of a trend in adventure games right now, actually. Why only recently, I don't know, seeing as Majora's Mask did it twenty years ago, but it's a good idea; it means you can have a sense of ticking-clock urgency while also not punishing the player for taking their time to experiment and maybe occasionally blow off the main quest to flick playing cards at Andie MacDowell, film reference.\n\nSo it might not be original, and it might have the general air of a basically okay-looking IKEA bookshelf that wobbles ominously when you lean on it, but I think the writing carries The Forgotten City; from the initial quest to figure out which of the twenty-odd boggle-eyed ancient Romans is going to fuck things up for everyone else, we delve into a deeper investigation of the city's true nature. The premise raises many philosophical questions, very few of which go unaddressed in dialogue at some point. What constitutes a sin? \"No one knows.\" How do they even know that committing a sin will kill them all? \"They don't; that's why half the population are sitting on undisguised hate-boners for the city's ruler.\" When your game is heavily dialogue tree-focused, the important thing is that I should never feel like I can't say something I want to say, and Forgotten City mostly pulls that off; I'm generally free to call out the local cunts for their various cunty behaviors.\n\nSo despite the wobbly design and occasional highly out-of-place combat section, I stuck with Forgotten City; there was always an investigative thread to pull, and a few to keep in mind to pull in slightly different ways next time around, and I was interested to see where it led. I do wonder if the game would've been more interesting if I didn't keep my entire inventory from loop to loop. If I was obliged to remember sequences of actions required to get certain key items before I could proceed, the game might've had a more meaty challenge aspect to it; as it is, success becomes inevitable.\n\nThere's one side-quest centering around a merchant who's demanding a thousand denarii for an essential cure, but I'd been swindling him out of five thousand denarii every loop for the last three, so I just chucked the smug asshole some pocket change, pausing only to wipe my nose with it. The hilarious thing is that there was a time traveller before you, who went through the loop enough times to grow old and die without finding a solution; what the fuck was that guy doing? Trying to take his pet glacier for a walk?\n\n----\n\nGame: Cruelty Squad\n\nReviewed: 2021-07-28\n\nWhy do old people struggle to understand modern culture? Is it a memory thing? Like, if you've got too many memories of Chuck Berry and trousers with very high waistbands, there's no room to squeeze in any appreciation for fidget spinners? Or is it something physical that just happens one day, like your balls dropping or your first period, where some culture-appreciating part of your brain dies, and from then on, every new song you hear sounds like a microphone being held up to a fluorescent light? See, I always thought it was just that as you get older, you retreat more from general society and lose touch with the common cultural references that allow us to relate to new trends.\n\nBut there are moments that make me wonder, like when everyone and their toupées were nagging me to try Cruelty Squad, whose screenshots on the Steam page immediately made me think, \"Are they taking the piss?\" It's all clashing colors and PS1-era 3D models with worse animation than the little dudes on a foosball table, and environments that look like someone opened the level editor and then threw their laptop out the window of a speeding bus, and texture work that looks like the brooms from The Sorcerer's Apprentice got set loose in a water-damaged gift-wrap shop, and an interface that looks like it got molested inside a crowded novelty photo booth at a juggalo convention, complete with a health meter that takes up an entire quarter of the active screen and looks like an untreated hernia, etc., etc.\n\nBut there had to be something more to Cruelty Squad. An \"Overwhelmingly Positive\" rating on Steam after two thousand reviews goes a bit beyond taking the piss; that would require a complex, organized piss-taking effort, and I think the troll brigade used up all their piss-taking energy with the GameStop thing. So I gave it a try, and I can almost guarantee that you, too, will be confused by the appeal of Cruelty Squad on your first attempt, if you can even decipher the fucking mission select screen, which is like examining a pile of vomit to figure out what specific carrot that orange bit came from.\n\nYou'll then start the first mission, walk into a room, and get immediately shot to death by an enemy who looked, at first glance, exactly the same as all the non-hostile NPCs you're not supposed to shoot. Then, you try again and shoot the enemy who shot you last time, whereupon fifteen of his mates pour into the room and juice you like an overripe orange. And this is on top of the game looking like MS Paint neon prolapse, and the MIDI music that sounds like the soundtrack from a 90's adventure game about being inside the mind of Nick Cave. You'll probably kick it in the head after that, and no one would blame you, but if you're anything like me, something will make you go back.\n\nAt first, I thought, \"Well, it's just a troll game, isn't it? Kids of today, acting like they invented troll games. The Newgrounds era wasn't that long ago!\" But you know something? Troll games are kind of my jam, like those mods people used to make for Half-Life that replaced the textures and sound effects with memes and the voice lines with fifteen-year-olds yelling cuss words way too close to the mic. I love shit like that; it's amateurish and obnoxious to play, but it expresses something that no other form of art does. It's the equivalent of graffiti: an irreverent expression from an unheard voice defiantly skating on the knife-edge of acceptability, often darkly hilarious, if only metatextually from the thought that someone made it and uploaded it, and I downloaded it, and then wasted an hour on it that I could've spent reading William Makepeace Thackeray.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Word usage target: 'missions' must be used 2 times", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "But when I went back to Cruelty Squad to assess it from that angle, I discovered there's a perfectly playable game here once you figure the basics out and get past the visual vomit and aural catarrh. It calls itself an \"immersive sim\", and I've never been entirely clear on what defines one of those; I think it might just be any game where you crawl down air vents a lot. It's a mission-based assassination game where you get to your targets, skillfully use the contents of their skulls to reduce local property prices, then return to the exit, all while keeping an eye out for guards, 'cos you die faster than a dumb blonde joke at a lesbian wedding reception and there are no mid-mission saves, so you have to start all over again. But then again, the enemies die faster than Adolf Hitler doing a set at a lesbian wedding reception, and they don't even get to restart the mission, so maybe you should check your fucking privilege!\n\nAt its core, it's a game about carefully advancing, peeking around corners, and getting the drop on the enemy with precise headshots, and once you've found some of the weapons that don't suck as hard as their \"looking like massively overused sections of sewage pipework\" would imply, then it plays perfectly efficiently. And hey, the environments might look like they were carved out of the world's least appetizing potatoes with a child's plastic beach implements, but the same was true of the first two Thief games, and we somehow got over it. Not that I'm saying the game should get a pass for being retro-styled; even in retro times, games didn't go out of their way to look like the top of an overused salad cream bottle. This doesn't feel like a game from retro times; it feels like an expression of nihilistic frustration bubbling up from the morass of modern society, and its deliberate hideousness is part of that effect.\n\nThe story of the game is that you are an empty shell of a person in a dystopian cyberpunk world where I guess everyone got their sense of aesthetics shot off in the water-wars, assassinating key targets because your corporate masters told you to. Your targets are never characterized or given any dialogue; you just kill them and piss off. Neither they nor any nearby NPCs seem particularly surprised when the murder starts; this is just the world everyone lives in. Hell, our own agency marks us for death in one mission, and we have to escape a police raid on our apartment building. In other immersive sims, this would've been a turning point in the plot, like when you betray your agency in Deus Ex, or that bit in Thief 4 where you finally wise up and stop playing Thief 4, but no; you just glumly go back to work the next day 'cos it was a bureaucratic fuckup, and there's nothing sufficiently humanlike in the world that you could possibly complain about it to.\n\nGet through the missions, and you'll have played a decent enough, if simplistic assassination game, but this is only scratching the acne-riddled surface of Cruelty Squad; fully explore all the levels, and you'll descend down a surreal rabbit hole of psychedelic secret areas and unlockables. As for whether I like or recommend the game, that's the wrong attitude; sure, I can criticize it for looking like garbage and its many unintuitive design choices - that grappling hook ability that completely alters the way you move around could've been introduced with more ceremony - but you know what? I don't think Cruelty Squad cares.\n\nIt's an experience like having a bad acid trip while already blitzed out on weed, so all you can do is numbly zone out and stare into space as reality collapses about your ears. And it's worth a look just to explore that headspace; spend a little time in a nihilistic funk where life is one long, bleak joke at humanity's expense, then snap out of it and get back to work at the Amazon warehouse.\n\n----\n\nGame: Ys IX: Monstrum Nox\n\nReviewed: 2021-07-21\n\nIt's always the silver lining about big game releases being drier than a senior churchwarden's pantyliner that I can devote more time to the lower-profile titles. The viewers get to send in heartfelt recommendations for their personal favorite indie and retro games, I get to tell them all to piss off; everyone's having fun. So since it finally came out on PC last week, I had a chance to play Monstrum Nox, the ninth game in the Ys series. (Yuss series? Is? Yes? Yis? Well, that's one way to foil my usual \"gradually corrupt the title\" gag.)\n\nYs: Molesting Nonce is the latest in the courageously persistent and long-running Ys series of mid-budget Japanese action RPGs that's been about three steps behind the rest of the industry its whole life. But while the games have never exactly lit up gaming horizons like a napalm strike in nipple tassels, I tend to find them fucking adorable, like a little toddler coming downstairs at an adult party going, \"I'm a gwown-up! \", wearing Daddy's best jacket and waving Mummy's favorite clitoral stimulator. The Ys games are a sort of cozy, unthreatening place for me; sometimes, you just want to play a nice, straightforward game where you press the button, and the dude goes stab. Although, having said that, the first Ys game didn't even have an \"Attack\" button; you were supposed to aggressively chest-bump your way through the enemies like a middle manager trying to intimidate a nightclub bouncer. As I said, fucking adorbs.\n\nYs has gradually embraced the various innovations of the action RPG genre at its own leisurely pace, and has recently discovered that open-world sandboxes are a thing, with Monstrum Nox giving you full-on gliding, hookshotting, and wall-running super powers to let you leap gaily about a fantasy city like a flea on an extremely passive St. Bernard. A city of nondescript buildings, all decked out in repeating gray-brown brickwork like the default texture in the Duke Nukem 3D level editor, but bless 'em anyway; they're trying so hard.\n\nAnyway, like most Ys games, Monstrous Knockwurst follows the adventures of Adol Christin, career adventurer and highly generic anime swordboy, who must be very grateful that his parents didn't give him a middle name that starts with \"F\". In this game, he arrives at a new city and is almost immediately thrown in jail basically for being an adventurer, which is fair enough; I mean, adventurers are handy when dragons are stealing the children, but absolutely cannot be trusted around pottery. During his escape from imprisonment for crimes against earthenware, Adol Fitzgerald Christin meets a mysterious woman named \"I Drew My Girlfriend's D&D Character For My College Art Portfolio\" who, in classic magical girl tradition, grants him the power to transform into himself, but with superpowers and poorer outfit coordination.\n\nShe then enlists him to help defend the city against strange interdimensional invaders alongside five other superpowered conscripts named \"The Monstrums\". Yes, I know it sounds wrong! I know it sounds like the plural should be \"Monstra\"; it's what the game fucking calls them, alright?! The Monstrums shape the overall plot in that each chapter, Adol gets to know one of them, add them to his adventuring party, and discover their civilian identity, and it never ceases to be hilarious that the game keeps presenting it like we're meant to be surprised, because the Monstrum disguise basically consists of a change of hairdo. Which might make some sense in Anime World, where there are ninety thousand hairdos and three faces for everyone to share, but come the fuck on! Oh, the sassy, matronly party member with big tits is secretly the only other sassy, matronly character with big tits? Next, you'll be telling me that Prince Adam knows more than he's saying about this \"He-Man\" fella.\n\nGameplay is structured rather like your standard D&D campaign: you start off exploring the hub city, start a quest, go through a few scenes of anime character drama before a reason is contrived to go clear out a dungeon full of monsters and traps and fight a boss, while hanging out with a group of friends that you're fine with now, but are faintly embarrassed to be seen with in public. At regular intervals, we have to progress the plot by doing these big tower-defense horde-fights against waves of baddies while Little Miss College Art Portfolio oversees and very emotionlessly jills off to it, and this is generally where the game's only meaty challenges can be found. (In the tower-defense, I mean, not the jilling off.)\n\nCombat's generally not much to write home about, if you'd even be inclined to write to your parents about how much you like anime games with big tits. As I say, Ys is a fairly basic \"press the button to stab\" sort of experience, and while it has by now acquired many colorful varieties of stab, it all comes down to button-mashing in the end, especially in a horde fight; in which case, it's annoying that they bound \"Switch Character\" to one of the face buttons, 'cos I keep accidentally pressing it while button-mashing, and now the game thinks I'm very indecisive. You switch between party members because there's three different flavors of stab - plain stab, salt and vinegar stab, and mint chocolate stab - that monsters can be strong or weak against, and each party member specializes in one, which is about as nuanced as the combat gets.\n\nFrom a button-mashing perspective, all the characters and their special flavors of stab feel interchangeable; they're all about as fast, with similar charge, clearing, and launch attacks, so having one of each flavor is all you need to cover the bases. But the game keeps unlocking new party members like it's piling more vegetables onto my plate; oh, a second character with mint chocolate damage? Great! I'll put it on the shelf next to the sandwich toaster and the ovulation testing kit, and everything else I never fucking use! You know, all you're doing is creating an awkward conversation at the next quarterly employment review. None of this is a dealbreaker, of course; it's just another thing that makes the game kind of adorable in my eyes. \"Look, I've got six whole party members! I'm a big RPG now!\" Oh, aren't you just, Monstrum Nox? But don't leave all those party members strewn about the living room floor; Auntie Secret of Mana might trip over them.\n\nSo just to reiterate, Ys: Mumpty Numpty isn't going to set any trousers alight with innovation; the setting is trite, the combat lacks nuance, the characters are all archetypes from the same bucket Scarlet Nexus was emptying from - Ensign Emotionless, Group Leader Girlnextdoor, Sergeant Sassyjugs, Major General Massivecunt, etc. - and even the sassy jugs wobble about in a rather token and predictable manner. And yet, isn't a deliberate refusal to innovate itself a form of innovation? Ys never asks much from me, and hell, I ain't got much to give these days; I find the games as pleasant and digestible as milk and cookies.\n\nI enjoyed playing Monstrum Nox, and there were enough intrigues in the plot to make me want to see it through; the dull setting and last-last-gen graphics are offset by the fun of roaming about with your traversal superpowers. Makes me think of Gravity Rush, actually, another series I happen to think is totes adorbs. And there is some innovation if you look for it; there's this one NPC in your home base who aggregates all the stores you've found, so you can just send them to get the items and equipment you need instead of trying to remember what shops were where. Fucking hell, lady; where were you the last time I played World of Warcraft?\n\n----\n\nGame: Mario Golf: Super Rush, Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights\n\nReviewed: 2021-07-14\n\nMario Town is split into three districts: first, Mainline Mario, where the core platformers live on increasingly tall tentpoles. Secondly, Nostalgia Mario, where dwelleth games banking on emulating older mainline titles; this is where we find New Super Mario, 3D World, and Mario Maker. And lastly, skirting around all of those, we have Whore Mario, the shady, down-market region, where they just make any fucking tat and stick Mario's face on it like a fishnet stocking on a blobfish. And yes, there are a few quaint, gentrified areas in this region where the RPGs live, but then there's the alleyway where Super Mario Run plies her trade; dear god! You can catch something nasty just being within earshot of the public toilets.\n\nThe point is, you know it's a slim pickings kind of release week when I seriously give a Mario Golf game a chance, but I figured, \"Hey! I just came off slightly enjoying the sniping gameplay in that Sniper: Roast Waterfowl with Carrots 2 game, and what's golf gameplay if not sniping gameplay without the body count?\" And so, I set out to escape from worrying about rising income inequality by pretending to be an internationally famous public figure enjoying a sport exclusively played by rich cunts... or not.\n\nAnd that was the first troubling sign: when I started the main single-player campaign, and you don't get to play as Mario. The named characters are only for the multiplayer and challenge modes, I'm afraid; the peasants have to play the campaign as a custom Mii, because of course, when I play something called \"Mario Golf\", I want to spend the whole time playing as Richard Dean Anderson or Jeffrey Dahmer. Mario, if you can slam your name over the top of this title like an artificially enlarged penis across an unsuspecting forehead, you can damn well stop scoffing mushroom tortellini in the clubhouse and put some bloody work in!\n\nThe next troubling sign was that there's a rather unreasonably long gap between starting the single-player campaign of the golf game and getting to play a fucking game of golf; I guess they felt the need to set it up like a grand adventure, rather than just me wanting to unwind for an hour, pretending that the little white balls I'm whacking are the testicles of venture capitalists. So, you get plonked into a sort of hub town area, and some watery plot is established with you being grouped up with three rivals who appear to be the first three random Mario enemies that the developers could grab from the communal asset bin. After that, there's bugger-all to do in the hub town except interact with passersby from which banal, golf-centric dialogues drop like dry cowpats from their constipated face-rectums, then it's several rounds of mandatory tutorials before we may proceed. Like golf gameplay has gained much nuance in the last twenty years: choose angle, account for wind, press button, adjust stupid trousers, press button again.\n\nAnd then after all that, right before the actual golf starts, the game goes, \"Oh, we forgot to mention; all the golf from now on is speed golf. As in, you have to play within a timer and sprint to your ball for each shot while all the other players get in the way.\" Fair enough, be careful what you wish for; some golf is happening now. Fair enough; shouldn't expect a relaxing, sedentary experience from something aimed at kids these days, who can't pay attention to a raging house fire unless it's somehow themed around SpongeBob Fucking SquarePants. But from the way we get chucked without warning into nine holes of speed golf, makes me feel the game is paced like absolute dogshit; reject Wii Sports dogshit with a general air of halfhearted jank, like it couldn't even be bothered to erase the perspective lines.\n\nSo I kicked it in the head fairly swiftly and went looking for indie games instead, and since I was put in a bad mood by Mario Golf's happy, brightly-colored commercialism, let's look at something gloomy, violent, and nihilistic to cheer myself up. Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights has absolutely no connection to Mario Golf: Super Rush, unless we want to call this the \"Games Whose Full Titles I Struggle to Commit to Memory\" Double Bill, and is yet another attempt at 2D platformer Dark Souls-ing, so you know what that means: any moment spent not dodge-rolling through an enemy is a moment closer to fucking up. Oh, and we're a small child in a scary world, as well; all we need is some anime tits, and this game could officially represent indie games at the Olympics.\n\nIn classic Dark Souls fashion, we're in a ruined medieval kingdom where everyone's gone undead and hostile, and-- Ooh, can I take a stab at what the main villain will turn out to be? Is it the darkness? Oh, it's \"The Blight\"; well, close enough. We play as a tiny, innocent little girl with white hair and white skin and a white dress with the general vibe of someone who's had their clacker welded shut at birth; we must explore the kingdom in your basic Metroidvania fashion, using the power of restless spirits to fight off the hostile undead, purify their souls, and claim their power for ourselves through sheer, unrelenting force of moe.\n\nIf you think I've sounded a bit dismissive so far, then fair enough; \"dismissive\" is kind of my default tone, probably why they've never asked me back to judge that children's art competition a second time. But the guiding principle at work in Ender Sillies is that if you can't be original, at least do everything right, so while, yes, it's a bit Dark Souls-y and no small bit Hollow Knight-y and quite a large bit Salt and Sanctuary-y, and the \"borrowing a wide variety of attacks from defeated enemies\" is significantly more than a bit Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow-y, it all fits together rather well; it's as colon-blastingly difficult as you might expect of a game where the enemy has ten million swords, halberds, and buggering sticks of every size and shape, and you only have a positive attitude and a dress your mum made you wear to church, but its generosity with its checkpoints is proportional to its stinginess with consequences for death.\n\nThe boss fights pull off the right balance in that they seem insurmountable the first time you skip into the arena and get your petticoats nailed to the wall, but as you learn their patterns and find the best combination of powers to counter them, they gradually come apart like a headboard in a honeymoon suite. But it's the context that makes it for me. You're not just killing bosses; you're purifying corrupted knights, reminding them of their vow to protect little, doe-eyed white chocolate porcelain figurines like the main character, and enlisting them to fight by your side, adding a through-line of emotional storytelling to the standard gameplay that I found rather effective.\n\nIn all, there's only one aspect of Ender's Game: Quitely Knightly that I dislike, and that's the animation. I get that some games can't commit to lovely frame-by-frame 2D animation, because the artstyle has a lot of gritty detail and we're hoping to glimpse the Sun again at some point in our lives, so instead, they create animation by rendering everyone's body parts seperately as static images and rotating them as needed. But it always looks so stiff and puppet-y, and rather at odds with the grim, serious tone of the plot; feels like reading Requiem for a Dream adapted to pop-up book.\n\n----\n\nGame: Scarlet Nexus\n\nReviewed: 2021-07-07\n\nI relish a chance to go into a game knowing nothing about it; it's like how I prefer to be paddled by someone wearing a mask so we don't have to make awkward conversation about it later while waiting for the bus. I didn't know anything about Scarlet Nexus but the title, which told me jack shit, although it does sound like a bad erotic fiction author's euphemism for lady bits: \"Her scarlet nexus quivered in anticipation as he unveiled his magenta ambassador.\" There was also the one image on the Steam page, which seemed to depict some Jawas from Star Wars with orange tubes coming off them like they rigged up a Lucozade delivery system, which was intriguing enough.\n\nSo I immediately started it up in preparation for something wholesome and sports drink-related, only for everyone to pull their hoods down and go, \"PSYCH! It's an anime game.\" Doh! You got me again, anime! \"We sure did, fuckface! Now choose your protagonist; do you want to be Tedious Generic Anime Schoolgirl, who thinks the best way to convey seriousness of character is to have the emotional range of a bathroom sink, or Tedious Generic Anime Schoolboy, who remains inexplicably oblivious to every female character in the game openly vying to knob him?\" Oh well; at least if it's a Japanese game, it's not just going to be another Jiminy Cockthroat or survival crafter like everything that comes out of the West. But then again, Japan has its own Jiminy Cockthroats, or over-represented tropes.\n\nLet's take a look at the story, for example: Earth has been ravaged by apocalypse except for an outpost of humanity with access to really advanced technology for some reason, and this outpost is being constantly assaulted by mysterious monsters, necessitating the creation of a defensive force of people with superpowers or special technology, almost none of whom, for generally unexplored reasons, are old enough to shave. Now, which action sci-fi anime did I just describe? Basically all of them? Yes, that was my thought. It also describes several Japanese games I've played, including Astral Chain, Xenoblade Chronicles X, that Attack on Titan thing.\n\nAnd there tend to be a lot of similarities in the way gameplay's structured: generally, there's a core combat mechanic with a hack and slash-y emphasis and lots of very elaborate finishing moves that involve jumping very high and going, \"YAH!\" This combat is relegated only to fenced-off arenas, while the rest of the gameplay consists of exploring open areas full of very interesting scenery, mostly behind invisible walls, while the only things you can interact with are a hundred copy-pasted NPCs that all have one dialogue line that plops out of their mouth whenever you press on their head like a fucking Pez dispenser. Oh, and the story will feature a cast of diverse characters with unique weapons and haircuts, including enough waifus to cover all the standard archetypes, if not a full-on dating sim mechanic, because as we all know, erotic fan-art accounts for something like 97% of the Japanese economy.\n\nIf we might as well think of everything I just listed as the Japanese equivalent of Jiminy Cockthroat - Chihiro Cockthroat, if you will - then this cock has been completely enveloped by The Scarlet Nexus, and the result feels inescapably generic, but for the plot occasionally going in slightly bananas directions that make me think it was a mistake for the game to divide it across two parallel campaigns, as whichever path you pick, you're going to miss out on a few bananas plot points that kind of lose something when just being verbally described to you in the bits where Generic Anime Boy and Generic Anime Girl meet up to compare notes. \"Hi! We just got back from Narnia, where we learned that the monsters are actually made of jam and all along, one of our party members was secretly an artisanal jam-maker from the dark side of Mars.\" \"Well, I know you're too boring a character to have made up something like that!\"\n\nBut let's stick our fingers up the primary gameplay loop and check it for prostate cancer. The core combat is based around you being a psychokinetic who can fling bits of scenery at enemies and also has a big sword, but that kind of goes without saying; first day of Anime Protagonist High School, you get the big sword with your campus map and your homework diary. So, combo-ing involves switching between twatting with sword and twatting with random chairs and radiators and things, and honestly, I'm not sure I like it; in the heat of battle, you don't seem to have a lot of power over which random bookshelves and wheelchairs your powers are going to fling at the target, how long it'll take for them to get there, or if they'll hit from the right angle to smack into their dangling, hairy weak spot.\n\nAnd it's let down by some dodgy control choices, like having to press two buttons to switch the targeter back to the main threat you're trying to focus on, because the game fucking auto-targets anything you hit even if you're only giving it a courtesy maiming in passing. And while there's an interesting abstractness to the monster design, it's fucking hard to intuit what they're about to do. Oh, that one's stomping its high-heeled shoes and wiggling the garden gate it has for a face; is it about to charge or trying to find a wi-fi signal? I can't fucking tell.\n\nThe other gimmick is your fellow party members, whose unique powers you can borrow to augment your attacks or add other buffs and conditions, but what with having to include every character archetype, including Inexplicable Asshole Boy, Dude Everyone Calls The \"Old Man\" 'Cos He's Over 25, and of course, a full waifu inventory, there's kind of too many party members to keep in mind, especially when the two factions join forces halfway through, and suddenly, we have to deal with double-tapping shoulder buttons to switch between character wheels. Quick question, game; are you Microsoft Windows? No? Then don't use double-clicks for interface navigation in the middle of combat! (And don't use Microsoft Windows in combat either, thinking about it.)\n\nSpeaking of party members, the game plays up the relationship mechanics by having these little chill-out sessions in between story missions, where you increase your bond with the party by making conversation and passing out whatever presents you crafted from the random bullshit you found in the last mission's bins, and it's a right pace-killer, especially after, again, the two protagonists' factions join forces, and suddenly, you're hosting a fucking office Christmas party and have to mingle around, listening to everyone's anime bullshit for half an hour, 'cos if you don't, you won't be able to make your sword attacks strawberry-flavored in combat.\n\nAfter all that, I can't think of much that recommends Solar Plexus; I liked the monster visual design, and some of the plot curveballs were fun, but the combat is full of little annoyances, and there's a lot of the critical path gameplay that feels obnoxiously padded-out. It is also simultaneously anime as dicks and anime as balls, and I understand that saying that will immediately turn off half the audience and electrify the other half, but it often seems to be going out of its way to hit all the points on the anime checklist, and comes out feeling like a terribly generic anime action RPG. When Anime Waifu #3 appeared and my anime schoolboy protagonist introduced her as his childhood friend, I remember literally saying aloud, \"Of course she fucking is!\" And oh, look, she's secretly in love with someone. Can I guess who? Is it 90's-era David Duchovny? \"Ooh! Good guess, but think slightly blander.\"\n\n----\n\nGame: Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart\n\nReviewed: 2021-06-30\n\nYou may recall my first and only experience with Ratchet & Clank was playing that one on the PS4 that was tying in with the movie, and which made me go, \"Hmmm... is that the smell of distended rectum, or has this franchise gone completely up itself?\" Always an occupational hazard when a series goes on too long, runs out of new territory to explore, and instead decides to settle down and curl up inside its own bum, but what an excellent setting of tone for the latest one, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Incidentally, speaking of bums, whatever happened to the tradition of Ratchet & Clank games having slightly risque subtitles, like \"Going Commando\" or \"Up Your Arsenal\", in the grand DreamWorks movies, Grabbed by the Ghoulies, \"stealth joke for the mums and dads\" tradition?", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "S'pose we're above that kind of cheeky fun these days, aren't we, Sony?", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Probably got nicked by someone in marketing whose only experience with comedy is having had it patiently explained to them at a mandatory seminar. I'm trying to think of ways the title \"Rift Apart\" could apply to bums, but all the possibilities make me feel uncomfortable.\n\n(Ahem. While rewatching this video prior to final upload, it occurred to me that \"rift apart\" might be intended as a sort of pseudo-spoonerism for \"ripped a fart\", which would be a bum joke, and if that was intentional, I hereby retract the preceding complaint about the subtitle not being a bum joke. I repeat: Ratchet & Clank's issues may not presently be for want of bum jokes. We now resume your snarky internet video.)\n\nIt's called \"Rift Apart\" because the plot deals with the eponymous duo getting transported to another dimension hauntingly similar to their own with identical game mechanics, but where they never got together, and therefore, everything is wrong and bad, which is just about the only plot left that a franchise that has gotten up itself can do. When the heroes have won too many times and the villains humiliated too often to be a credible threat, it's time to play the \"What If?\" card; it's like what happened to superhero comics after they officially ran out of ideas circa 1975, and every story since has just been one race after another to restore the status quo in which Spider-Man is poor and miserable and Batman is rich and miserable, and as, of course, we've recently learned, unadventurous in the bedroom.\n\nSo in the new dimension our heroes get trapped in, the local versions of Ratchet and Clank - girl versions, no less; the fan fiction community will be abuzz with madly oscillating fists tonight - never met or became partners, and so, Girl Ratchet and Girl Clank getting together is the fucking final puzzle piece required to win the day and finally correct their deviant existence. See, there's something terribly flimsy about the setting of Ratchet & Clank, which might be because it 100% pivots around the relationship between a space cat and his fucking Roomba. On the one hand, it's got this grand space opera interplanetary scope, but it also seems so weirdly underpopulated; it's like each planet only has one actual character on it and ten million copy-pasted generic locals whose job is to run around screaming every time something explodes.\n\nAnd a lot of the plot feels like one contrived excuse to go to a new planet after another: \"We need to get a magic crystal! Let's go to the magic crystal planet where they're mined from. Oh no! Our magic crystal shattered!\" \"Well, we're on the magic crystal planet; couldn't we just get another one?\" \"NO! Now we must go to the fixing things planet and enlist the legendary fixer of things!\" This is literally what happens at one point; it's like someone casually brings up this fixer dude, and suddenly, that's the only imaginable solution to a problem that only calls for half an hour's work and a Pritt Stick. Then we go to the fixer planet and have to fight a fucking giant robot out of nowhere 'til I guess the sequence runs out of setpieces, and we abruptly stop fighting the giant robot. \"Oh, sorry; thought you were someone else. Here's your fixed crystal. Plot tangent over.\"\n\nAs for the gameplay, it's Ratchet & Clank: you switch between playing Ratchet Classic and Girl Ratchet, whose actual name is \"Rivet\", and I tell you that now before I give into my sudden extremely shameful impulse to refer to her as \"Snatchet\". And the opportunity to mix the gameplay up with a new playable character was missed like Catwoman's unfulfilled G-spot, because they both play exactly the same; in fact, when one of them gets a new gadget or weapon, the other one automatically has it as well without them even having to meet, possibly thanks to Space Dropbox. So it's mostly more of the same: the usual rail-grinding, box-smashing, pew-pew combat and leveling up your favorite weapons until they become super powerful, and then never fucking using them again because your dog turd on a stick needs leveling up and you don't want to waste the XP.\n\nThe only significant addition to core gameplay is a \"quick dodge\" button, which I seem to remember saying the last game could've done with when the combat got intense, so again, it's nice to know I still have that power; for my next trick, I will command Sony to cluck like a chicken and release Bloodborne on Steam, for fuck's sake. Otherwise, it's more of that very PS2-esque Ratchet & Clank gameplay that hasn't changed much since the first racily-subtitled sequel, but you know what? No bad thing, say I; in a world where it seems like every AAA franchise is inexorably creeping towards the universal Jiminy Cockthroat model like blobs of hairy cum towards a prison shower drain, it's actually nice to see something resisting the pull and sticking with what works. And honestly, as up itself as the story has gotten, it is sort of impressive that it's still maintaining the same continuity after all this time, and has only had a slight dalliance with rebooting.\n\nI just find the characters really boring! It's a ways into the game before Ratchet and Rivet meet up in person, and since being the last member of his species is Ratchet's only remaining interesting character trait, their eventual meeting is hyped up with some significance; I mean, these two are pretty much going to have to smash at some point, if only for the sake of scientific inquiry. But then they do meet, and it's like watching two teenagers being forced to hang out together at a barbecue because their parents are part of the same swinger's club. And meanwhile, basically every other character is \"comedy person who gets flustered and talks too much\", a character archetype that, to my mind, should be sealed in the nearest Borderlands game and chained to the ocean floor.\n\nSo that's Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart: generally inoffensive, but hardly pushing the envelope; more prodding the post-it note, really. I apologize for the abject blandness of this take, and also for the lateness of this review; it would've come out sooner if we'd gotten a review code before the release date, but Sony wouldn't give us one when they found out what it was for. They said that, quote, \"Given the tone of that coverage, we'd prefer you secure your own code.\" From where, Sony?! The fucking dumpster outside your office?! I don't normally give you these cheeky little glances behind the beef curtains, but, I mean, really? I guess we all knew publishers want to dictate the content of reviews, hence those review guides they keep sending us that read like a timid schoolchild asking to please not be kicked in these specific sensitive areas, but I didn't expect them to just come out and admit it! What's your problem with my tone, Sony? You didn't know I'd make the \"Snatchet\" joke!\n\n----\n\nGame: Sniper: Ghost Warrior Contracts 2\n\nReviewed: 2021-06-23\n\nThere's still something about the title \"Sniper (HRUUH) Ghost Warrior (HRUUH) Contracts\" that irks me, all dry heaves aside; I always find it laughable when anyone refers to themselves as a \"warrior\" if they've never even had one battle-axe lesson, or, indeed, if they collapse like an ineptly-folded cootie catcher the moment they get into a direct fight with someone less than two hundred yards away. Without the \"sniper\" part, what would you assume \"Ghost Warrior\" was? I'm leaning towards either \"poorly-translated martial arts film\" or \"an air freshener marketed towards men aged 18 to 35\".\n\nI reviewed Sniper (HRUUH) Ghost Warrior 3, and it was godawful, like watching a Jason Bourne film where the costume department accidentally ordered everything two sizes too small and Jason Bourne spends every action scene in a dustbin, growling with generic intensity about how his jockstrap pinches. Sniper (HRUUH) Ghost Warrior (HRUUH) Contracts 1 was an improvement in that it was a game like reading a slightly interesting magazine in a doctor's waiting room, as opposed to being like the ensuing botched colonoscopy. I covered it in my compilation review of games I couldn't think of any interesting things to say about, but now the sequel's getting its own review; not because it's any less mediocre, you understand, but because it's now so mediocre that the mediocrity's come back around to being interesting. It's been a while since I've seen a game so utterly milquetoast in all its attributes.\n\nThe plot, right, is that you're a lone sniper in a nondescript Middle Eastern oil nation with a new government that I guess didn't import enough Simpsons DVDs, and therefore, the Western powers want ousted; you proceed to oust it by tracking down a bunch of key power brokers and turning all their heads into very short-lived, highly pressurized ornamental fountains, concluding with the big leader herself. You do all that, then the very no-nonsense voice in your head says, \"Well done! \", then you go home. I guess I was expecting a twist, like \"The big leader gets in a giant robot suit or some kind of fortified bunker, at least, and isn't just standing around in a courtyard looking like she's waiting to complain to the gardener about some neglected leylandii\", or maybe \"The no-nonsense voice in your head could be lying about your targets\"; you only have his word that they're evil, and the worst you ever see them do is neglect to close the Venetian blinds before you make everyone else in the room forever paranoid of distant shrubbery.\n\nThere is kind of a twist, in that there's one last surprise target you need to ornamental fountain after the main lady, but Mr. No-Nonsense Handler tacks it onto your to-do list with all the gravitas of a request that you pick up a carton of milk on the way home. So on the whole, it feels like the story writer sat down to work and then threw up their hands and went, \"Pfff! \", even leaving aside how painfully generic a setting this is for a contemporary war shooter. Oh, I guess we can't call it that, 'cos there isn't technically a war going on; come back in a few years after our actions get declassified, I suppose.\n\nBut I guess there's no helping feeling distanced from the story in a sniping game, where the average distance between you and every other named character is roughly the length of the queue outside the STD clinic in the town where your mum lives, and this is a game that focuses on the sniping, thankfully. There's a bit of utterly bog-standard action-stealth gameplay on the way to the sniping positions - you know, hide in bushes, wait for guards to turn around, and contextual button-prompt them right in the jugular vein - but then the sniping challenges feel like a nice reward, like coming home after a long day at work, gathering the family around, and shooting them all in the head.\n\nI enjoyed the sniping gameplay more than I expected; at least it focuses on something, unlike the rest of it, which is the usual \"You can use stealth or direct combat, or stick landmines down your trousers and bum-bounce everyone to death; it's up to you!\" folderol. No, reign it in, kids. Those targets are fucking miles away; you won't be bum-bouncing those without an industrial-grade bum trebuchet. So you have to snipe crazy long distances, calculating wind drift and bullet drop-off, so it's actually rewarding when you score a headshot, and it's like watching slow-motion footage of a dog overturning their food bowl. But this is a modern stealth game, and so, as always, the specter of Cockup Cascade hangs overhead like a socially inept zeppelin; if you miss your target and set off an alert, then just fucking reload, 'cos if you couldn't cottage-cheese their noggin while they were standing around daydreaming about pies, then you definitely won't do it while they're sprinting to the car.\n\nAnd when alerted, all the enemy bodyguards instantly know your position 'cos I guess they're all experts in trigonometry, or maybe my mum made me carve my name and address into all my bullets, and they start firing back, and mystifyingly, can hit you! From a thousand meters! Makes me wonder why I blew all my money on the sniper rifle equivalent of a Porsche 911 if a bunch of rusty AKs that a rogue nation picked up at the CIA's last rummage sale can achieve the same result. But I'll give this a pass, because while, in reality, there's not much you can do about a shooter two post codes over except shake whatever remains of your fists, this is a game, so there needs to be some threat, and Sniper: Toast Borrower Pontefract Cakes does seem to understand that.\n\nSo while it does provide you with the inevitable scouting drone that every Jiminy Cockthroat game now has, by the last couple of missions, there are so many anti-drone towers around, there's only about 10% of the map you can even use the fucking thing. You can also lay mines, but the one time I successfully killed an enemy with one, all his alerted friends, again, instantly figured out my position somehow; Mum's name labels strike again! So the A.I. does have a tendency to cheat, but honestly, it probably needs all the help it can get; the little alert meter that pops up when you're visible fills up rather weirdly slowly from what you'd expect from anyone with 20/20 vision and an intact hypothalamus.\n\nSo I would describe Windscreen Wiper: Wet Warbler Wank Biscuit 2 as a game of contrasts: interesting enough sniping nuggets concealed within some rather flimsy stealth-actioning, but I don't mind that too much, 'cos it helps pace out the fun bits; it's like a thoughtful present with some slighly damp gift-wrap around it that only a couple of weevils have gone into. What I do mind is how fucking flimsy it is from a narrative standpoint; the obvious disinterest of its creators radiates off it like the brown note. \"Yeah, you're in the country of Whateverstan; the government's totally bad, probably; here are some targets.\" That's all the context you get, and there's absolutely no sense of escalation or that the situation is evolving at all; it's just one distant bigwig after another getting the fly-to-the-windscreen treatment.\n\nThe only real highlight, dramatically speaking, is right at the end, spoiler alert, when No-Nonsense Voice is giving his final congratulatory monologue and starts getting emotionally needy. \"Good work, agent! You have made this area safe for democracy! This ends our contract. But I'd just like to say, you've been a pleasure to work with, and I'd like to buy you a pint someday. I'm sending you my home phone number in case you want to get in touch. No pressure; any time's fine. It's just... I've been very lonely since the divorce, agent....Are you still there, agent? Oh, my cat's come into the room, agent! Do you want to say hello to my cat?\"\n\n----\n\nGame: Necromunda: Hired Gun\n\nReviewed: 2021-06-16\n\nNormally, I'd spend the first few lines vacillating around the point like a ballroom dancer trying to conceal their stiffy, but this week, we're doing a shooter for big, bloody, burly types who like getting straight to the point and making loud noises when they lift heavy things. Grrrr! And you know what else big, tough, violence-liking people like? Warhammer 40K, where only the hardiest warriors and most delicate miniature painting brushes can survive; where space marines like tricked-out walking Volkswagens lock saw-toothed blades with intergalactic terrors while their all-knowing overseers argue over who's got the most accurate tape measure.\n\nNecromunda: Hired Gun is a first-person shooter set in the 40K universe; specifically, on the planet of Necromunda, and I wonder why it's taken so long for someone to set a first-person shooter there. You know how planets in sci-fi always have a single theme: the desert planet, the ice planet, etc.? Well, Necromunda appears to be the first-person shooter planet, since it consists entirely of brown industrial environments and there are only two jobs available: gunfighter, or whoever it is that carves skulls on everything. Seriously, get a skull-carving apprenticeship in the 40K universe, and you're set for life; you'll get contracts for everything from plumbing to the emperor's new personalized stationery.\n\nSo I can only assume that Necromunda: Hired Gun was the result of someone at the Warhammer factory playing some Doom Eternal and realizing, \"Hey! We practically invented big-cock sci-fi gunfighting with dudes who look like they're wearing their entire bathroom suite! Time to get in on this!\" And so, they made a game much like Doom Eternal, emphasizing high-speed action, mobility, and an environment that looks like what Silent Hill looks like if you feel very guilty about the time you hosted a barbecue in an abandoned steel mill, but with the Warhammer 40K branding.\n\nSo the plot is, you are the titular hired gun living amidst the constant gang warfare of the Hive cities, where all the women have mohawks and belly shirts and all the men look like they got dragged through a combination sewer and decommissioned optometrist's equipment storage facility; you take a routine job to shoot up some lads, but I guess didn't read the briefing properly, because we end up getting shot up by the lads we were supposed to shoot up. Then we get enhanced with a few more copper pipes, and there's something going on with a new piece of MacGuffin technology that all the gangs are after, and someone murdered someone high-ranking, I think, and-- oh, whatever. I think the only way to fully appreciate this plot is either to already know a lot about Warhammer's setting, or to stop giving a shit and just focus on waiting for everyone to stop talking so you can go to where it says to go and shoot all the dudes.\n\nSo the environments are fairly open with a lot of verticality, and with your double-jump and wall-run and hookshot, you can merrily fling yourself around them like the Swiss Army knife in an industrial laundry facility you somewhat resemble. But comparisons to Doom Eternal dry up quickly; there's a strategic element akin to Doom's \"chainsaw the baddies, win a prize\" thing, where you get health back if you shoot enemies after you've been hit. But this isn't like Bloodborne, where getting hit once is the first bite of a three-bite shit sandwich; it's a high-octane shooter. We're constantly being hit, because at any given moment, there's more hot lead in the atmosphere than breathable air, so we basically just get health back from shooting things and the distinction was pointless.\n\nThere's also something akin to the \"glory kill\" mechanic, but instead of having to wear an enemy down first, you just run up and press the \"Use\" key at any time, whereupon your character does something, and the enemy dies from it; that's as much as I can say with confidence. Maybe if the graphics weren't so murky and every character weren't so heavily accessorized, the slightly overlong kill animations wouldn't look like poorly-lit footage from David Attenborough's The Life of Refrigerator Parts, which I had plenty of chances to enjoy, because you can't be harmed while the animation plays out and you get health back from doing them, so there were entire platoons I cleared out just by running up to each enemy one-by-one and pressing E like an eager waiter with a plate of murder canapés, and I can't imagine that was the intended experience.\n\nYou also have a dog; a big, friendly bite-monster who lives in the special doghouse in your bum until his cooldown finishes. It's one of the more prominent among the ninety billion bells and whistles this game has, but it has the usual issue of NPC fur-baby support: that pointing at a target, telling Mr. Scruffles to bite its nipples off, and the process of Mr. Scruffles figuring out how to get to them is infinitely less efficient than just shooting them in the head with your gun, especially since Mr. Scruffles doesn't have your mobility, and while you're hookshotting and double-jumping around, can only cock his head in confusion before chowing down on his own bum. But the dog is useful, because while he's out, all the enemies are highlighted through walls; very handy with architecture as busy as this. Frankly, I'd have rather just had the see-enemies-through-walls-o-vision and left the dog and the collection of poo bags at home, but whatever; let him have his fun. It's like having to make friends with the kid who owns a pool, I suppose.\n\nHeld up against neo-Doom's tightness of design, Necromunda falls short; its various gimmicky mechanics work together like horny cats in a taffy-pulling machine, and the layout and visuals aren't clear enough to serve the quick decision-making fast-paced gameplay demands. Still, put all that aside and embrace the flow of traversal and combat, and you might find yourself riding the wave of enjoyment, until you get to the end of a mission and have to deal with the user interface, at which point the wave of enjoyment crashes into a concrete jetty, and you get your head stuck in a mooring ring, and there's a shark.\n\nSeriously, the in-game menus are horrible; you end a mission, and you're expected to sort through the various guns you found, and the lucky charms and status items that all look like they'd be more at home in a crafting survival game being combined with ten of their fellows to make an iron shovel, deciding if the \"3% reduction of cholesterol from Chinese takeout\" bonus they offer makes them worth hanging onto. And if I decide to sort something into the \"hang onto\" pile, does that mean it's equipped now, or do I equip it in the load-out screen or at one of the merchants in the hub area, all of which mutely present a sort of cross between a fractal and a sheet of graph paper and expect me to know what the fuck I'm there for, like the audience at the TED talk in that recurring nightmare I have?\n\nThinking about it, having to stop the action every now and again to get angry over a bunch of calculations and graph paper might be on-brand for Warhammer, but it's still a pace-stopper, even when you have figured it out. You know how you know you want to hang onto a gun in Doom Eternal? You fire it at a bunch of imps and then count how long it takes for disembodied armpits to stop dripping off the ceiling.\n\n----\n\nGame: Miitopia\n\nReviewed: 2021-06-09\n\nRemember the Nintendo Wii? After the Nintendo GameCube was the console equivalent of a Chinese gymnast - well-crafted and colorfully-dressed, but painfully undernourished - remember how Nintendo followed it up with something that resembled a UFO cult's purity-testing device, and it sold better than mouthwash outside a blowjob factory, and everyone was all like, \"Ooh, motion controls are the future of gaming! \", and I was all like, \"No, they've only attracted a short-term crowd of gimmick-loving trend-followers, and ultimately, the long-term core audience of gaming plays to relax and unwind and not Morris dance around the fucking living room. \", and then the consoles were all like, \"Don't listen to Grumpy-Trousers! Motion controls all 'round!\" Ten years on, and the Xbox has had to sheepishly remove its Kinect like a hat at a funeral, the PlayStation Move is relegated to backup Christmas-themed sex toys, and the Wii itself is consigned forever to the leaky trough of consumer history, with all its brown gunk-encrusted controllers and cheaply-made third-party hidden object games about Toy Story cast after it. And I'm still exactly where I was, but with a slightly nicer chair, so looks like I won, hunter-duckers!\n\nStill, the legacy of the Wii remains with us, with every twinge of waggle-induced tendonitis and, of course, the concept of the Mii, wherein players construct a sort of refrigerator magnet homunculus they can pretend looks like them to insert into certain first-party Nintendo games with nonspecific protagonists and the general vibe of an animation on a bowling alley TV, a genre to which we can now add Miitopia, a full-on party-based RPG you can populate with the refrigerator magnet homunculi you have on your Switch. Thing is, I don't have any Miis on my Switch, Miitopia; this is the first I fucking heard that the Switch still has a Mii-creating facility. I thought it was just my device for playing indie games while on the plop. Unlike with the Wii and the 3DS, the Miis aren't central to the user experience; I haven't randomly acquired a bunch via StreetPass, or from inviting people over to play strip-WarioWare.\n\nSo every time Miitopia needed a Mii to fill an upcoming role, I had to make a new one from scratch, and if you could imagine an arse so tiny that it could only poo out a turd one millimeter thick, like a length of brown dental floss, that is how little I could be arsed to do that. So, for each one, I told it to randomly generate a bunch, and I'd just pick one that looked vaguely like a celebrity, and that's the story of how the stalwart adventuring party of me, Moby, Betty Boop, and Sinéad O'Connor united to battle the evil dark lord, Brian De Palma. I know this all sounds about as substantial as a campaign for healthy eating fronted by late-period Marlon Brando, but there's something about Miitopia that I felt makes it worth talking about; it's quite intriguing to see an attempt to design a narrative-based game while designing as little narrative as possible.\n\nThe plot is, Brian De Palma is evil dark lord-ing across a generic fantasy world with all the visual identity of an example website from the 90's, and we, the protagonist, have been enlisted by fate to stop him. Over time, our party expands as, one-by-one, various cartoon characters and music celebrities knock on the door of our motel room and tell us they will be joining our quest; not exactly Arthur meeting Lancelot, is it? All subsequent interaction between party members takes place through randomly-selected generic conversations, making the epic tale of our struggle against darkness about as dynamic and engaging as reading a book of Mad Libs that you filled in the last time you were completely sober.\n\nHaving said that, there's a surprising depth to it at times; there's a Persona-esque mechanic where party members increase their friendship levels by hanging out, and that gives you extra benefits in combat, so there's actually a point to it, in stark contrast to that Tomodachi Life bollocks. No romances, though, God no; learned our lesson there. Engaging with sexuality on any level in today's enlightened age is like going paddling in the Marianas Trench. Then, at one point, one of my dudes hid behind my main dude one too many times, and they had a falling-out, so my main dude started getting sulky and prone to errors until the other dude apologized enough times, and this is the kind of organic storytelling shit I wanted to see, as it lets me pretend I have actual friends.\n\nComparisons to Persona end pretty quickly, though, 'cos Persona, right, is an RPG, whereas Miitopia is a fucking slot machine; it lies at the unmentionable stain on the bedsheet where console RPGs and mobile games met and vowed never to speak of again. Everything in this game is a gamble; for one thing, you can't control your party members in combat, so all strategy is out the window: I'll pacify Goblin Dentist A with my \"jolly interesting facts about animal husbandry\" attack, so Halle Berry and Sinéad O'Connor can focus damage on Goblin Dentist B, hopefully. \"Oh, dear! Turns out, Sinéad O'Connor is going to focus damage on whatever she bloody well pleases, and Halle Berry is just going to do that fucking useless attack that raises the friendship level of everyone in the party, which is great for her Instagram, I imagine, but isn't going to help much with the goblin wisdom tooth extraction that's about to boink all our health bars.\"\n\nAnd all the benefits you get from friendships are random, as well; maybe your next \"soggy biscuit\" attack will randomly do triple damage, 'cos your two mates in the party both made a contribution. If you fail a boss fight, just go straight back in and try again and hope for luckier rolls of the dice. But that's not all; each level consists of running on a conveyor belt for five minutes like Hanna-Barbera characters on a budget crunch and battling a monster or two, then you go back to the motel for some admin, and maybe you decide to buy some new equipment. But even that is a fucking gamble; you give a party member money, and they might buy a slightly more powerful sword or armor for themselves, or they might come back with a half-empty bottle of mouthwash and a parking receipt from the blowjob factory.\n\nBut crossed fingers and prayer don't make for a good skill ceiling, so to compensate for all the randomness, there's the \"sprinkles\" mechanic: how this works is, at any point during battle, you can pause, and then give yourself all your health and magic back. That's it; kind of feels like a last-minute spackle sort of gameplay mechanic. There is a limit to it, but even so, it kind of makes healing spells and items completely obsolete; at least it creates the one element of twitch gameplay, when you have to make sure you slam the \"Pause\" button and sprinkle all your health back before Moby wastes his turn eating a fucking healing banana.\n\nRandomness, as always, has this tendency to hack your brain to keep pulling on the slot machine handle, and Miitopia certainly manages that, as I played it intensely for most of the fucking week before I realized how wafer-thin it all was and stopped. On reflection, it's all so half-hearted; there's a Final Fantasy V-style jobs mechanic that starts with warrior, mage, and priest, that basically cover all the damage, magic, and healing bases, and a whole bunch of random useless jobs that read like someone was making them up while glancing around an office: pop star, scientist, chef, pot plant, err... cat, staple remover. I only made up that last one. So on the whole, won't recommend, unless you really want to dress up Sinéad O'Connor as a cat and watch her go to town on a goblin like it's a picture of the Pope.\n\n----\n\nGame: Subnautica: Below Zero\n\nReviewed: 2021-06-02\n\nAre survival crafting games overdone? I would say \"no\". They used to be overdone; now they're that smear of smoking fat on the floor of the oven that you keep telling yourself you'll clean before the next time you use it and makes all your tater tots taste like charcoal. How many more times must we combine \"bit of wood\" with \"plant fiber\" to create \"two-story mock Tudor retirement cottage with kitchen island and baby grand\"? Why do they always assume I want to build a fucking house?!", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "OOC - Mandatory inclusion (with quotes): The Amazing Human Desk Tidy", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "I'm only here for the thrill of exploration and discovery; it's like wanting to build a house in Disneyland. I climb a mountain and gaze upon the savage landscape below me, simultaneously inviting and foreboding in its cruel majesty; my first thought is not \"Well, there's a good spot for the breakfast nook.\"\n\nStill, amid even the blandest and most tedious hedgerow might be found the occasional discarded porn mag, and one of the few survival crafters I unmixedly love is Subnautica. Why? Because it was full of danger and spectacular underwater scenery that made it thrilling to explore, it had a story with a beginning, middle, and end, and a progression path that felt like we were constantly expanding and improving our ability to explore, even when we were building a fucking house. So I've definitely been among those who held aloft their cleaned Subnautica plate and cried \"More, please!\" to the exasperation of our parents and prison wardens, and that's exactly what we've got here: Subnautica: More, Please!, or Below Zero, which is rubbing up against the title of \"standalone expansion\" so closely that \"standalone expansion\" should probably complain to human resources.\n\nIt's generally smaller and shorter than the original Subnautica, and much of the gameplay is the same; the little exploding bastards that hoard the Cave Sulfur are still a massive pain in the oxygen tank. But there are some new features; most notably, the main character has a miraculous and innovative new piece of equipment called \"a personality\". Robin, for it is her name, comes to an alien ice planet to uncover the truth behind the death of her sister; the evil corporation that runs the Subnautica universe keeps saying it was an accident, but every time they say it, they sort of very unsubtly wink to someone standing off to the side, so obviously, we're going to trust them about as far as the distance between a Catholic school teacher's knees.\n\nBut the inciting \"dead sister\" plot element kind of fades away from the game, unless you're the kind of sucker who actually pays attention to audio logs, and after Robin gets an alien A.I. stuck in her head like it's the theme song from a 90's Disney cartoon, her priorities shift to mainly doing whatever the fuck it wants to do until you can build a new alien body for it to annoy the shit out of instead of you. So that's what drives you along much the same progression path as before: going from a little, helpless, floundering babby with an escape pod and two granola bars who can't hold their breath very long, and can't even dive past a hundred meters 'cos they got a note from their mummy saying they don't have to, to a deep-sea drilling, robot suit-wearing, badass survivor who's escaped from the mouths of giant horror-whales so many times, they're licensed to practice horror-whale dentistry.\n\nWhat's different on the gameplay front is that now we have to worry about freezing to death on top of air, food, water, and paying the electricity bill, although it's only a factor when we're on land; for some reason, all the seawater on this ice planet is pleasant jacuzzi temperature. Another wonderful survival tip from the world of survival games: if you're in below-zero temperatures, immediately make yourself as wet as possible; that'll certainly help!\n\nSo there's a bit where you ride a snow-speeder through icy wastelands while being chased by one of Godzilla's more unruly turds that shows up in the promotional art a lot, but it's more a gimmicky interlude than an integral new mechanic; I mean, if the most interesting new feature of a game called \"Subnautica\" takes place on dry land, then it sounds like something's gone wrong somewhere. Still, even in a vacuum, it's not that interesting: you ride along, the giant worm pops out, you fall off your speeder, the worm wiggles his big, glowy bum at you with the malicious pleasure of a housecat knocking a cup off a desk, you get back on the speeder, repeat. If the whole game were a cheeseburger, it'd be the pickle, if that; it might just be the sesame seeds on the bun, or the brief pang of guilt from your contribution to the deleterious effect meat production has on the environment.\n\nThe meat and the bread and the tasty, tasty cheese is still the underwater fun, and I was getting into that just as much as the last game. Sometimes, \"more, please!\" is all you need if the original was good enough: diving deep, finding new caverns, picking a good spot for your base, and slowly making the initially vast and intimidating environment your cringing, salty bitch. I do like the new vehicle, the Seatruck; it starts out just as a little sporty runaround, like the original Seamoth, but you can add modules to it until it has the Cyclops' advantage of basically letting you carry a base around with you, but fully customizable, so if you don't want nineteen fucking lockers in the thing, constantly reminding you of how many people failed to come to your last birthday party, then you can-- \"CRASH! \"...I'm sorry, what? \"CRASH! The game crashed!\"\n\nI should mention I was playing the PS5 version 'cos it was the code I was given, and might as well get some fucking use out of that glorified factory-warped panini press, and this version seems to be a bit buggy; it occasionally crashes to - I hesitate to use the word - desktop. So when was my last autosave, Subnautica: Below Zero? \"Autosave? What's that? Is that like runner's high, but for goalkeepers?\" Sudden change of expression, sound of distant breaking glass. You don't have autosave?! But I've been playing for, like, four hours! I built half my base! I found some really hard-to-find things! I made friends with a shark and named it \"Porthos\"! What do I do now?! \"I don't know; eat shit, by the sounds of it.\"\n\nIt was a difficult few days after that, listeners. I didn't want to go back to Below Zero; I didn't feel like I could forgive it. I sought other games to review; I tried out a Castlevania clone on Steam called \"Lost Ruins\" that people seemed to like. And that was enjoyable and intriguing, as I set off to uncover the mystery behind why every single character was wearing a Japanese school uniform, and why the giant anime girl boss fights attacked me by trying to crush me with their giant titties-- oh, I just figured the mystery out, actually. Inclusivity's great and all, but there are people who I feel would still benefit from being shamed now and then. So in the end, I went back to Below Zero and just tried to power through to where I'd left off, making do with a nice, plain one-bathroom studio underwater tech base, and can confirm just how short Below Zero is, 'cos there'd only been about a half-hour of plot left before an ending that felt somehow both overly drawn-out and anticlimatic.\n\nSo yeah; it's more Subnautica with some bits bolted on, and maybe that's enough, but for fuck's sake, put autosave in your games! Yeah, we used to get by without it, but shit changes, you know? Your mum used to get by without a gastric band, but then the five-dollar footlong happened.\n\n----\n\nGame: Biomutant\n\nReviewed: 2021-05-26\n\nHey, now that the post-apocalypse is starting to feel less like an overused setting in fiction and more like a fucking dress rehearsal, want to play a game about small, furry animals retaking the Earth after the human race dies out? Well, then play Tokyo Jungle, genius; it's got cute Pomeranians ripping the throats out of bunny rabbits, and what kind of monster can't find joy in that? I guess there's Biomutant now, too, but you don't get to be a Pomeranian in that, so I don't know how it had the balls to show its face. Actually, that does raise the awkward question of what the fuck kind of animal we are playing in Biomutant: best guess, a sort of hyena-cat-leopard-raccoon-lemur-sloth, like we got conceived at the Lion King wrap party and nobody was willing to claim parentage.\n\nAnyway, Biomutant is an RPG, you know what that means: \"Stats, stats, stattity stats. Character creation time! Let's randomly combine seven zoo animals to create your physical appearance, and then choose our favorite stat.\" I hate when a game forces me to make a whole bunch of character-building decisions before I know the first fucking thing about the game. \"Do you want to put points into intelligence?\" I don't know; do I?! I mean, how much intelligence does it generally take to hold a big knife by the non-ouchy part and stick it in everything softer than a tree trunk?! \"What about charisma? It makes it easier to pass persuasion checks.\" But how often does that come up? Is this one of those RPGs where high charisma is the secret easy mode, or one where any build not specced for combat is going to get chumped like a concerned parent at an after-school knife-fighting club? Spoiler alert: it's the second one.\n\nBiomutant is an open-world RPG that's trying to do a lot of things, none of them well. This is normally the point where I'd summarize the story, and I assume the game has one, in the sense that I assume a teenager's bedroom has or, at one point, had a floor. What certainly doesn't help is the slightly insane decision to have the narrator be the only one capable of speaking; every character you interact with only talks in animalistic grumbles, like dogs upset that you stopped rubbing their tummy, and so the narrator has to summarize what they're saying. And this is an RPG; you talk to characters all the time! It creates the vibe that we're experiencing the story second-hand: \"Grumble grumble, whine whine.\" \"He says you are this kingdom's only hope, brave adventurer, and his tone of voice was assuredly very inspiring.\" This isn't the story; this is the fucking CliffsNotes!\n\nBut even if they'd gotten in the fucking Royal Shakespeare Company, it wouldn't help, 'cos the plot comes at you like a two-foot-high sandwich to an unprepared jaw; you start off in a bunker, and then you rescue a dude from some standard enemies, and he informs you that your parents and home village were murdered by a monstrous villain, and you want revenge. Oh, thank you for jogging my memory; you know how these things slip my mind. Except, I don't think that's actually the plot; the plot seems to be, \"You have been volunteered to save the world by restoring the Tree of Life, or possibly by destroying the Tree of Life.\" Oh, yes; we have to pick a path on the ever-unsubtle black-and-white moral spectrum, where the choice is either friendship and hugs or violence and power-bombs, and every single fucking character in the game feels entitled to judge you on which path you're heading down. That is, assuming the narrator is to be believed; they might all be taking the piss out of my eyepatch for all I know.\n\nSo the Tree of Life is important, somehow, and it has four roots, and one to the west is being ravaged by the evil Fluffynuffy, but Pongo is building a nutbanger device that you can use to wrongle the binkybonk, before going to the second route in the north, which is being splapplopped by the Knicky-Knacky-Noo-- Hold the fuck up! Your story, Biomutant, could at least have the decency to buy me dinner before it spooges all of itself over my face at once.\n\nSo absorbing the story in Biomutant is like trying to translate a badly-written message on the top of a speeding custard pie that's being thrown at someone else, but what do you actually do in the game? Well, it's an open-world RPG, so usually, what you do is go to where the icon says to go, where some kind of sentient hedgehog-otter-weasel thing will give you a mech-suit and tell you to use it to gather five squeaky ducks that you can use in the next boss fight to win, somehow, and you know what? I'm just going to stop trying to get my head around all this. Another thing you're obliged to do is take over territories for your tribe, which ties into the \"moral choice\" thing, 'cos at the start, you have to choose whether to side with the tribe that wants you to murder all its enemies and let the world burn in chaos, or the side that wants you to murder all its enemies and then get all judgy at you about it.\n\nObviously, I went with the second lot, 'cos I'm not fucking fifteen, and then, just before every stronghold takeover mission, your dudes are all like, \"Try to avoid violence! \", and I'm like, \"Well, tell that to the fucking mission, because as soon as I kick the door in, it's going to spawn a bunch of lads and tell me to defeat them to proceed!\" \"Oh, you can go to fucking town on them; I just meant violence against people who count.\" Yeah, so it's only when you confront the leader of a stronghold that you have the option to try to persuade them to give up without a fight, which is the only place where the charisma build comes into things, so I wouldn't bother, frankly, 'cos on the few occasions it's effective, its main purpose is to make the game marginally less interesting.\n\nI say \"marginally\", 'cos the core combat is only slightly more engaging than clicking a single dialogue option and getting the subsequent tense diplomatic negotiation summarized for you by the narrator. The combat is like a paddling pool full of refrigerator parts and white bread: not much fun... and shallow... and for babbies... and overcomplicated. You've got your one-hand weapons and your two-hand weapons, which can be fully customized with different hilts and blades and various add-ons, customizable armor parts, ranged weapons, combo attacks, magic attacks, parries, ripostes, wedgies, holding them down and gobbing on their face, and it all goes to waste, 'cos the moment-to-moment action just doesn't have any satisfying weight to it; it's just watching bouncing furballs waving sticks around, like Ewoks holding a rave inside a tumble-dryer. And then you realize your stamina comes back way too fast, so you might as well just spam your favorite magic attack over and over again, like you're sick of babysitting and it's the button that turns on Sesame Street.\n\nIn microcosm, the combat displays the issue that runs through the entire game: that it's thrown too many ideas into the pile without thinking about how it's going to fit them all through the door. The story and mechanics needed to be paced out better, or indeed, at all. I can't engage with the plot, and none of the mechanics are fun; there's no solid core here to bring everything together. It's like they kept adding stuff to a shish kebab and then ran out of skewer, so they started hot-gluing chunks of meat and bell pepper to the end, and needed to realize that there are much more elegant ways to get someone to leave your barbecue.\n\n----\n\nGame: Returnal\n\nReviewed: 2021-05-19\n\nWhen you think about it, aren't we all trapped in cycles of one kind or another? Cycles of work and sleep (hopefully not at the same time); cycles of eating Creme Eggs and shitting them out to make room for more Creme Eggs. Perhaps there lies a universal truth in the premise of this week's subject, Returnal, in which the protagonist is trapped in an existentially horrifying cycle of death and resurrection in pursuit of an answer to the overhanging question, \"Is it worth buying a fucking PS5 yet? \", and the related question, \"Is it finally time to have an interaction with an eBay scalper that doesn't end with you picking bits of broken teeth out of the treads of your shoes?\" Well, let's not go nuts.\n\nReturnal is, in the simplest possible terms, a roguelite; a game with procedurally-generated maps that you have to start from scratch every time you die. Only, this is a roguelite with AAA graphics and financial backing and, as tends to be the case when AAA gets its kinky fingers into something that indie and retro circles have been playing with since Peter Molyneux still had all his own hair, they're acting like they fucking invented the concept. Why else would they name the game after it? Returnal, as in, \"eternally returning\"; how droll. The brainstorming meeting must've gone through enough donuts to conceal the entire contents of your mum's bedside cabinet.\n\nLeaving aside the slightly awful name that reads more like the kind of made-up word that would follow a game's main title and a dry heave, Returnal is a nice chunk of good old hard sci-fi that plays like a roguelite version of Metroid Prime by way of the movie Prometheus, and I, for one, am always in the mood for a good hard sci-fi-ing: the kind of thing where it takes a single alien concept that turns everything on its head and see what happens to an ordinary person having to deal with it, like when you sneak psilocybin into someone's breakfast cereal and then watch them go out to collect the mail. In this case, our protagonist, Selene, crash-lands on a monster planet covered in mysterious alien ruins and... well, and monsters, obviously, and soon finds that every time she gets killed, she wakes up back in her ship with the starting gun and all her bits re-established. Also, she keeps finding corpses of other versions of herself and audio logs from a possible future self, who sounds like she's gone two imposing, erect penises short of an H. R. Giger art book.\n\nReturnage very much front-loads its explore-y, platform-y, first-person shooting gameplay, but brings across enough intrigue with its isolated plot elements to keep you wanting to push forward: what is the mystery behind the alien signal? How many times has Selene gone through the cycle? Why does her house keep appearing on the alien planet and making her play a Bloober Team first-person walking simulator for five minutes? Is it real? Is any of this real? Are we even Selene any more? Who did that eggy fart? Wouldn't you like to know?...I would, too; I kind of didn't finish the game, so I can't answer any of those questions except that last one, and I'm holding onto that for blackmail purposes. Lord knows I tried to finish the game in the time I had available, but this isn't one of those games you'll inevitably beat if you just keep following the objective icon and ignoring the side-quests; it's hard, it's unforgiving, and it doesn't give half a square of raspy, company-issue toilet paper that it hasn't randomly spawned you a decent gun yet. \"Deal with these six flying robots with missile launchers, and I hope you learned how to quick-dodge with your trousers 'round your ankles.\"\n\nI have some slightly cynical thoughts about this amazing new roguelite concept those innovative geniuses at the AAA industry have come up with for us here; it feels like a cunning way to get out of having to balance your game properly when a bonus room could contain three free weapon chests, a cake, and a handshake from the prime minister, or has an equal chance of locking you in a broom cupboard with a furious gorilla and his giant luminescent erection. It's hard to frame that as well thought-out design in a vacuum, but as part of a roguelite, who cares? Die and have another crack, and maybe you'll randomly roll a competently-paced difficulty curve next time.\n\nSo, success in Returnaround returna-revolves as much around luck as getting good, even more so than in other roguelites, I'd say; there's this whole \"malfunction\" mechanic where some pickups are infected with the wibbly-wobbly purple badness juice of legend, and if you pick them up, you'll either get away scot-free or get crippled in some way that you're stuck with until you jump through some extra hoops, like \"get a certain number of melee kills or prime minister handshakes\", and this is 100% a gamble. But then again, the extra objectives are never insurmountable, and it's kind of fun to have that extra challenge... BUT WAIT! Is it? Fun, I mean?\n\nThat's the trouble with randomness: I don't actually know if I'm having fun or if it's just hacked my brain, the way gambling does. You know that experiment they did on birds where one cage had a machine that just dropped food when a button was pressed, and the other had one that only sometimes dropped food when a button was pressed, and after a while, the first cage was fine, but the second one had developed a food dispenser-worshipping evangelical bird cult (or pigeon religion)? That's what Returnorama makes me feel like every time I die, go back to the start, and furiously swear that I'll just have one more go to wipe the smug smile off that faceless collection of glowing objects I died to, and it's more spite than enjoyment that's carrying me.\n\nThat said, it doesn't hurt that the core controls are nice and fast and responsive and arcadey; exactly what you need when you're flinging yourself around, trying to avoid a million and one glowing bullet-hell projectiles, made nice and distinctive against the muted, murky environments. Perhaps a touch too murky when, in the heat of the moment, I mistake a murky smoke cloud for a section of murky floor and proceed to pay my respects to Mr. Newton at full, screaming volume.\n\nSo, there's that; also, what with the PS5 already being, in my view, \"Particle Effects: The Console\", every projectile and pickup is a shower of glowing blobs and every enemy looks like a pre-built gaming PC going Super Saiyan, and it's hard to distinguish incoming threats from all the glowy effects flying off the main character as she shoots, especially with the camera hugging her armpits like post-workout body odor. Things might generally be less annoying if the camera could fucking back off a bit so we could see the pre-built gaming PC that just ran up behind us and is about to whip us with its dangly USB cords.\n\n\"Oh, come on, Yahtzee; the game's intentionally hard! It's not going to throw up warning signs and lovingly stroke your hair to help you adjust.\" Yeah, but there's a line between \"hard\" and \"unfair\" that Returnaringo skates along haphazardly at times; I know that's the intention - unfair universe, death, death, grim, grim, futility of personal struggle against the uncaring vastness of the infinite universe, \"Ooh, makes you think\" - so Return of the Jedi pulls off its intentions pretty well. Just bear in mind that its intention is to hurt you... which is fine. Art is about exploring the whole tapestry of emotion; sometimes, you want games that make you feel powerful, and sometimes, you want ones that make you feel like an unacknowledged smear of organic paste on the boot heel of the universe. You know, as practice for when you get a job at EA.\n\n----\n\nGame: Resident Evil Village\n\nReviewed: 2021-05-12\n\nWeird question: how often would you say foreign objects get traumatically inserted into your body during an average week? Maybe once at most, and usually with your consent? Well, tell that to Ethan Winters, or as I've come to call him, \"The Amazing Human Desk Tidy\". It's seriously tarnishing his \"average everyman in a crisis\" image, the sheer amount of random sharp objects he gets stuck in him in the course of Resident Evil 7 and 8; by the end, it's just gotten silly! I know he doesn't ask for any of it, but you know what they say: if anyone you meet is an impalement weirdo, maybe the impalement weirdo is you.\n\nAt the start of Resident Evil Vilililililillage, Ethan \"Unluckiest Chump in the Western Hemisphere\" Winters is lounging around the house with his wife and baby, thinking his getting-impaled-on-things days are behind him, when, of all people, Chris Redfield bursts in, shoots Mrs. Winters dead, and kidnaps the baby. This, boys and girls, is what we call a \"hook\", but don't worry; it's like what they used to do with superhero comics where the cover shows Superman about to drop-kick a baby into a volcano or something to force you to buy the comic and discover, oh! Turns out, all along, it was a volcano-shaped sweet shop and it's the baby's birthday. So obviously, there's an explanation for Chris's actions, one that I feel he could've summarized to Ethan easily enough before or during the home invasion without having to beat him unconscious with a rifle butt. Chris just felt like being a real dick about it, for some reason; maybe he couldn't find a boulder to punch that morning.\n\nAnyway, various other things go wrong, and Ethan gets trapped in a weird, isolated village of monsters and must rescue his baby daughter from the monster leaders. Now, Resident Evil has had its ups and downs, in my view: mainly downs, and specifically two ups - Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 7 - and Vilililillage is best summarized as what you'd get at the exact midpoint between those two games. So, from 7, we have the first-person gameplay that, again, feels like we're piloting a refrigerator box balanced on a Roomba, as well as essentially the same plot beat-for-beat: Ethan gets toyed with by family of psychos, kills them one-by-one, discovers something near the end that ties it to the overarching Resident Evil story, the way one ties the leash of a perfectly satisfactory dog to the front of a combine harvester. The only difference is the acreage.\n\nAnd from Resident Evil 4, we take the gothic B-movie vibe, inventory system, quirky merchant character and associated weapon upgrade mechanics, and basically the whole setting: isolated village in open-quotes \"Europe\". \"Europe\", eh? So somewhere between Manchester and Istanbul, then? \"Hey, we should probably do something to seem like we're not just entirely copying RE4's homework!\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Hmmm... what's the exact opposite of a tiny castle-owning man?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"A giant castle-owning woman!\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Genius! Fish fingers all 'round.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Yeah, sorry if you got into that whole meme that arose around Lady Dimitrescu, because whoops! She's only the boss of the first area; she dies, like, two hours in, and then it's back to fantasizing about your high school French teacher in a milkmaid outfit.\n\nSo I find myself disappointed by Vililililillage; on broad analysis, at least. The moment-to-moment combat is sufficiently weighty and brutal, although I would say the difficulty feels a bit low on standard level; I somehow never ran out of ammo or items, and yet, simultaneously, never ran low on inventory space. Testament, perhaps, to Ethan Winters' dad-level suitcase-packing ability. But consider it recommended if all you want is another ten hours of Resident Evil-brand distraction to kill time before you collect your \"Most Discerning Motherfucker in the Universe\" award, but I was hoping for more. \"Yahtzee, Resident Evil 4 and 7 were your two highlights of the series! Surely, a game that combines them must be everything you'd want, right?\" WRONG! Dirty boy! No mummy milkies for you!\n\nFirst of all, it's hard to appreciate the creativity on display when so many of its moments and mechanics are copied beat-for-beat from its two main influences, but more importantly, 4 and 7 were good for different reasons: 4 was amusingly camp and action-focused and grand in scope, but 7 was survival-focused and benefitted from a narrowing of scope that made it effectively unnerving; 8, as a result, is a severely mixed bag. How mixed? Put it like this: there was a moment in Vililillage that was the most genuinely terrifying horror experience I've had in a video game for a very long time; there is another moment, sometime later, where you're in a dreary, repetitive industrial environment fighting cyborgs, and it's about as scary and exciting as trying to squeeze past a Borg cosplayer on a narrow staircase, and when I say \"moment\", I mean about an hour.\n\nThis is part of the decline the game suffers after Mommy Milkies has spooged herself out of the game, and after the really effective horror part-- it's the bit in the dollhouse, alright?! I presume it's okay for a review to identify the bit it's praising. I don't know; you people cry \"Spoilers!\" if I so much as tell you Ethan Winters' inside leg measurement. Anyway, the point is, that's the peak, and there's only one way to go from a peak. The game's all over the place by the end; all the global conspiracy shit leaks in from the other games like brown urine from an overloaded nappy. There's a bit where we have to play as Chris Redfield, and it turns into a military shooter. I didn't even mention that the industrial area ends with Ethan Winters having to pilot a fucking mech suit with a chainsaw arm and an infinite gatling gun, and before you say that sounds cool, you predictable, mouth-breathing, Marvel movie-enjoying fucks, think of the start of RE7 when you're in a shed fighting off a crazy wife in her workout pumps, and how infinitely more effective it was than any of this nonsense.\n\nThe sinking feeling I got from Chris Redfield's appearance at the end of 7 has proved entirely justified: the way Vililillage shifts the story's focus to the stodgy old git towards the end feels like a misstep after the breath of fresh air that Ethan Winters has been to Resident Evil protagonists. \"Oh boy, someone new, and human, and relatable, who we've not witnessed do something really embarrassing like 'be in Resident Evil 5'!\" As a series, Resident Evil just can't seem to kick the habit; every now and again, it pulls its head out of its bum for one game, but just can't resist that wonderful butthole smell, and is six inches deep again by the sequel. So, of course, we discover how the events of the last two games tie into the fucking Umbrella Corporation, and there's a new bonkers global conspiracy to create monsters and sell them as weapons, because it's nice how guns straightforwardly murder whatever we point them at, but maybe if there was a chance your weapon could turn around and suck your eyeballs out, then that'd add enough je ne sais quoi to stand out in a competitive marketplace.\n\nIt's like Resident Evil is a restaurant that's been trying to sell octopus burgers, and no one fucking likes the octopus burgers 'cos they're slimy and weird and the eyeballs look like they're judging me, so then they bring out a nice burger with no octopus and it sells really well, and the managers all go, \"Great! Now, how do we work the octopus back into this?\" Forget about the fucking octopus! The octopus doesn't work; why do you always insist on pushing the octopus?! Are you trying to launder a marine life-smuggling enterprise? !\n\n----\n\nGame: Balan Wonderworld\n\nReviewed: 2021-05-05\n\nLook at you all asking me to play Balan Wonderworld and getting your phone cameras ready, like you've just put a smash cake in front of a tiny baby. That title's a gift, isn't it? \"Banal Wonderworld\"; \"Whirly Blunderbland\"; \"Anal Wankypiss\". But, you know, bloody-minded contrarian that I am, I feel inclined to be charitable towards something everyone already says is a great big bag of salt and vinegar shit-crisps, and I can honestly say, badly-designed and incomprehensible though it is, I don't feel much hate or anger towards Balan Thunderpants; just a mixture of confusion and embarrassment, like what I felt when my dad announced he'd gotten a job as a Playboy Bunny.\n\nI suspect the negativity towards the game has a lot to do with it being directed by Yuji Naka, creator of Sonic the Hedgehog, and everyone was expecting more, to which I might ask, \"Have you fucking played any Sonic the Hedgehog games in the last twenty years?\" Expecting more at this point is like going bobbing for apples in a veterinary surgeon's sink trap. But while Balan Chunderlungs bears a lot of the Sonic the Hedgehog art style, in that everyone has giant heads and stringy limbs and animate like theme park mascots going through the final stages of opioid withdrawal, the game is more a successor to Nights into Dreams, Yuji Naka's IP from the Sega Saturn days; I said to myself, \"I've never seen Nights into Dreams; I wonder what the fuck it's about?\" So I sat through a longplay of the game on YouTube, and when it was finished, I said, \"I have now seen Nights into Dreams; I wonder what the fuck it's about?\" And that rather sets the tone for this review.\n\nI suppose the best approach at this point would be to try to describe what happens in Barren Thunderthighs, like I'm some futuristic explorer reporting back from a mysterious alien ruin in the brief period before I get impregnated by something hideous. You play as either Big-Eyed Girl With Personal Issues or Big-Eyed Boy With Personal Issues, who stumbles into some kind of mysterious funhouse run by the titular Balan, who looks like what you'd get if Willy Wonka turned into a Pokémon. We are then dumped into a hub world where we get followed around a meadow by several pastel-colored Tribbles; from there, we embark upon a series of abstract platforming levels apparently based upon the psyche of a random person in the real world, who is shown in a cutscene experiencing some extremely banal difficulty in life, like \"chess player doesn't win at chess\", or \"bug-collector's school friends think bug-collecting is a bit weird\". Then we fight an elaborate symbolic boss, then we watch a cutscene with the person overcoming their difficulty, then they and the protagonist meet up and launch into a choreographed dance number.\n\nThis all happens with no dialogue, possibly as an attempt at purely visual storytelling or to cheap out on the translation budget. But listen here, Yuji Naka: a three-panel comic strip about Snoopy wanting his dinner can get by without dialogue; you need to sit down and answer a few fucking questions. What the fuck's going on?! Who's the dude who looks like if Robert Smith from The Cure turned into a Pokémon? Is he supposed to be the Satan-like villain who's causing everyone's problems in an attempt to sow discord in the world of men? 'Cos the problems are so mundane, I kind of feel bad for the guy; he's clearly gotten way overdressed for the occasion, and every time he shows up in gameplay, he gets his darkened broody bumcheeks handed to him in two minutes flat.\n\nThe gameplay gimmick is that each world has a handful of different costumes to find with different abilities, or rather, ability. Perhaps as some kind of bet or self-imposed challenge, all gameplay is based around only using one button; maybe they didn't want to exclude players whose hands are trapped in cookie jars, or were hoping to port the game to a garage door remote. So, some costumes have a jump, and some have an attack, and you have to switch back and forth to enjoy the benefits of both; some have extremely specific uses, like the \"Conservative Politician\" costume that you use to enter locked doors shaped like underage girls' vaginas, and generally, I'll vaguely remember seeing one of those doors on World Poo, Level Fart, but the levels are designed with so little flow and intuition that it's hard to keep a mental map; and then there are costumes that have no use at all, like the one that turns into an immobile cube at random intervals, and more often than not, immediately slides off a ledge into the abyss. This is one of the many gameplay design decisions that are more bewildering than anything else; it's like it was thought up by a six-year-old who was threatening that if anyone dared compromise his original vision, he would refuse to eat his dinner.\n\nThere's a lot of pointless scarcity; to pick up a costume, you need a single-use key, but there's almost always one in the same room which respawns after you pick it up, so what is the fucking point of locking the costume at all? Also, you don't just have a costume once you've found it; fall off a ledge or get hit once, and you lose your current costume, and if it's a costume from a different world that you brought along to use in a highly specific situation to get one of the hidden gold trophies you need to progress in the game, the way it worked in Sonic Unleashed, and it was annoying as asbestos-buggery back then too, I've lost the thread of this run-on sentence, let's just end on something that sounds vaguely funny, waffle bogeys. On top of that, it's also easy to accidentally lose costumes because you can only carry three, and picking one up kicks out whichever one you had in the third spot. That's right, the inventory system from Treasure Island Dizzy; I'm glad we all remember it.\n\nBut as I said, most of this terrible design just confuses me. I haven't even mentioned the weird machine in the hub world that appears to do nothing except make a number-ticker go up, and you can pour resources into it to make the number-ticker go up more elaborately, like some kind of uncomfortable metaphor for life as a social media influencer. See, this isn't standard video game industry terribleness; there's clearly a vision behind it, just not a vision that operates on any light spectrum from our universe. That's why it's mostly more confusing than rage-inducing. Except one thing: at some point, someone pointed out to the six-year-old that we only ever see the player character and the germaphobic porn studio fluffer or whoever else currently needs their bullshit problem fixed, and the game's title character doesn't seem to be involved much, and the six-year-old panicked and threw his juice box 'cos everyone needs to see how cool his character is.\n\nSo, every level features several unrelated asides where we have to watch Balan fly around, space-punching rocks and the Robert Smith dude, while we press quick-time events. These sequences are all basically the same and go on way longer than they need to, in that they don't need to exist at all, so that's, like, infinite percent too long, mathematically speaking. And if you don't hit all the quick-time events perfectly, you don't get the gold trophy what you need to progress, so as far as the game's concerned, three \"Perfect\"s and a \"Very Good\" is no different to spending the whole sequence rubbing the controller on your buttocks. So on this one specific point, Balan Wonderworld can eat shit; it was weirdly interesting up to now watching it struggle to stand up like a baby deer on the ice, but then it stumbled into my drinks cabinet and knocked over the amaretto.\n\n----\n\nGame: It Takes Two\n\nReviewed: 2021-04-28\n\nPeople often say to me, \"Yahtzee, why is it that you avoid multiplayer games? And when will you let me off this red-hot grating?\" Well, you know, it's just that I prefer playing games to relax and unwind at my own pace, and not be disappointed once again by other people and their unwillingness to learn how to tap-dance properly. But as I said in my Outriders review/widdling session, I can appreciate a multiplayer game that actually designs itself around an essential multiplayer experience, and isn't just chucking three extra players into the adventures of Captain Scowlybuff and his many identical friends for the sake of maximizing user engagement, the way one maximizes the food order of an unpopular restaurant critic with the addition of bogeys and spit.\n\nSo when my editor asked me to check out It Takes Two, a two, and strictly only two-player game, I was like, \"I'm down with that, as long as it's not like that last strictly two-player game I played, the laughably awful A Way Out by Hazelight Studios, which played like if David Cage tried to adapt The Shawshank Redemption, realized it wasn't long enough, and filled in the rest of the time with three random DVDs he found in a bargain bin.\" Who's this new game by, anyway? Oh, Hazelight Studios. Well, that might've been embarrassing for someone capable of shame! Same director as Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, of course; what is it with this fucker and dual protagonist gameplay? Does he just have really wonky vision?\n\nI'm teasing; put away those widdle umbrellas, audience, because, to my not inconsiderable surprise, It Takes Two is actually pretty fun. A Way Out was shooting for gritty crime drama and fell flat, because its rampant cliches, terrible writing, and secondary protagonist with a nose so big, he can't swim the backstroke without setting off shark alerts made it impossible to take seriously, and so It Takes Two embraces a lighter tone and a more abstract setting so that we're more laughing with it than at it, and it's full of enough over-the-top gameplay and visuals to keep me distracted from the frankly still terrible writing.\n\nThe premise is, a married couple whose relationship is bottoming out so hard, it's getting carpet burns, inform their friendless, presumably homeschooled, and probably on-the-spectrum daughter that they're getting divorced; said daughter proceeds to cry on some dolls she made of her parents for Christ knows what reason, and the parents' souls get magically transferred into the dolls. Blimey, lucky she didn't cry into some bog roll or the sandwich she was eating; that would've been a bit Kafka-esque. The parents must then work together to find a way back to normal by navigating abstract puzzle-platforming fantasy worlds based on aspects of their family home, which appears to have been about the size of Windsor Fucking Castle, harangued from start to finish by an omnipotent self-help book with a slightly racist accent whom you and the protagonists will swiftly want to murder; in fact, I'd have given the game's story more points if it had ended with the family finally coming together over a cheerful backyard book-burning.\n\nWhat should be as obvious upfront as a drastically botched tit-job is that this story arc is going to center around a divorced couple reconciling for the sake of the kid, and I don't know if that's a healthy message to bring across to troubled families: that divorce only happens 'cos you didn't try hard enough. Honestly, I kept wondering what the fuck these two ever saw in each other, 'cos the mum's bitchy and uptight and weirdly reminiscent of Su Pollard, and the dad's whiny and ambitionless and apparently did nothing with his time other than constructing increasingly elaborate playrooms for his emotionally-stunted offspring. So the dialogue's a bit cringe... worthy - cringeworthy. Worth cringing about. That is the word. Who's this fuck who's been going around, telling you you can use \"cringe\" by itself as an adjective?! - because the characters are grating, and we have the Sonic Boom problem where the game is constantly complimenting itself. \"This is amazing! This is fantastic! Wow, the artist of this should definitely be earning a living wage!\"\n\nBut none of this is a dealbreaker, because 1.) you're playing with a friend, so when it starts getting sappy, you can lean back and take the piss out of it like the emotional ghoul that you are, 2.) it has occasional darkly hilarious moments, like the extended sequence where the protagonists set out to drink their daughter's tears in the literal rather than edgy-coffee-mug sense, and end up trying to murder her favorite toy in the most ineptly drawn-out way imaginable, and 3.) the game design is actually really good. At its core, it's an exaggerated Mario-esque 3D platformer with a decent enough feel, but it also layers on puzzles where the two protagonists are given different, complimentary abilities and have to work together to proceed, and they're generally very well-designed, making the most of the strict two-player setup while relying very minimally on \"door is very heavy, needs two people to lift\", the multiplayer gameplay equivalent of white noise.\n\nAlso, the mechanics are constantly changing; first, she's got a hammer and he's got a nail, then he's got a spooge gun and she's got a gun that detonates spooge, and I guess we're a fucking third-person shooter now. It's almost impossible to be bored, as the gameplay never becomes unintuitive enough to break up the constant flow from scenario to scenario. The quality isn't quite consistent; there's the odd boring rail-shooter bit, or we get dropped into an open area full of pointless toys and minigames where we're tacitly invited to fuck around a while, but that'll force me to spend more time in the presence of the main characters, and frankly, if I'd met them at a dinner party, I'd be fobbing them off to make small-talk with the fucking aquarium. But these moments never last, and three minutes later, you're standing on an aeroplane's wing kung-fu fighting a squirrel, and your engagement jumps back up again.\n\nIt does mean that the plot feels like it's pinging around all over the place, and is more a pile of unrelated ideas strung randomly together than a cohesive journey with a beginning, middle, and end, but at least it's always pulling out something new and interesting, which is all the more impressive 'cos it's such a long game at around 10-12 hours; obnoxiously long, I'd say, but then, I'm a professional reviewer with deadlines to meet, who can't even last two hours around another person without completely alienating myself. Which tangentially brings me to one awkward overhanging question that I have: who the fuck is this game for? It's designed for couch co-op, and there's outwardly a family-friendly vibe, but I couldn't picture myself playing through it with a child of my own; tonally, it's all over the place, and it might lead to some awkward questions if your own family has seen some drama. \"No, of course Mummy and Daddy didn't split up because of you; we just never quite figured out how to get past the boss fight with the vacuum cleaner!\"\n\nThe bottom line is, it's a game throwing an awful lot of shit at the wall, a lot of which doesn't stick, but enough of it does, and moment-to-moment gameplay's as tight as a gnat's arse. I just wrote a compliment that included the words \"arse\", \"shit\", and \"bottom\"; and that's why I'm a professional, kids.\n\n----\n\nGame: Oddworld: Soulstorm\n\nReviewed: 2021-04-21\n\nBack in the wild, romantic days of the PlayStation 1, when pixels were large and masculine and memory cards were to their modern equivalents what a pedal-powered double-decker bus is to a motor scooter, there began the Oddworld series, wherein some visionary genius sat bolt-upright in bed and said, \"What if there was a world that's like primitive Earth, but - get this - everyone looks weird, and has eyes the size of Jammie Wagon Wheels? For some reason, I feel like this is a creative well that will never run dry.\" Very much the James Cameron's Avatar of its time, in several respects, because it initially announced it was going to be a five-game epic, but never quite successfully fired the outboard motor on that one, merely sputtering along for a few games before disappearing over the horizon of indifference.\n\nBut back then, we didn't have the experience we have now with the many failed attempts at cinematic universes, from which we learned that pledging a multi-sequel epic before the first installment is even out is like getting a positive pregnancy test and proceeding to book a church for your child's future wedding; you're just tempting fate to ensure your child is born with no genitals or really weirdly into Sonic the Hedgehog. Oddworld started out with this rather original, mystical, and darkly comedic vibe, but, in later games, made the tactical error of leaning more towards the comedy when the comedy was based mainly around farts and doing embarrassingly bad Star Wars prequel-level gags in the Monty Python old lady voice, and was generally about as funny as the children's bone cancer ward's production of Othello, the Moor of Venice.\n\nSo, while I wouldn't say the Oddworld franchise never got off the ground, it certainly never really cleared the treetops, and is presently weaving around the painfully solid giant redwoods of irrelevance by remaking the first couple of games; sort of an attempt to recapture that original freshness, the way one does with Febreze and a pair of old underpants. First, there was New 'n' Tasty!, the remake of Abe's Oddysee, and now Soulstorm; not a remake of Abe's Exoddus, but more of a retake, or reimagining, or recidivist, or some other word beginning with \"re\", possibly even the one you're thinking of, you terribly un-politically correct viewer!\n\nLet's not waste time and skip straight to the TL;DR part of the fractious Reddit relationship story that is this game; I kind of hate Soulstorm. I hated the experience of playing it. But the question I found myself asking was, \"Is this because of unintentionally bad design, or from its attempt to faithfully recreate the PlayStation 1 era, before video gamers were spoiled by autosaves and analog sticks and the warm, convivial atmosphere of grudging societal acceptance?\" Well, I'd say it's a little of Giant Redwood A and a little of Giant Redwood B.\n\nThe plot involves Abe, bumbling messiah of the Mudokon people who all look like Teenage Mutant Ninja Tadpoles, fresh from having rescued his people from the factory in the first game, now getting roped into rescuing another batch as he's hunted across the plains by his enemies; thankfully without so many fart jokes, but having taken those out, the game doesn't have anything to replace them with. The general tone of the story is bland, with Abe stumbling from one gameplay encounter to the next without much apparent decision-making on his part; it's like watching Mr. Bean recast as Lawrence of Arabia.\n\nAnyway, Abe's Oddysee and Exoddus were, back in the day, what we used to laughably call \"cinematic platformers\" or, even more laughably, \"realistic platformers\", which usually meant \"character can do an infinite number of pull-ups onto ledges\", which doesn't strike me as realistic, but then I get most of my exercise lifting Creme Eggs to my face. So that's faithfully recreated in standard 2.5D gameplay, complete with the classic \"cinematic platformer\" thing where it's weirdly difficult to walk off a ledge. The gameplay is also based around escorting NPCs, and a game based around escorting is so often akin to, say, a family dining experience based around sitting on spikes, but not so much in a puzzle game in the Lemmings sort of area like this; figuring out how best to navigate your dudes past a few screens of hazards when your dudes have all the facility for self-preservation as a blind hedgehog on a turnpike.\n\nBearing that in mind, when I fuck up in a puzzle game, I want to feel like it was because I wasn't smart enough, not because some element of the game decided not to work the way it had worked before. Sometimes, your followers' neurons will fire fast enough to run past the ceiling crusher when you tell them to; sometimes, they won't. Sometimes, they'll all hide in a locker when you tell them to; sometimes, they won't, and when the enemy patrol turns around, they all get shot dead before they even have time to show their hall pass. Sometimes, the enemy patrol turns around and shoots you dead; sometimes, they don't, because their A.I. fucked up and they've stopped moving altogether, which gets particularly farsical if you've dropped a mine on their patrol path. \"Boy, that was some really impressive patrolling up to now! Can't wait to see it again! Oh my goodness, is that a reunion performance of The Three Tenors behind you?!\" \"Boy, missing out on that would haunt me to my dying days!\"\n\nWhen the elements of a puzzle game don't act consistently, the result is frustration; it's like playing chess against a six-year-old who's just decided his bishop can now move sideways and shoot lasers out of his hat. These are the frustrations that I classify under \"recreating the retro vibe, genital warts and all\"; there's also an array of wonderful, fresh, new diseases that Soulstorm has acquired from not maintaining social distancing with modern video game trends. For one thing, it's nice that games can now instantly save your progress when you touch a save-point without all that fucking around with double-decker bus memory cards, but when you've just lost five dudes 'cos a helicopter enemy randomly decided they can see through smoke clouds now, and want to kill yourself and retry the area, suddenly, those insta-save points become fucking landmines.\n\nOh, and we all know how much modern video game audiences love digging around in the trash like they're your mum at a speed-dating event, and so there's a fucking crafting element in the game; we find ourselves having to laboriously check every dustbin and locker, all of which are like fussy prom dates 'cos they require you to be perfectly-positioned before they'll consent to being rooted around in, in order to craft items that are essential for progress. Or, we have to scrape together enough pocket change to pay a toll on the gate to the next area, often by taking empty bottles to a recycling machine, and that's not even crafting; that's just fucking me about. Rather undermines the main theme of escaping from wage slavery, because we seem to have taken over the factory's fucking janitorial services.\n\nWe also have the occasional cockeyed notion that this game about carefully escorting people needs some action set pieces, so our dude who's mainly built for tiptoeing around like he's sneaking off to raid the fridge has to accurately fling rocks at a giant robot's weak spots while it fires multiple explosive counter-arguments at your bony bum. So in brief, Soulstorm either does too much, or not enough of being too old-fashioned, or too new....Yes, I've confused myself, as well; let's just leave things at \"don't buy it\".\n\n----\n\nGame: Outriders\n\nReviewed: 2021-04-14\n\nBlimey, I thought video games were supposed to be violent! I've been doing so little killing lately, I'm becoming dangerously well-adjusted. Just look at my last few reviews: idle games, management games, farming sims; last night, a stray cat came into my front garden, and I didn't stomp it to death! High time for some good old-fashioned mindless violence, and who better to provide it than People Can Fly, the developers behind Painkiller, old-school boomer shooter from before old-school boomer shooters were wallpapering the fucking rumpus room, and, more recently, of Bulletstorm, quirky tongue-in-cheek spectacle shooter that's like Gears of War trying desperately to loosen up at an office Christmas party? I can certainly trust them to provide a murder simulator that's at least interesting to talk about, and not another bloody multiplayer-focused looter-shooter with endless copy-pasted bullet-sponge baddies and a cover art depicting some smug people walking slowly towards the camera. Isn't that right, People Can Fly? Yeah, I know Outriders is all the things I just said! I was doing a little funny; wipe that puppy-dog look off your face!\n\nI love when review codes of games come with a little review guide telling you how proud the creators are of their product, and what specific parts they'd most like you to gush about in your effusively praiseful review.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "It's amusing to me that they think I'm capable of guilt.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "It's like playing football, you know; if you let something inflate itself first, you'll have a lot more fun kicking it in the face.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Outriders' blurb file says a couple of interesting things: firstly, that it can be completely enjoyed in single-player, which is always a wonderful excuse to test that claim.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Does this mean you have an offline mode, Outriders?", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Ohohohohohoho, it's good that we can still have fun, Yahtzee!\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Yes, might as well admit now that this will only be a review of the first four or five hours of Outriders, 'cos most of the limited time I had to play it in, the servers stayed on about as reliably as an oversized sweater on a mischievous dog.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "I know we're all fucking jaded to games being always online these days, but maybe, as a favor to me, you could all go back to not being jaded just for a little bit? Burn down a few shrines to capitalism? How about one shrine to capitalism? And you don't even have to burn it; we can just piss in the letterbox.\n\nAnother interesting thing admitted in the Outriders review guide is that, quote, \"it may look like a looter-shooter on the surface, and many players may compare Outriders to a looter-shooter.\" Many players, People Can Fly, implying that some of them don't? Have those people gotten their eyes checked lately? 'Cos that's a cause for concern! I haven't seen pussy-footing like this since the last time I refereed a women's kickboxing tournament. It IS a fucking looter-shooter; just accept it! You basically play an ultra-violent homeless person who has to push their shopping cart around at the end of every battle, seeing if this +3 Filthy Overcoat provides better protection than their currently-equipped +2 Burlap Sack Held On With String. \"Alright, fine; it's got looter-shooter elements, but we've also focusing on our epic dark sci-fi story!\" Well, let's look at that and see if it lives up to that avalanche of adjectives.\n\nThe plot is, the planet Earth goes back once again to its abusive spouse, the human race, and once again pays the price, forcing the human race to move out and find another planet to mooch off. After decades traveling through space, we find one that seems gullible enough, and we're part of the scouting party that tentatively reports that it's not a horror planet of monsters and everyone can come down and start burning down the forests and building a load of TGI Fridays. Moments later, PSYCHE! Turns out it was a horror planet of monsters; you get wounded and cryo-frozen, and wake up thirty years later to find a hell-world where humanity are locked into the usual \"fascists vs. nutters\" forever-war. Great job, guys! Smashed that previous planet-fucking speed record; let's find another one and see if we can get it sub-two decades.\n\nThe \"forever-war on hell-world\" setting is rather disappointingly standard, but I do kind of like how the story's told, focusing on our main dude's perspective as he wakes up in an unfamiliar future and careens from crisis to crisis, bewilderedly asking where all the toilets got moved to. Also, the whole story has this air of dispassionate nihilism that I found rather entertaining; it keeps introducing new characters with distinct appearances and fleshed-out backstories and then killing them off minutes later. Ho yes, this ain't Gears of War; keeping your helmet off won't save you now! I don't like the way the camera constantly jiggles during cutscenes, like it's being directed by Paul Greengrass while he's trying to balance a book on his head. It doesn't add gritty realism; it gives me a headache, and makes me think every character's busting for a piss.\n\nAnyway, our hero is randomly given superpowers for some inadequately-explored reason, and that brings us to the combat, which is a seemingly endless parade of chest-high wall cover-shooting arenas full of enemies that all look alike, 'cos most of them strapped an entire dinnerware set to their bodies. The stated intention is that you have to get stuck in and be aggressive, because enemies are constantly driving you back and killing dudes with your superpowers is the only way to heal, in which case, I wonder why they made it a cover-based shooter, a gameplay style more suited to caution and sitting on your pimply space-marine bum, 'cos you can only move in short bursts when you've got saucepan lids strapped to all your limbs; maybe it, too, was cryogenically frozen at some point around the early 2010's.\n\nHonestly, any catharsis that came from using my superpowers to blowtorch nearby enemies like they're a litter of unwanted kittens who didn't show me enough respect is offset by the frustrating level of difficulty, as I'm peppered with gunfire from all sides in battles clearly designed on the assumption I'd have other players with me to split the damage, especially the bullet-spongy boss fights with health bars like we're chewing on broom handles. Thus is exposed the craven lie of equal single-and-multiplayer experiences, but then, I expected as much.\n\nI'm going to stream some inconvenient truth-piss into your letterbox now, AAA games industry: it is not possible for any game to be equally enjoyable in both single- and-multiplayer; you can optimize the experience for one or the other, but never both, and the sooner you stop trying to cover all possible audiences at once with the same great big money-making hat, the better. The sooner the multiplayer-likers can go back to having games like Team Fortress where different classes have different skillsets and the gameplay is built around having to rely on each other to compensate for individual shortfalls, rather than making every class mealy-mouthed, basically-okay-at-everything straight-B students bound for the inevitable rude awakening once they get to college, and the single-player-likers can get back to being able to enjoy the story and challenge at their own pace, and sing dirty limericks to themselves without upsetting everyone in the voice chat, AND FUCKING PAUSE THE GAME! !\n\nSorry, bit of a tangent there. Normally, I'd summarize my feelings about Outriders at this point, but, unfortunately, my opinion is currently down due to server issues.\n\n----\n\nGame: Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town\n\nReviewed: 2021-04-07\n\nSo after I reviewed Harvest Moon: One Star a few weeks back and said it was the imperfect Pod Person replica of the original franchise that got rejected for forgetting to glue its nose on properly, and that you should probably hold out for the new Story of Seasons, I immediately realized, \"Oh crunchy nut bugger-flakes, I've tied my hands on this one, haven't I?\" I've basically endorsed Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town, sight unseen, so now I have to review it to make sure it doesn't leave skid marks on the guest towels. After all, it's not like the original Harvest Moon developers are hoarding the secret formula for light farming sims like it's the recipe for Coke; you just need a twenty-minute day cycle, a brace of anime hotties, and an at-best truncated idea of childbirth.\n\nSome of the original Harvest Moons were stinkers, like that one on the GameCube from the \"make everything look like we're viewing it through a coffee filter\" era of graphics that had all the visual charm of the top layer of scum on the pond behind the abattoir. If you want to know if Pioneers of Olive Drab is better than Harvest Moon: One Wank, then yes, it is, but that's not much of a bar to clear. Nice job, guys; you completed a one-page assignment without resorting to 24-point text and triple spacing. The question is if it lives up to the current standard for light farming sims, which, to my mind, is Stardew Valley, which I hear just got another free content update, because the developer's doing it out of love and is apparently allergic to money or something.\n\nAnd if there's one thing that condemns Story of Seasons before it's even wobbled out of the fuck-shed on bloodstained newborn legs, it's that it hasn't done a lot of updating over the years. At least Wonky World was trying something new; it went for the kickflip and broke its nose on its own selfie stick, but Story of Seasons isn't even in the skate park. It's at home, assembling the same jigsaw puzzle as always: growing, harvesting, fishing, mining, chickens first, then cows, and all the animals look like overinflated balloons and think that foot-and-mouth disease is just a euphemism for saying the wrong thing at a social gathering.\n\nIt's only really improved graphically over the years, and call me a pointlessly persistent proponent of pixel art, but I feel that top-down cartoon farming is a concept that just doesn't benefit from full 3D; I mean, I go around town for the first day's waifu hunt, and all I have to go on are a bunch of tottering dead-eyed Bratz doll mascots that cause nary a stir in my character's humble flaxen underpants, and they don't even have attractive 2D portraits of the characters to throw on top of their dialogue boxes so you can get a feel for how they'd look once you've got a serious set of beer goggles on. In the end, I zeroed in on the one lady who appraises relics you find in the mine, just because I was seeing her every day anyway when I dropped off that day's sackload of earth-caked garbage. It's hard to feel electrified with romance, settling for the girl I would have no reason to interact with were I to just buy my own fucking pressure washer.\n\nOn that note, if you want to hear about new features, Story of Seasons has pinched a few eggs from Animal Crossing's Easter basket in that you can donate fish and relics to the museum, so every time you find a new fish you react not with joy, but with eye-rolling dismay at now having to let it stink up your inventory until you can get to the museum again, and then having to pick where to display the fucking thing like I had time to learn how to curate a fucking aquarium while I was learning how to milk a spherical cow. There's also some Animal Crossing-y online features where you can visit other people's farms and marvel at how their turnip patches are a slightly different shape than yours. Who's got time for that shit? I have to moisten all my crops, then head out waifu-hunting and moisten some other things. But who the fuck's demanding innovation from their light farming sims? As I say, the formula's pretty much down, so it's like trying to liven up a perfectly good money shot by using spicy mustard instead of cum.\n\nLet me just say this now; if you've never played a light farming sim, and don't want to try Stardew Valley because Eric Barone murdered your family or something, then you'll get the full light farming sim experience with Pioneers of Bollock City. All I can do at this point is nitpick the little ways I don't like it as much as others. So I've gone over the waifus; just the way they like it, am I right, fellas? I also don't like the loading times, and they're not helped by the loading screens all being what I think must be photos taken by other players, because they're usually blurry and poorly-cropped images of somebody's armpit.\n\nI also have a specific bubble in my catheter tube about coal; you need coal to power certain machines, but I tried to stick some coal I found in the mine into one, and it slapped my hand away. \"No! I only want refined coal!\" So a little searching around later, I discovered a crafting recipe that I picked up without realizing that turned one piece of raw coal into one piece of refined coal. If you needed more than one raw coal to make refined coal, or if there were other things you could do with raw coal besides make refined coal, then this would be a gameplay mechanic; as it stands, it's just pissing about.\n\nRight, what else? I do like how you make lumber machines out of basic wood, because it means when you get your wood bachelor's degree and graduate to advanced wood, you still have a use for all the basic wood that's still lying around. Trouble is, you don't need to get far along the tech tree before the game starts demanding large quantities of lumber, and when one lumber machine can only make one at a time, and the lumber machines are practicing social distancing so you can't cram them up next to each other, you end up with rolling meadows of fucking lumber machines, and that's not the kind of scenery I hope to spend my retirement gazing out at from the farmhouse window.\n\nMy gut tells me this game is simultaneously a bit too slow and a bit too fast. \"...Does your gut want to clarify that, Yahtz?\" Well, I don't want to push it; we had Mexican last night. The days might be a touch too long, 'cos I keep running out of things to do, but at the same time, stuff seems to respawn a bit too fast. I guess we need the trees, since we go through lumber like a termite colony under an IKEA warehouse, but as my farm expands, I feel like I'm spending half the morning holding the weeds back.\n\nAlso, I feel like development happens too fast early on, and not because I'm working hard; I'd upgraded to both iron tools and silver tools before I was halfway through the first spring. And I didn't even have to pay for a chicken coop; there was one already there, complete with one free wild chicken that was leaning against the wall ready to go tame for the first passing farmer to pat it on the head, and it's only their blind luck that I didn't happen to be setting up a teriyaki restaurant. See, you're more emotionally attached to something you've had to wait for and put a bit of work into, I suppose; that's why I've started putting on oven mitts to jerk off.\n\n----\n\nGame: Evil Genius 2: World Domination\n\nReviewed: 2021-03-31\n\nSpeaking as an extremely clever person, I feel a bit personally attacked by the concept of an \"evil genius\"; anti-intellectualism is rife in the world today, encouraged no small amount by a media concerned that their advertisers' claims that their breakfast cereal induces hallucinogenic bliss in woodland creatures might not hold up to rigorous academic study. Well, let's see how far your fucking street smarts and common sense get you when you need someone to figure out how to turn a city-sized clod of oceanic waste plastic into drinkable water and hospital-grade insulin! Just because I'm smarter than everyone else doesn't mean I look down on people; someone has to make my sandwiches. Just because I can envision a vastly more efficient society with myself as absolute dictator doesn't mean I want to go to that amount of trouble. Just because I ordered the installation of an oubliette in my basement doesn't mean I have sinister intentions for it, so stop asking questions and get your jackhammer out, Frank!\n\nBut I digress. Evil Genius was a base-building management game from the before times about being a James Bond villain plotting to take over the world, and now there's a new one covering its shameful nethers with the enticing Seven Veils of Sequel, but it's totally just a remake, fuck you; one that's let a long enough time elapse since the last decent Dungeon Keeper game that it can finally credibly argue that it's not just a ripoff of that with a campy retro-futuristic pulp spy fiction coat of paint. No, obviously, it was inspired by just looking at the way the world is currently being run and realizing that a cartoon global dictator couldn't possibly make things any worse; nor, indeed, could a world government headed by half a breakfast grapefruit.\n\nBut anyway, that's all you really need in terms of setup; you're a cackling, white cat-stroking supervillain, and you need to build a base on an isolated island and manage an inexhaustible supply of minions in order to pour resources into heists and schemes on the world map that all sound like they would probably be really interesting, and you can have a lot of fun thinking about what an exciting time your minions must be having as you dawdle around the office, micromanaging the positions of the fire extinguishers. So let's get straight to the core issue of Evil Genius: that its major concerns are 1.) creating the retro camp Bond villain lair aesthetic, and 2.) the logistics of how one runs such a place, and if anyone on the team realized that you need to crowbar \"fun and engaging video game\" into there somewhere, then apparently, they didn't think to bring it up.\n\nLet's focus on Point Two for now, because there's a lot about base-designing that feels inefficient. You're supposed to designate areas as specific rooms, but I'm unclear on why my minions need a barracks, and a dining hall, and a break room, and an entirely separate kind of break room for replenishing mental health or something; that's what happens when you let the fuckers unionize, I suppose. Furniture for one kind of room can't go in any other kind of room, which makes no sense; would it really break the interior designer's heart to shove a fucking vending machine in the break room so my dudes don't have to trudge all the way to the dining hall for a Twix? And while we're on the subject, why can I only put fire extinguishers, guard posts, and staircases in rooms officially designated as \"corridors\"? I just wanted a fucking split-level food court! Also, why did I have to research the concept of a staircase?! Where was my evil genius educated, St. Bungalow's School for the Wheelchair-Bound?\n\nIt also feels inefficient that my only recourse when I need more power or one point of signal strength is to build an entire new generator or tape-reel computer bank the size of nine fridges taped together, so you need to be constantly expanding the computer room until you've got nineteen of the buggers. Couldn't we just make the tape reels bigger or something? It's like when you need a pound of sausages for dinner, but the butcher is closed, so you just stop at the petrol station and buy nineteen Peperamis.\n\nFunnily enough, the emphasis in this base-building game is on the base-building. There's not much you can do directly; you give build orders, but you don't get to pick which minions are assigned to do the building, nor whether or not it takes priority over squeezing blackheads in front of the bathroom mirror. Evil geniusing is about hands-off management, apparently; it's just about designing your base efficiently enough that everyone can get to where they need to be. I fucked up, because my evil genius had a buff to speed up minion training, but I put the training center on the other side of the base from his room, so he was constantly having to waddle back and forth like a mother duck trying to get her chicks across a busy highway while struggling with ADHD.\n\nI get that the idea is to build a base so efficiently it runs itself, so you can sit on your fat arse shopping around for a new filter for the piranha tank, and that can be interesting, but at the same time, the game keeps throwing curveballs at you, and if it turns out you weren't prepared, there's bugger-all you can do. Being able to select a minion and directly order them to do something would make all the difference when you find yet another squad of investigators freely walking around your base, snapping away like Japanese tourists, while the eight elite mercenaries I painstakingly trained are all sitting in a security room playing Magic: The Gathering.\n\nSuddenly, the hands-off approach is out the window, as I need to specifically click on each intruder and select \"kill\", at which point, it turns out that only half the bloody mercenaries decided to pick up one of the bloody guns I spent ages bloody researching and developing, because the gun cabinet was more than three feet away and their fingers were slippery with Cheeto dust. So in my experience, if you are relying on guards, you're playing it wrong; it's more fun to use traps and turn your base entrances into whirling labyrinths of death. Although, if you do that, then suddenly those fucking mercenaries will start eagerly running up to invaders and gnawing on their ankles before they can even get to the trap, or just in time to join them in getting decked by a boxing glove on a spring.\n\nIn summary, Evil Genius 2 is an inconsistent game; if we need three kinds of break room for the sake of realism, it'd be nice if any of my lads could have a realistic sense of self-preservation, although I doubt any amount would have helped the first time a super-agent invaded my base, who tanked all the boxing gloves and then murdered every single minion before I knew what was going on. I have no idea how I was supposed to prepare for this, short of retraining everyone into a guard and buying them all one gun cabinet each to keep strapped to their fucking head at all times.\n\nBut then, when all seemed lost, the super-agent breached my evil genius's lair, and my evil genius just fucking took them apart. And that kind of killed my interest in playing any longer, frankly, because doesn't it undermine the whole theme of delegating, and the challenge of building a base to protect myself? Why bother if I can just stick my main dude behind the reception desk and open fire every time the front door opens? What you'd gain in efficiency would balance out what you'd lose in getting blacklisted by DoorDash.\n\n----\n\nGames: Loop Hero, Everhood\n\nReviewed: 2021-03-24\n\nWell, it's March, so let's \"march\" on down to Indie Game Square, crowded as ever with the permanent farmer's market of Steam, where the barks of stallholders mingle with the squeals of poorly-drawn anime girls getting violated, and no one has glimpsed the sun since 2014. And what an appropriate month this is for our first game, Loop Hero, a game about march-ing: marching around and around in a circle, or rather, watching someone else march around and around in a circle while we occasionally fling them a new pair of trousers and dream silly, silly dreams about what it would be like to be the one playing the video game.\n\nThe premise is, you are a lone hero in a world that has been destroyed; like, really, really thoroughly. Everything has been reduced to a void; it's like watching network television at ten in the morning. All that remains is a single looping path, and all you can do is follow it and, bit by bit, remember the world as it used to be. Although I guess your memory isn't the best, because you can only remember it in a rather muddy 16-bit art style with slightly hard-to-read text, reminiscent of one of those depressing Amiga games from the 90's designed by sad British people who live in places like Hull.\n\nThe actual gameplay of Loop Hero consists of the lone wanderer walking around the loop, fighting randomly-spawned apple-flavored Jelly Tots to receive terrain cards that you then place on and around the loop to liven up the scenery and provide more different things to fight and more opportunities to collect loot. I say \"fight\"; you aren't involved in that, either. The hero and the monsters just automatically take turns smacking each other like a roomful of sexually inexperienced people trying to figure out what the big deal is with S&M, and all you can do is change their equipment; you don't even get to choose when to drink potions. But lest the phrase \"idle game\" rise unbidden into your thoughts like the image of a stern primary school teacher during sex, there is some challenge here, and the challenge is simply deciding when to stop; again, like we're thinking about primary school teachers during sex.\n\nWhen you get back around to the start of the loop, you have to decide if you get to go around again to keep collecting better and better loot but risk dying and losing most of it, or head back to camp and bank all the loot you've got now, which will mean having to start from scratch. Essentially, it's a fantasy 16-bit version of Deal or No Deal; if you get too cocky, you end up going home with the $200 box to an awkward conversation with the missus, as it were. See, you use the loot to build upgrades for your home base to add more variety to your encounter deck. Oh, I forgot to mention; Loop Hero is also not a deck-building game on top of not being a roguelike or an idle game. If it were a deck-builder, it'd be a very inefficient one that would require infinite cards.\n\nThere is something very absorbing about Loop Hero that gives me the same \"Ooh, just one more go-around\" feeling that a waterslide offers; a very slow waterslide full of gravel instead of water, but some of the gravel is M&Ms, so it's somewhat rewarding. At the same time, I don't really like how Loop Hero ricochets from \"involving\" to \"uninvolving\". Like, for a lot of it, I can stick a podcast on and doze off, which is fine; some games be like that, and sometimes, it's nice just to fidget with something while I daydream about primary school teachers on waterslides. But then, suddenly, you get a few unlucky rolls and find yourself with two health and your kneecaps hanging off, and if you're not awake and quick on the \"Pause\" button, your dude just breezes straight on into Fuckedland. So that's Loop Hero; it's like taking a somewhat interesting book and systematically removing all the pages with a very slow angle grinder.\n\nSo let's move on to the other game I played, which not only falls under the same category of \"retro-style game taking place primarily in black void\", but by extraordinary coincidence, is also an anagram of \"Loop Hero\" if you change some of the letters and don't know what an anagram is: Everhood. Everhood is also an excellent argument for creating a new Steam tag along the lines of \"games that really aren't subtle about wanting to be Undertale\". It's got all the trappings: the top-down console RPG movement; the minimalist amateur-looking art; the quirky monster characters being silly giving way to rather intense existentialism and a fourth wall with all the lastability of a Pringle in a college dormitory; the Banjo-Kazooie talk noises where the budget only stretched to one squawk per character.\n\nWhere it differs is that Everhood leans more into the abstract; the setting feels more like Loop Hero's cluster of disconnected memories than Undertale's cohesive world, and there's generally a more dreamlike feel. If I were lazy game journalist scum working for some desperately irrelevant gaming news source, I'd probably describe Everhood as \"Undertale on LSD\", meaning that it has no consistent color scheme besides \"eye-gougingly vibrant\", and they're really proud of some Unity plugins they found that make the screen go all wibbly-wobbly.\n\nThe premise is, you are a taciturn wooden doll that incidentally bears a haunting similarity to the wooden doll character from Super Mario RPG, but that was more than ten years ago, and therefore, in the cognition of most mainstream video game publishers, didn't really exist. You must journey through a strange world of monsters - well, strange world of empty black screen, mainly, but some of it's monsters - to find your arm that was stolen by an evil king, engaging throughout with a combat system that takes Undertale's system of moving a symbol around to dodge symbols symbolically and turning it overtly into a rhythm game, which is a perfectly logical step, because Undertale's soundtrack was one of its strengths. Actually, most aspects of Undertale were strengths; it was a giant clump of beefy arms with one noodly twig on the bottom with \"graphics\" written down the side.\n\nSo in Everhood combat, you're basically trying to survive on a giant Guitar Hero fretboard, dodging button prompts like someone trying to edit a David Cage design document. The story takes a turn when you get your wanking hand back, spoiler alert, and acquire the ability to fight back as well as dodge, and that's when the existential stuff creeps in, because now we have the option to go back through the game and murder everything in it. I say \"option\", but the game flat-out tells you to do it, and if this is trying to ape the Undertale genocide playthrough - It is! It totally is! I figured it out, Mum! - then it misses the whole point that the player actively choosing to commit genocide was what gave it its impact.\n\nI felt genuinely bad about killing characters in Undertale because they were funny and well-written, and you had some real context for their lives, but I mowed through Everhood's cast with the same emotion as when I'm closing all my browser tabs after a successful wank. I guess it just doesn't have that emotional heart Undertale had under all its beefy arms; feels more like a showcase of admittedly quite good music, so maybe you'll find it emotionally engaging if you're the kind of person who really identified with the struggle of the pencil-drawing dude from the Take On Me video.\n\n----", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "/* Required word frequency: 'suppose' (4x) /", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Game: Harvest Moon: One World\n\nReviewed: 2021-03-17\n\nJeez, I thought the world of light farming simulators was a gentle, uncomplicated place where turnips always come up in three days and baby cows spontaneously materialize inside barns when the other cows are happy enough, with none of the grim realities of getting plowed up and down the feeding trough by a randy bull. But apparently, there's a lot of copyright fuckery going on in the world of almost-spherical livestock. Okay, I looked this up, and I think I've got the details square: The popular and influential Japanese cutesy farming sim franchise Farm Story was published by Natsume in the West under the name \"Harvest Moon\"; in 2014, the developer switched publishers, and its games have since been released in the West under the name \"Story of Seasons\" because Natsume reserved the rights to the name \"Harvest Moon\" so that they could make their own rival cutesy farming games and call them \"Harvest Moon\", because they assume those fat, ignorant Westerners have reservoirs of cream gravy instead of brains and won't know the difference.\n\nWell, just dip a biscuit in my skull, because I tried out the new Harvest Moon on Switch. I enjoyed Harvest Moon back on the SNES and have clocked in enough hours in Stardew Valley to raise an actual child or moderately-sized dog, so I was curious to see in precisely what manner Natsume was buggering the franchise's reputation over a feeding trough; quite heartily, it turns out! Harvest Moon: One World is the game, and while it seems to have had some noble intention to sprinkle a little more adventure into the concept so you're not just waking up and urinating on potatoes day in, day out, in doing so, it loses sight of the core appeal of these games, and there's a general air of wrongness about the whole thing, which first started sinking in when it told me to go to the cave and mine some bronze ore. There's no such thing as \"bronze ore\", you shitwits! It's an alloy; it doesn't occur naturally! It's like telling me to go harvest a cupcake bush.\n\nAnyway, the starting premise is that you're a dude in a world where everyone's forgotten how seeds work. \"Oh, so it's like a dystopian future where technology's taken over and everyone eats manufactured nutrient cubes?\" Well, that sounds like an interesting concept for a light farming sim, and as such, too interesting to be anywhere near this game. It's actually a standard RPG rural village, where I guess the inhabitants have subsisted up to now sucking the dew off the grass every morning. I say \"village\"; it's more like two houses on the edge of a cliff.\n\nThat's one of many ways this game comes off as insubstantial; another way is how most of the world is an empty corridor maze of repeating grass texture dotted with the odd house or tree that all look like inflatable pool toys, as do the characters, especially the protagonist with their glazed expression and permanent \"village idiot\" grin that looks incomplete because they forgot to add the line of drool at the corner of the mouth. Anyway, as the one weirdo who still thinks crops grow from seeds, you are tasked by the Goddess of Spring (or someone like that) to travel the world and reintroduce the concept of growing things; and yes, every character in this game does come across as about as stupid as this premise. I mean, for fuck's sake, there are fruit-bearing trees everywhere! What did everyone think those were? Unusually taciturn people with very delicious haircuts?\n\nThe reasonable question to ask at this point would be \"How does one combine a farming sim with a game about journeying around the world? \"; the one certainty about farms is that they kind of can't go anywhere. Well, shows how much you know, because this society that failed to develop agriculture has mastered miniaturization technology; you know, it's like when you play Civilization against someone who researches nuclear fission before they've discovered the wheel. Because of this, you can pack up all your farm buildings into a convenient package and go establish yourself at one of several predetermined spots throughout the world because this society has also failed to develop the concept of land ownership, apparently.\n\nBut isn't the point of these types of farming simulators to build something and watch it grow from a humble turnip patch in the backwoods to the primary agribusiness concern of Anime Thirsty Ladies-ville? You don't get that when you're having to uproot yourself every few hours so you can move to a new area with a different-color repeated ground texture, another two or three inflatable NPCs to load you down with more fucking fetch quests, and another couple of thirsty love interest characters about as romantically intriguing as a plank with a bad haircut. I say \"uprooting\": you can't actually bring anything you're growing with you; just the buildings and your animals pressed together into one squawking, very confused box. Every new spot has its own unchangeable grid of farming plots lovingly laid out by Mother Nature with a fucking set square, apparently.\n\nSo the game generally lacks a sense of payoff, and the mechanics are going to the randomness bordello a few too many times for a few too many economy handjobs. You can't really choose what seeds you get; you pick them up randomly one-at-a-time from passing gnomes, which is very annoying if you're trying to fill a quota, like the story mission that required me to grow three watermelons. I turned over every gnome in the fucking place, and when I finally found watermelon seeds, I'd wait for them to grow, and then the game went, \"Ooh, you're so good at growing melons! This melon randomly turned into a special melon, which doesn't count towards the quest quota, so I guess it's back to the gnomes with you!\"\n\nAnd don't get me started on the fishing, 'cos I just started anyway; it'd be redundant. \"Ooh, that's a nice big silhouette of a fish in that water!\" say I, forgetting that this isn't Animal Crossing, because after I drop in my line, all those enticing silhouettes disappear and a random, generally much piddlier one appears for you to catch. Then you have to press a button when the little fish icon moves past a bar, but the icon can change direction at literally any moment, and if you press wrong, then bye, sucker; stole your bait! And then, 90% of the time, it's a fucking sardine, that sell for so fucking little, I might as well have spent the time charging truckers for disappointing handjobs.\n\nAfter one particularly long and unrewarding day of proxy handjobs, I realized I didn't even know what I was saving up money for; I didn't need it to buy seeds, thanks to the gnome exchange, and I felt about as much investment in my farm as I do in one of my extra-long pubes after I zip my trousers up too quick. And that's it, really; I'd heard that Natsume was driving the Harvest Moon ice cream van smack into the animal shelter, and I suppose I was just curious to see the wreckage for myself and pick through it for salvageable orange fruities.\n\nIn the meantime, if, like me, you enjoy fantasizing about what it would be like to have actual manual skills, there's a new Story of Seasons coming this month that's probably the one worth holding out for. Or try the remake of the GBA one that's out on Steam; keyboard controls are a bit wonky, and it's hard to get a good sexual tension going when all the love interests are proportioned like Dora the Explorer, but that's just the companionable whiff of cow manure that drifts into the farmhouse kitchen compared to One World's hundred-yard swim down the factory farm runoff pipe.\n\n----\n\nGame: Persona 5 Strikers\n\nReviewed: 2021-03-10\n\nI like the Persona series; I guess I'm just owning that now. I like the concept of a magic world formed from the subconscious minds of humanity, so you can go into the head of someone you don't like and kick the furniture around until miniature chairs fly out of their ears. Come to think of it, I also liked Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and Ni no Kuni II somewhat, and EarthBound and Chrono Trigger back in the day-- Dammit, do I actually like JRPGs, and I just hate reviewing them because I only have a week to play, and they've usually got runtimes inversely proportional to the length of all the female characters' booty shorts? Hang on, let me stare at this anime character for a bit. Hmmm... Nope, still looks like the grotesque offspring of an inflatable sex doll and a three-point electrical socket.\n\nThere's probably just something uniquely appealing about Persona, and it seems the country of Japan agrees; it's hot shit over there. It's had more spin-offs than a very large figure skater on a very small rink; there's one-on-one fighting games, and those weird dancing games, and those Persona Q crossovers where all the characters from all the games meet each other and have arguments over whose stoic protagonist has the most irresponsible eating habits. And now we've got Persona 5 Strikers, a real-time action combat-based RPG in which Persona 5's Phantom Thieves reunite to clear their names and stop a mysterious villain using their methods to change hearts all across Japan, but do not, as the title might suggest, form a soccer team.\n\nThey've almost got the numbers for one. Don't expect to keep up if you haven't played through Persona 5, 'cos the gang's all here from the outset: Sporty Spice, Scary Spice, Posh Spice, Arty Spice, Model Spice, Hacker Spice, er... Cat Spice, and lest we forget, Protagonist Spice. Is it me, or is there a lot of dead weight in the Phantom Thieves? I suppose once you've watched someone awaken their Persona while dramatically screaming and ripping their face off and bursting into flames, probably a bit awkward at that point to say, \"Sorry, party's full, but we'll keep your résumé on file.\"\n\nAnyway, Joker, the young hero whose appearance is ripped from a generation of teenage girls' erotic Harry Potter fantasies, reunites with the Scooby Gang for their summer holiday; and what an appropriate time of year you've picked for the release of this one, Atlus, I must say, watching Joker enjoy a sizzling summer beach festival while I huddle under six dogs for warmth. As the Phantom Thieves travel across Japan, they discover the local branches of the Metaverse being corrupted by local celebrities, and have to explore their mind dungeons and change their hearts and all the usual bollocks, only now, the dungeons are full not of turn-based JRPG battles, but Dynasty Warriors-esque high-energy real-time punch-ups with crowds of mobs. Which you might think would fit well with Persona 5's usual crackling visual energy and pumping soundtrack, and I guess it does, but turn-based combat gave the original a sense of stylish, well-thought-out movement; I mean, awakening your Persona in these games always seems to involve suddenly learning how to pose in a really cool way, which tends to get lost in the frenetic chaos of a brawl.\n\nAnd that's not the only thing; the new combat takes a lot of getting used to, not least of which because there's eight motherfucking winklepicker-wearing \"please cosplay as this, obsessive fans of the world\" playable Phantom Thieves right off the bat with slightly distinct combos and mechanics. And mashing \"Light Attack\" only gets you so far when you have to be constantly vigilant of incoming attacks from all sides, and making sure to engage with Persona's weakness-exploiting mechanics: staggering cheese-aligned monsters with your Branston Pickle attacks, etc.\n\nA heroic effort has been made to translate all of Persona's turn-based combat mechanics to the new format, and it's not always a comfortable fit, like your elemental spells. In the world of turn-based, the spell that throws Branston Pickle at one enemy is a very different proposition to the one that throws Branston Pickle at all the enemies, but in Real-Time Brawling Land, it's just \"area-of-effect attack\" vs. \"slightly larger area-of-effect attack\", and the bigger one's rarely necessary as enemies crowd together like suburbanites at a new Olive Garden. And it's usually not worth using status ailment-inflicting spells, 'cos they never bloody work on bosses, and in standard battles, it's like trying to outwit individual beans on a plate of beans on toast, so why waste the stamina?\n\nAfter all, in classic Persona fashion, your stamina is limited and dungeon-crawling gradually eats it away until you're forced to return to reality to recuperate. Except, the usual Persona time crunch element is missing from Strikers; time only moves forward once you've beaten the dungeon, so rather than losing a day when you pull out of a dungeon, you just have a quick piss and a Nutri-Grain bar and hop straight back in with all health and stamina restored. So I might ask why we need to go through the rigmarole of leaving the dungeon, when the fast-travel points might as well just restore your health and stamina right there and spare us having to go through two bloody loading screens!\n\nAs I say, they're trying to recreate the Persona feel, and I suppose it wouldn't be Persona if it didn't unnecessarily dick you about here and there. But the point is, Persona 5 Strikers is very much for the fans, and my recommendation depends on how many Joker Funko Pops you have in your living space. The Phantom Thieves are all post-character development BFFs, so they just move through the plot as a giant eight-headed mass with very little interpersonal conflict, so while the fans might like to see all the old faces getting along and going through a slightly anomalously large number of bathhouse and beach scenes, you might lose a general audience. Bear that in mind as I say the following: I, someone who enjoyed Persona 5, also enjoyed Persona 5 Strikers.\n\nIt took a while to admit it, because it feels like the combat has a million and one poorly-explained elements to keep track of, and at first, it's like trying to clean your spectacles with a pressure washer, but once I was adjusted, I enjoyed trying to keep a nice flow going. At the same time, I started getting a sense around the third dungeon that the game was lacking substance, in parts: the Ice Castle dungeon, a generic setting and another generic checklist of MacGuffins before a boss fight with someone who's just generically being a dick to people. Felt like the Phantom Thieves' Mobile Dickhead Removal Service - call now for a free quote - was just going through the motions at that point. But by the standards of a spin-off, at least, Strikers is a meatier experience than that dancing sim rubbish, and the core combat retains that lovely Persona 5 energy reminiscent of coking up some angry tigers and locking them in a roller disco.\n\nIn closing, I'd like to repeat something I once said about the Yakuza games: isn't it odd how contemporary Japanese games always feel like they have to sell Japan as well? The way the Phantom Thieves stop at every tourist hotspot and have many prolonged scenes of them scarfing down the local cuisine, it's like the game's designed for foreign tourists. Maybe it's just the difference in culture standing out more to me as an outsider, but it feels like if every game set in America had characters going, \"Oh boy! I can't wait to go to McDonald's for one of our famous Big Macs, and then go down to the Walmart and watch the traditional running of the shitheads!\"\n\n----\n\nGame:Breathedge\n\nReviewed: 2021-03-03\n\nIt's the time of year when AAAs are put to bed to dream restless dreams of middling Metacritic ratings and rampaging seven-headed Twitch influencers, and we have to keep the nightlight on with midrange jank and the usual indie survive 'em ups. It's not that I dislike survival crafting as a genre; I just don't feel like it's taught me any practical survival skills. I head out to the wilderness, gather some wood and some stone, pack them together and tuck them under my scrotum for five seconds, and the result is not a makeshift axe, but an awkward conversation with my prostate specialist.\n\nBut anyway, this week, I've been playing an indie survival craft 'em up called \"Breathedge\", which is Subnautica, but in space. \"Why yes, I am that very thing, Yahtz; in fact, I contain multiple direct references to Subnautica to acknowledge its influence.\" You know, you're really sucking the fun out of dismissive know-it-all assholery, Breathedge! But yes, take Subnautica and remove all the water so that nothing remains but cold, forbidding vacuum, and that's Breathedge. And while you're at it, remove the interesting story and any particular reason to engage with its base-building mechanics-- Wait, I liked those! You removed too much, Breathedge! \"Ooh, sorry; guess I'll fill in the gap with fourth wall-breaking humor that, over the course of the game, gradually, almost imperceptibly, moves over the line from amusing to insufferable.\"\n\nBut let's not pull our dicks out before the striptease has even begun. Breathedge has much the same starting premise as Subnautica: you're a spacer who's minding their own business on a giant spaceship when it dies horrifically of not all being in one piece anymore, vomiting bits of itself all over 15-20 hours of exploration-based gameplay and leaving you the only survivor with nothing to your name but a single escape pod and the ability to turn raw materials into complex machinery by tucking them under your scrotum for thirty seconds. So the traditional Subnautica gameplay structure ensues: you explore the immediate vicinity to gather basic materials to craft bigger oxygen tanks and better equipment that lets you explore further out from your starting position, and find more exotic materials for even more complex equipment.\n\nAnd if there's one thing Breathedge absolutely nails, it's Subnautica's majestic quality, as applied to space. The lonely spectacle of the distant stars and planets is a symphony for the eyeballs, and you really get a sense of the massiveness of everything and the sheer, unforgiving distance between it all; you can basically see everywhere you're going to go right off the bat, but you can't get to most of it at first 'cos you're using some bubble gum on a straw instead of an air tank, and you'll suffocate before you can so much as get close enough for your farts to register on an extremely sensitive Richter scale.\n\nSo it's definitely got that Subnautica-brand majestic beauty crossed with terrifying hostility, like a sultry, attractive woman with the face of a giant spider. And one certainly gets the satisfaction that comes with getting near the end of the craft-explorey loop when you finally build your endgame rocket flip-flops or whatever that allow you to fully traverse the sandbox, at which point, the sultry, attractive woman still has the face of a spider, but now you're kind of into that because those pedipalps can do things to your prostate that will make your toes roll up like tubes of nearly-empty toothpaste. So those are the parts that Breathedge gets right. Ooh, there was some subtext in that last sentence, wasn't there, children? Did you spot it?\n\nThe protagonist apparently refused to splash out on one of the better-quality magic scrotum replicators, because every tool he makes breaks down quicker than a germaphobe at a bum-licking contest. And the majestic distances of space are all very well until you wear out your flip-flops traveling to one of the rare non-stingy asteroids to draw some resources, only to find once you get there that your drill only has two uses left because, apparently, it's just an electric whisk with a Cheesy Wotsit on the end. There are also way too many instances of having to craft a highly-specific tool to get past one obstacle that never comes up again, especially in the second half of the game when Breathedge goes off its attention deficit disorder meds and forgets what kind of game it's trying to be.\n\nYou spend the majority of the game in the big survival sandbox, gradually expanding your capabilities until you acquire a working spaceship, and my assumption was that this was the next stage of expansion; I was going to be able to cruise around the sandbox in my new penis extension, go back to all those mean asteroids that once bullied me, and drive through a nearby puddle to humiliate them in front of their asteroid girlfriends. But no; all you can do with your new ship is fast-travel to another, entirely separate sandbox where there's space combat mechanics all of a sudden, and introducing combat at this stage is like giving us a Snickers where all the peanuts are crammed into the last two bites. Although, you don't even have to fight them, so it's more like all the peanuts are put in a little Ziploc bag and taped to the outside.\n\nBecause all progress from this point forward is made by docking with one space station after another and going down some linear corridors until you find something that advances the story, except the game is still clinging by its fingernails to its identity as a crafting survival sandbox, so you'll occasionally stop dead because some tool or component is required to proceed, and you need to walk all the way back to your ship to craft it. And since we can't go back to the first sandbox to hunt resources, the game just has to awkwardly sprinkle some around the floor, like a previous player ran through here with an overloaded shopping trolley taking the corners too quick. It's rather baffling; it's like the game realized it forgot to spread the plot around the whole game and had to load it all into the last two hours of it.\n\nThis might be related to Breathedge's deliberate attempt at fourth wall-breaking subversive comedy, which, early on, I thought worked well and gave it a humorous edge that made it stand out in the garbage trawler that is indie survival craft 'em ups. But while a fourth wall break is surprising and funny, all subsequent fourth wall breaks is just waving your comedy hammer at empty air, and the omnipresent fast-talking A.I. narrator who flips back and forth between doing a comedy motormouth bit and just talking too fast 'cos they're not a very good voice actor really starts to grate when they constantly point out all the gags.\n\n\"Oh no! You can't get past here without crafting another piece of arbitrary bullshit! The developers, who are me, who are writing these words that I'm saying, must be trying to pad the gameplay out; what a bunch of scamps. Oh, look! It looks like something is about to happen! Oh, my goodness! The thing we were all expecting didn't happen the way we were expecting it! What a clever subversion on the part of the developers who are writing these words.\" See, there's poking fun at yourself, and then there's poking a finger so far up yourself, you can pull undigested Cheerios out of this morning's breakfast.\n\n----\n\nGame: Little Nightmares\n\nReviewed: 2021-02-24\n\nLongtime viewers will know we've had a lot of fun here at the Zero Punctuation Combination Waterslide Park/Sewage Treatment Facility with the running gag that virtually every arty indie game is basically about a small child being lost in a scary world, probably because they're frequently made by tech nerds new to the industry, having to face the fact that it might finally be time to get a real job and figure out how to do their own laundry. Which also explains why the games are usually highly unsubtle metaphors for something from the standard list of tech nerd mental health issues: anxiety, depression, isolation, the fact that nice girls don't want to touch them.\n\nIn the past, I've occasionally stretched the criteria for \"small child, scary world\" to include indie games like Bastion, Braid, and Ori and the Blind Forest in order to continue claiming to be right in my adorably small-minded way, but absolutely no stretching is necessary for this week's subject; oh, dear me, no! Little Nightmares wears \"small child, scary world\" like a set of custom-fit pajamas, throws a big, comfortable duvet of oppressive atmosphere over itself, and goes to sleep. It uses all the tropes, even the really on-the-nose ones like \"main character wears a hooded coat\" and \"soundtrack featuring sad children singing like the evil landlord just sold all their gruel vouchers\". I might go as far to say that it officially takes Limbo's crown as the ur-example of \"small child, scary world\", since Limbo's pseudo-sequel Inside kind of gave it up when it transitioned from \"small child, scary world\" to \"GIBBER, GIBBER, NONSENSE, NONSENSE, WEETABIX WITH LEGS!\"\n\nLittle Nightmares II, I should say, which is the new one, but in general terms, the two games don't differ much, and I never reviewed the first because... I don't know; let's say a zeppelin crashed into my house, so might as well lump them together. They're both extremely creepy games about a tiny child with a big head navigating a sequence of horror setpieces and blatantly unfair traps as they continually physics platform their way in a rightward direction in the classic Limbo style, all drenched in an oppressive atmosphere of thick, slimy dread where anything might leap out and bite you off at the ankles at any moment, like a shark-infested gravy boat; only real difference is that II is a prequel to I, establishing the long-speculated-on backstory of the main character's raincoat. Spoiler alert: she found it in a puddle. Whoops, better update the wiki!\n\nWhich should more or less indicate that this isn't a game whose appeal hinges on the plot; there isn't much of one besides \"small child wants something that, for whatever reason, is really far off to the right somewhere\". There are little nuggets of background storytelling establishing some things about the setting but raise further questions - \"Why are the funny noises coming out of the TV? \"; \"Why are all the adults hostile and look like characters from an Eastern European stop motion animated film apparently specifically designed to traumatize poorly-supervised children?\" - but the thing is, the point of playing the game is not to resolve the plot, but to exist within that world for a while and drink in its atmosphere, which is, rather effectively and convincingly, like that of a nightmare. There you go; that's the plot. It's a nightmare; even gave it away in the title. It's all a nightmare and it doesn't have to make sense, so don't worry so much about that wiki after all.\n\nIn terms of building that experience, Little Nightmares rarely puts a foot wrong; it takes everyday, mundane settings and people and soaks them in liquid grotesque until they're all sodden and bloated, like an Edvard Munch painting that was hung over a steam vent. The environments are beautifully realized; the monstrous adults all look like papier-mâché projects your kids brought home from school and that you have to pretend are cute, and all the little details are spot-on, from the sound of their labored breathing to the way they jerkily animate like they just drank ten pints and are trying to remember which way's the floor and which way's the ceiling. And the animation of the main character, too; the way they scamper along with their head bowed like they're trying to get through a public park at night without being noticed by the scary teenagers.\n\nSo on the whole, the setting and atmosphere hit the mark like a boxer who hates people named Mark....Fuck you; I had writer's block. In fact, one might call Little Nightmares a game that's 100% atmosphere, because the moment you try to engage with it on a story or gameplay level, then it sort of stares blankly at you for a moment before a sweaty fat man chases you into a mousehole again.\n\nAs I said, the \"challenge\" aspect of the game is basically a sequence of traps where the objective is generally \"make exactly the right movements or die and start again\" which, in the abstract, is about as fun as playing Operation in a Parkinson's ward. There are chasey bits, where the monster catches up and stuffs you into a pita bread if you're not immediately sprinting in the right direction when it starts; there are combat-y bits, where you have to swing a melee weapon at precisely the moment an enemy is pouncing or get your head caved in on a floorboard; and stealthy bits, where you get spotted and eaten if you so much as startle a flatulent aphid, which leads to some moments having to be replayed and replayed, and dread gives way to boredom, gives way to anger, gives way to quitting, gives way to the right at a mini-roundabout.\n\nI don't know how one fixes this. It's the classic horror game paradox: the threat of sudden death is necessary for creating the feel of being a little ant postman trying to deliver mail to Mrs. Trapdoor Spider's house, but the moment that sudden death actually happens, all the tension disappears, and each subsequent death as you struggle to get past the challenge is like the game continuing to stab an already-stabbed balloon. I suppose, ideally, you'd want to design it so the player escapes by the skin of their teeth each time, but that's a tough balance, because some players have slower reflexes, or are trying to play while hiding behind the sofa cushions.\n\nOf course, one thing that might help is to not have us wrestle with the physics engine the whole way through. Why'd you have to add the third dimension to the \"keep pressing right\" Limbo formula? Uh-oh, three-dimensional movement plus platforming plus fixed cameras equals the square root of a faceful of piss. There's a bit where you have to jump off a ladder onto a rope that dangles from above, and there's absolutely no frame of reference for where that rope is, precisely, and you can only blindly hope it's positioned so that a jump straight off the ladder will hit it, which it turns out it wasn't if you've moved an inch or two to the left.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "And then when you're on the rope, whether you're swinging towards the next ledge or Skull Fracture City is a matter the game might as well be deciding with a Ouija board.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Somewhere in your response, you need to say: \"Do you also see why Dark Souls was the more popular one?\"", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "For me, Little Nightmares shows a stark contrast; much of its imagery and setpieces will come back to you, especially if you eat petrol station sausage rolls just before going to bed, but they're the only things that will, because the gameplay's as deep as a very disappointing pie....I had writer's block again; fuck you.\n\n----\n\nGame: Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood\n\nReviewed: 2021-02-17\n\nHey, people who like pen-and-paper role-playing, stop dazzling the world of fashion with your presence for a moment and listen. Have you ever thought that the campaign you're part of might work really well if adapted into a book or video game plot? Well, apply this simple test: go to literally anyone in the world and tell them about the most interesting thing that's ever happened in your game. Shortly, you will notice that their eyes appear to be focused on a point six feet behind your head, and they keep saying things like \"Uh-huh.\" and \"Right.\" and \"If you don't stop talking, I'm going to scrape out my own eardrums with a teaspoon handle, you tedious, tedious fuck.\" For you see, nobody gives a shit about your imaginary heroics outside of the players directly involved, and the cloud of in-jokes, body odor, and Cheeto dust in which you meet, and anyone who says otherwise is either trying to seduce you or sell you a car.\n\nThe point is, Werewolf (HRUUH) The Apocalypse (HRUUH) Earthblood - fucking hell, that is the last time I read the full title out! - plays like a case of someone adapting their pen-and-paper role-playing sessions, in that it's full of contrivance, pointless characters, and repetitive environments because the DM either had Alzheimer's or a very limited set of room tiles. WereThePocBlood concerns Cahal, a gruff, hairy dad who looks like the breakout character from a popular reality TV series about gay motorcycle repairmen; he is a werewolf in a setting that's basically the premise of Captain Planet except with werewolves instead of diverse, go-getting teenagers, and where all issues are resolved by turning into a monster and tearing the enemy to coleslaw instead of summoning a demigod far too smug for someone wearing tiny red pants.\n\nI mean, the writing's certainly about as complex as Captain Planet, pointlessly excessive gore aside, because it mainly centers around an evil polluting corporation who are ravaging the Earth, not for wealth or to meet the needs of an ever-growing, ever-complacent humanity, but because they are being literally controlled by an evil monster and are actively trying to destroy the world. So yeah, the story's about as nuanced as hammering a six-inch nail through your forehead. Cahal is part of an eco-terror group working against SuperMegaGloboTech; his wife gets killed on a raid, he goes a bit bananas and kills someone else, leaves the pack in shame for five years, but then he comes back 'cos he has to finish the fight, or possibly because the game world doesn't consist of anything other than the facilities of the evil corporation and one werewolf hideout about a minute's walk away from all of them.\n\nIf it hasn't become obvious yet, Werewolf: The Pocky Arse Blurp isn't a very good game; it's a game of midrange budget from a European studio, and is very much what one should expect of midrange Euro-jank that wants to eat at the AAA table but only got as far as the stealth and the action and couldn't manage the open world, the crafting, or the collectibles. But even for midrange Euro-jank, I struggle to think of any game whose core gameplay is more completely at odds with the themes of its plot and abilities of its main character; I mean, here's this dude who can turn into either a rampaging wolf monster or a lithe normal wolf that can dash through the wilderness faster than an enchilada through an elderly relative's digestive system, and then he spends most of his time crouching behind cubicle dividers in cramped metal rooms, like a scoliosis sufferer queueing to go on Space Mountain.\n\nEvery cocking part of this game takes place in some kind of industrial environment consisting of a string of sectioned-off metal rooms containing an arrangement of cubicle dividers and patrolling guards; it's like playing Pac-Man, except when you get caught, you can't continue until you've smashed up the arcade cabinet with gardening equipment. It's a classic case of using open combat as punishment for fucking up the stealth, and Crikey O'Dogballs, does it feel like a punishment, because combat is very woof-- I mean, rough.\n\nThe physics of it all feels completely off; everything starts moving around like a fast-forwarded video of balloon animals in a centrifuge, and all you mostly do is mash \"Light Attack\" and hold on for dear life as you combo around the room like a runaway lawnmower in a doggy daycare. And you can barely tell what the fuck's going on 'cos of the particle effects and bits of pancreas flying everywhere, and a camera that frequently daydreams and points at the wrong thing because someone was describing their D&D campaign to it earlier. And yet, combat's still really easy, because that's what happens when you take a high-energy, high-impact fighting style that'd probably serve you well if you were a Dynasty Warriors character and have us do it in a small, enclosed room full of meat piñatas.\n\nSo a good question to ask would be why one should bother going out of one's way to stealth through the game when one can rip through the guards in ten seconds flat, and no guards in any subsequent arena will be alerted because I guess the evil corporation sold everyone's two-way radios to add soundproofing to all the walls, or indeed, why we should bother with trying to find the secret computer rooms where we can deactivate, like, one security camera, thus using three minutes of work to delay by two minutes the frequently inevitable descent into ten seconds of combat. Unless we're the game's mum and want to encourage its ambitions to be an immersive sim, which is admittedly adorable.\n\nThere's a small handful of bits in the game where you can complete optional scavenger hunts and dialogue puzzles to get past certain areas without fighting, and I'm like, \"D'aww, look at the little puppy that thinks it's Deus Ex. And look at that adorable upgrade menu with, like, nine things on it. Yesh, you're an RPG, aren't you?\" Only if \"RPG\" now stands for \"Rip, Pulverize, Gouge\". I guess it's pretty liberating to listen to some NPC fuck telling me he can get me the key to the next area if I find his cat's deworming medicine, knowing that at any moment, I can smash the \"oh, fuck it\" button and turn his and his cat's bowels into fucking party streamers.\n\nOh, but that might go against the theme of the story about staying in touch with your humanity and not giving into your animalistic frenzy, and I wonder if the story and the gameplay designers were working in the same building, because from a gameplay perspective, giving into the frenzy is the tops, and the solution for basically everything; I mean, in the prologue, going Frenzy Mode is what ruins Cahal's life and alienates him from his tribe, and seems to be the incitement for a character arc, but then in gameplay, you can go Frenzy Mode as much as you like. \"Hey, your 'Alienation From Humanity' Meter is full; remember to use it on as many humans as you can! Why not buy an upgrade to get double damage from your alienation from humanity?\"\n\nAll janky design and dull, repetitive levels aside, it just feels like a game really at odds with itself. \"Well, how would you fix it, Yahtz?\" Well, I'd have added some kind of consequence for using Frenzy Mode too much, like reduced XP or a bad ending. Or, focused on cathartic combat and chucked the humanity-questioning stuff in the recycle bin. Oh, wait! Even quicker solution: chuck the whole fucking game in the recycle bin and play something else! \"Be serious, Yahtz.\" Sorry; I meant to say \"compost bin\".\n\n----\n\nGame: The Medium\n\nReviewed: 2021-02-10\n\nYou know what, Konami? I don't even care about Silent Hill anymore; you make all the pachinko machines and arcade shooters and Pyramid Head-shaped suppository kits you like. I loved Silent Hill once, but you know what? Getting us attached to name franchises is how they get you; that's why Disney can sell haunted Zyklon B canisters just by sticking C-3PO on the front. I don't want a new Silent Hill; I want interesting, new horror games that benefit from Silent Hill's influence. I like bands influenced by Nirvana, but I wouldn't like it if they nailed Kurt Cobain's body to the front of the drum kit.\n\n\"Well, you're in luck, Yahtzee, me driveling old game-reviewing giant sea turtle, 'cos here's The Medium, a new original survival horror game not only inspired by Silent Hill, but featuring music from Akira Yamaoka himself!\" Yeah, all the shitty Silent Hills had music from Akira Yamaoka; so did the Dead by Daylight expansion, and Shadows of the Damned, and... World of Tanks?! Akira Yamaoka apparently has trouble saying no to people. And why are you trying to cover the developer logo? \"Um, 'cos it's by Bloober Team.\" Ugh, fucking walking simulator merchants; wish they'd simulate walking over to a fucking whiteboard and coming up with some new ideas, for once. \"Oh, but this isn't another first-person walking simulator; it uses a fixed third-person camera in direct reference to classic survival horrors.\" Hmm, consider me on board for now, Bloober Team, but the moment you make me backtrack through a door that inexplicably leads to somewhere different, I'm making you play my new \"Get Kicked Up the Arse\" simulator.\n\nFor you see, that camera thing tells me something significant: that someone gets it. Someone gets that the third-person fixed camera adds to the atmospheric sense of detachment that survival horror benefits from; feels more like you're being watched from the shadows by parties unknown, and less like you're nestled up against the protagonist's nice, warm buttocks the whole time. Some people might say The Medium hardly needs it, though, since the atmosphere of detachment is adequately created by the personalities of all the characters, but those would be some terribly cruel people. Anyway, The Medium is about a twenty-something girl who wears clothes of a size somewhere between small and large, and also has the ability to perceive the spirit world and talk to the recently-dead; she gets called out to an abandoned vacation facility and site of a famous massacre to uncover the sinister truth behind both it and her mysterious origins and get some material for her urban exploration YouTube channel.\n\nThis might sound weird, but it took me a while to figure out that this fixed-camera survival horror game with a gloomy atmosphere about exploring both a decrepit real world and an identically laid-out scary netherworld that looks like it's made primarily out of ham was supposed to be Silent Hill-inspired; talk about missing the otherworld for the crucified bodies on spikes. I guess I just wasn't picking up the same vibe; it reminded me more of Dark Seed, that old point-and-click adventure game about exploring an H. R. Giger-designed parallel dark world as the protagonist struggles to overcome the horror of their mustache. Silent Hill feels organic and visceral and wet; The Medium felt more dead and dusty and as dry as a newlywed Baptist who doesn't believe in foreplay.\n\nSome kind of combat element might've helped. I don't say that because Silent Hill had combat; Silent Hill combat was like the stick in the ice lolly: serving a purpose, but not the part you want to chew on. It really seemed like The Medium was going to have a combat element, but then it didn't; all the pieces were in place. We establish that ghosts can hurt us, and that we're going to a place with more ghosts than the bargain bin at the Call of Duty shop, and that the main character can load up her arm with spirit juice to fuel a blast attack and a shield, so I was like, \"Great! Ghost laser tag? Let's Luigi's Mansion this bitch!\" But then, we don't get that.\n\nYour blast attack is used mainly for clearing clutter out of the way like it's a fucking astral leaf blower, and the closest thing to combat is the odd forced stealth/evasion sequence against a recurring monster who kills you in one hit, which is about as engaging as such things ever are; that is, as much as holding in a fart at a distant cousin's wedding. And then at the end of each act, the main character - who I seem to remember having a name, but it's one of many things about The Medium I struggle to hold in my memory - confronts a big, elaborate monster spirit form of whoever's been stirring up the trouble most recently, and it really seems like a setup for a boss fight, and then Whatshername just defeats them in the same cutscene with no bother.\n\nLook, I'm not asking for an exchange of ectoplasm bullets as our flaky protagonist dodge-rolls about like Sonic the Hedgehog, but the artists seem to have put a lot of work into the monster designs, and I'm sure it'd feel a lot more worth it if we had a chance to explore all their jiggly flaps looking for the weak spots. (On the monsters, I mean, not the artists.) Combat isn't just a distraction to keep the twitchy kids occupied while Mum and Dad are stroking their chins at the random document pickups; to a horror game, it adds context and engagement. Having to use a machete to hack aside the undergrowth in your path is what separates jungle exploration from a nature hike.\n\nThe running theme of my time with The Medium is that I always felt like I was more skating along the top of it than getting immersed. The gameplay didn't grab me; it's the usual survival horror inventory puzzle stuff - explore environment, find door blocked by rabid polecat, explore a bit more, find can of rabid polecat repellant, etc. - but the level design constantly herds us towards progress, and I never felt like I was the one coming up with the solutions. Case in point: there's a bit where the recurring monster is stomping about and we have to evade it until we find a way to restart a generator, at which point, Main Character Lady says, \"Aha! Now I can turn the tables on the monster! \", and I was like, \"You can? It's really not clear how. You going to plug in a karaoke machine and challenge it to a something stupid-off?\"\n\nI also wasn't grabbed by the story, although that might be retroactively because of the ending; if your plane ends up crashing in the mountains, it's hard to have fond memories of the airline's hot towel service. Token warning: just call me an auto shop for douchebags, 'cos there's a ton of spoilers coming in! Basically, the main character - Marianne? I think it was Marianne. - finds the person who caused everything, and said person asks her to shoot them to stop the monster, and Marianne decides she's gotten really attached to this person in the nine seconds they've had to talk and proposes instead to shoot herself, which would also stop the monster by some awkward logic I wasn't quite convinced by. The argument escalates for a bit, then cut to black, gunshot, roll credits. So, she either shot herself or she didn't; guess it'll depend on sequel viability.\n\nThe Medium has good visual design and atmosphere, but I wasn't thinking about those during my suddenly much freer afternoon; I was wondering why violent ballistic death leapt that quickly to the top of Marianne's proposed solutions list. Just felt really out of nowhere; failure of characterization, I suppose. The suicide ending made sense in Spec Ops: The Line, and Silent Hill 2, and my last school reunion.\n\n----\n\nGame: Hitman 3\n\nReviewed: 2021-02-03\n\nAnd so comes yet another final installment of the series that has soft-rebooted more often than a melting ZX81: Hitman 3. I seem to remember Hitman 2 came out during a slow period in winter, as well; must be something about this time of year when we're stuck indoors with the family that makes people want to methodically plan brutal executions. So let's be blunt: Hitman 3 might be wrapping up the story of the last two games, but this definitely won't be the last of the Hitman series; obviously, it's going to be strung out with DLC for a while like a diabetic rationing his jelly beans.\n\nBut that aside, what the fuck else has IO Interactive got to fall back on? Freedom Fighters? The fucking Kane & Lynch sequel that I, for one, would welcome like a snow shovel to the bridge of the nose? \"They're making a James Bond game, Yahtz.\" Oh, a game about an unflappable dude in a suit pursuing secret objectives in a series of high-class environments? That'll be a fucking stretch; it'll just be like Hitman, won't it, except with forcible undressing of women as well as men?\n\nHitman's the only string to IO's bow, but hey, unless you've got two archery targets and three arms, you probably don't need more than one string on a bow anyway. And it's a string strong. I mean, it's a strong string. Fucking better be, the amount of games IO spent perfecting the formula, i.e., focusing on pouring more and more detail into the massively complicated open-ended missions packed with NPCs and infiltration routes, and letting the story wither away to a tiny, malformed figure clinging to the rest of the game's trouser leg and mewling in the between-mission cutscenes, nay, glorified loading screens.\n\nI mean, I could tell you every single plot point in Hitman 3 right now and hardly be spoiling shit, because storyline-wise, Hitman has spent its entire existence running its brush around the same toilet rim: Agent 47 was engineered by some evil dudes who secretly rule the world; he goes rogue or turns against them in some way when loyalty to his friends grows more important, and punishes his creators for treating him like a soulless assassin by soullessly assassinating a bunch of them. We've been around this merry-go-round, like, five times, by my count, and this neo-Hitman trilogy does nothing new with it; there's always another secret world government to turn against, and they're all equally bad at screening their party guests.\n\nMuch like Hitman 2, Hitman 3 is really just a new mission pack for the established Hitman formula, to the point of using the same interface that's formatted like a furniture catalog, and also lists all the missions from the last two games. Which I guess is fair enough, 'cos the formula is, as I say, pretty down at this point, but the handful of new missions still doesn't feel like enough new game to call a full installment; all the missions from all three games probably only adds up to, like, two Hitman: Blood Moneys, at most. And the last mission hardly counts as a mission; it's more of a gimmick level for wrapping up the plot, set entirely on a train, which isn't the best environment for multiple-path design unless you count going into the dining car and having to pick from the chicken or the fish.\n\nAs for the other new missions, there's not a whole lot that doesn't feel like treading familiar ground; the highlight is a mission set in a British stately home where 47 can solve an unrelated teatime murder mystery, and it's like an Agatha Christie story that for some reason ends with Poirot hanging around after the parlor scene so he can fling someone off a balcony. But these so-called \"mission stories\" are, frankly, the worst parts of the game; I think that's the revelation I finally came to after speeding through all the missions, getting hand-held through a linear sequence of objectives where I follow my intended victim around for a while until the moment they say, \"All security guards, leave the room so I can have some alone time with my new best pal. Would you like to admire my new pit full of rotating knives? I thought it would make a nice centerpiece.\"\n\nIt feels like Mum and Dad doing our homework for us, and it makes the bottom drop out of all the tension and immersion, especially since they very often hinge on Agent 47 disguising himself as someone famous or who the victim has already met, rather than a random background employee, and them somehow not noticing that this person they know is suddenly built like a gravedigger's shovel leaning on a tombstone and keeps responding to direct questions with veiled references to being an assassin. \"Can I tell you a secret?\" \"Oh, I guarantee it won't leave this room.\" \"Do you recommend the soup?\" \"I'd have to say it's... to DIE for.\" \"Blimey, my verrucas are playing up!\" \"Perhaps you'd like to LIE DOWN... after I murder you completely to death?\" Yeah, it was funny the first couple of times, but when it's pretty much the same routine for every mission story, things get a bit silly, and at odds with the story's tone when the cutscenes are full of slick behind-the-scenes manipulators controlling the world through growly phone conversations in huge, twilit offices, and then you meet them in gameplay, and they're standing over the shark tank at SeaWorld demonstrating their new line of tuna-flavored aftershave.\n\nBut I think Hitman finally clicked for me after I made the conscious effort to resist my usual instinct; that is, play through to story end as fast as possible and then use the rest of the work week to practice throwing chocolate raisins into the air and catching them in my mouth. No, this time, I decided I would go back to the missions and embrace the sandbox malarkey by inventing my own assassinations; switch from the strict musical education to improvised jazz, as it were, and often with equally disastrous results, because Hitman gameplay is still a slave to the Cockup Cascade.\n\nThere's often no way of knowing if strangling a dude to the ground and ripping his trousers off is going to be out of view of his mates until you try, and they all spin around and act like they caught you shitting on the carpet; it's a lot like shitting on the carpet because, even if you get caught, you've got no choice but to finish doing it while furiously maintaining eye contact. So you've still got to hit \"Save\" more often than the \"Crouch\" button. Also, because the enemy are rather unrealistically good at figuring out where bullets are coming from if you decide to go sniping; I headshot someone from the roof of a henhouse 90 miles away, and a dude still runs up, sees right through my fox costume, and opens fire.\n\nBut generally, I was having a lot more fun seeking opportunities rather than being handed them by the mission stories; shame you kind of have to do a mission story on your first attempt, 'cos these environments are really dense and sprawly, and with no direction, it's like looking for the one un-horrifying toilet cubicle at a BART station. You have to play a mission a few times and get a lay of the land before you can start really having fun with planning custom assassinations, and that means immersion takes another fatal hit. I mean, you don't get second tries in real life; Lee Harvey Oswald couldn't run up and go, \"Sorry, I was going for no alerts; could we scoop your brains back up and have another crack?\"\n\n----\n\nGame: Demon's Souls (Remake)\n\nReviewed: 2021-01-27\n\nFriends, I have an awkwardly-titled monkey on my back that has been stealing my peanuts for many years: a monkey named \"Demon's Souls\". Ever since my Dark Souls epiphany when I realized I loved FromSoftware's grim, high-difficulty action-RPGs - hurt me more, Daddy - the monkey keeps asking if I'm going to redo my pre-epiphany Demon's Souls review where I complain about how it's too hard, and my feet hurt, and the waitress was very disrespectful. And I keep replying, \"I can't, because it was a PS3 exclusive, and the last time I saw my PS3, it was around the neck of Ride to Hell: Retribution as it broke surface one last desperate time.\" But now, Demon's Souls has been remade for the PS5, and my editor finally sold enough of his organs to get me one, so I have now played Demon's Souls again, and finished it, to my own surprise; there were a couple of hard bits where progress stalled, but eventually, I realized that this was before FromSoftware figured out how to counteract the all-purpose Dark Souls strategy, i.e., roll behind them when they attack and administer a violent suppository.\n\n\"So do you like Demon's Souls more than you did the first time, Yahtzee?\" Certainly do! \"Do you also see why Dark Souls was the more popular one?\" Certainly do that as well! I'm getting the Persona 4 feeling again, seeing all the little squirts that will one day become the game I loved, but not quite adding up to the full money shot yet. For one, Demon'SSS Souls - Jesus Christ, why did they call it that?! - is not a sprawling, interconnected open world, which surprised me, as such things are now as indelible a part of the Souls-like genre as funny walks are of scrotal psoriasis. Instead, you go to five unconnected, broadly linearly laid-out areas accessed from a hub castle; it's like Mario 64 if Princess Peach had had her eyes waxed shut.\n\nYou can tackle them in any order and go back and forth as much as you like, which creates the usual issue that they all have to have roughly the same difficulty, so once you're in the late game and have fully upgraded your suppository equipment, then the last few areas roll over like a friendly dog with an itchy back. In fact, the final boss of almost every area is a complete cop-out, generally too easy and often a gimmick boss, like the Dragon God, who looks terrifying, and is the size of your mum's buffet plate, but is actually a proto-Bed of Chaos, and he's only harder than fighting a kitten in a blender 'cos you have to press two buttons instead of one. Then there's Latria, which is one of the harder worlds, full of striking, horrific Lovecraftian visuals; then at the end of it, you just fight some random cunt with a Walnut Whip for a head.\n\nIt's only the final boss of the first area that puts up a decent scrap, and of course, he's the one who's an infuriatingly long way from the last checkpoint, and every time you want to face him, you have to plow through three castles, one dragon, and an elevator ride slow enough to pitch an entire Hideo Kojima project. Oh, and I won't spoil it, but as for the final final boss of the game, I've had bigger struggles working caramel out of my teeth. \"That was the point, Yahtz; it's an illustration of the rot that's set into this dying world that even the final boss could barely peel himself off the couch long enough to put up a fight.\" Yeah, I know! Dark Souls does the same thing, but it managed to not be completely anticlimactic about it.\n\nI left Demon's Souls feeling it had engaged me a lot less than other FromSoftware self-abuse simulators, especially in the story area; maybe the less cohesive world made me feel a little more detached from it, if it wasn't all the underwhelming boss fights that felt more like getting coughed on by a stoat. But this is a remake, remember, and as for whether it benefits from that, the graphics have certainly been significantly shined up in contrast to the disappointing Dark Souls Remastered, which just felt like playing the old version after you've gotten better contact lenses. I was impressed by the PS5's short loading times, but if I'm going to have to host a liquorice allsort as big as that, it better have some fucking hardware improvements.\n\nWhen it comes to gameplay, however, this is very much a \"warts and all\" situation.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "I mean, the biggest and greasiest wart that I'd have thought the game would want to hack off given the chance to rethink things is the limited inventory space, which is the little dog turd seed from which grows a many-branched dog turd tree: having to constantly manually replenish items; the having to press an extra button that sends found items to the stockpile when you might have three fetid buggerbears closing in of a mind to administer suppositories of their own; leaving behind your useless pile of tendonitis cure potions and then getting fucked 'cos you ran into the one enemy in the game that bestows tendonitis three miles from the checkpoint. And by the tiny stroke of removing inventory limits, all that embuggerance would disappear; we could stop having to deal with that Stockpile Thomas weirdo in the hub castle, who keeps talking like he's in actual physical love with me 'cos I let him hold the four Dregling Shields I am never going to bloody use.\n\nAnd while we're nitpicking, in Dark Souls, you use Titanite Shards to upgrade your weapons some of the way, and then you have to use the rarer Large Titanite Shards instead; this is a fine system. In Demon's Souls, once your weapon is upgraded past a certain point, you have to use both small shards and large shards; this is a bad system, designed by evil footwear companies who want you to wear out your shoes grinding small shards in old areas, or going back and forth buying them in bulk from that weird bloke who looks like Charlie Manson taking a beach holiday.\n\nBut you know something, viewers? You have to get really into a game to start being bothered by stuff this deep in the systems, and I was. Really into Demon's Souls, I mean. It was interesting to see all the little prototype ideas that would later go into Dark Souls and even Bloodborne, in parts; there's proto-Blighttown, there's Iron Golem Jr., and the granddaddy of the entire spectrum of \"generic dude in armor\" boss fights, old Mr. \"No, Seriously Now, What's Your Actual Name?\" The Penetrator.\n\nBut I'm left wondering what Demon's Souls' purpose is in the present day, considering that it was, in many ways, a prototype for the vastly better and much easier to pronounce Dark Souls. I would've said it might be a nice starter game for players who are turned off by the way newer From games have gotten even harder and sprawlier, and might appreciate something a little more straightforward and easier-going, but the game's actually harder in some ways; it's a lot stingier with checkpoints, and lest we forget, you're punished with having to make do with half health for the disproportionate crime of dying once, and not knocking out every boss on your first go with naught but a swing of one mighty testicle, which isn't exactly friendly to new players, or healthy genitalia.\n\nDon't get me wrong, I appreciate getting the chance to replay it, but I'm a Dark Souls fan; it was interesting to me, the way dads are interested in model railway museums that bore the earlobes off everyone else. Look, kids! This dragon guarding Castle Boletaria must be the progenitor of the Hellkite Wyvern from Undead Burg! Isn't that fascinating? \"DAAAD, we're really BOOORED! And my iPad melted!\"\n\n----\n\nGame: Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond\n\nReviewed: 2021-01-20\n\nAgain, January's looking about as lively as a wrap party at an EA acquisition, so again, this provides a lovely opportunity to put a certain device on my head and escape to a wonderful land far from the troubles of reality. No, I'm not talking about hanging myself, but checking in on the world of VR. How's life in the tech nerd ivory tower? You plumbed in the bidets yet? The latest addition to AAA dabblings in the VR space is Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, a fantastical alternate history game about how Germany somehow gets taken over by a fascist government, and a coalition of Western powers form an ideological alliance to stop their aggressive expansion across Europe. Cuh, what imagination those fellas at Respawn Entertainment have! Imagine a first-world power actually engaging in war for ideological reasons, and not because they can use it to divert money to some of their cunt friends.\n\nYeah, it's a World War II shooter, which would normally interest me as much as an envelope-licking simulator, but hey, VR probably could make an envelope-licking simulator interesting if it could somehow conjure up a tongue-based control system that wasn't completely horrifying. My interest was raised further when I went to install the game, and it was 130 EFFING GIG! That's, like, three Last of Us IIs! That surprises me, Medal of Honor: Abbott and Costello, because I'm looking at your trailers and screenshots, and your graphics kind of look like last-gen dogshit. So if you have filled your game with 130 gigs worth of that dogshit, why, you must have rendered a playing space the size of the fucking Death Star!\n\nBut then I took another look and noticed that the blurb mentions short documentary films made especially for the game, because if there's one thing there isn't enough of yet, it's documentaries about World War II. So that's probably why the file's so big; they've stuck a load of uncompressed video in there. Someone didn't learn the lesson Quantum Break taught us: that if your core gameplay loop isn't very interesting, then the solution is to find a better gameplay loop, not to try to distract us from it with movie nights.\n\nAnyway, the plot is, you're in World War II; that about sums it up. You're Generic Nonspeaking Soldier Man who gets caught up in the usual sightseeing tour: hanging with the French Resistance in wine country, sunbathing on Omaha Beach, all while hanging out with characters so generic, they might as well have been wearing mascot costumes. I get the logic - VR automatically adds a new dimension of immersion, so might as well just do the bare minimum in terms of creativity and gameplay innovation - but that logic hinges on being able to maintain that immersion, and Medal of Honor: Apples and Pears fucks that up at every turn.\n\nThe graphics are, as a great man very recently said, dogshit; at one point, I was looking down at Omaha Beach from a recently liberated pillbox and thinking, \"Hmm, I'm no historian, but I'm pretty sure there's supposed to be some soldiers running up that thing right about now.\" The guns are going for the historical accuracy that World War II shooter fans are weirdly insistent on - so remember every mission to switch to the MP 40 first chance you get, 'cos those Nazis might not have known much about race relations, but they jolly well knew how to design a machine gun, by jingo - but they're always covered in distracting, immersion-breaking glowy lines, showing you which bit to hold and where to put the ammo and unicorn stickers. And it bothers me that the gunplay is largely based around two-handed guns, 'cos as I said, two-handed guns in VR are kind of a lost cause, 'cos aiming the imaginary barrel is like trying to play snooker when both your arms are asleep.\n\nThe handling of things feels very dodgy; with the Index, at least, there seems to be an occasional delay on registering changes in finger position, so I'd be trying to let go of a gun and end up having to shake it off like a piece of snot. At other times, the grab range for objects seems a bit overgenerous, and I keep accidentally drawing my pistol when I'm trying to grab something on the floor or adjust my underpants, although that might partly be due to my stubborn insistence on sitting down while playing VR. I know; where do we complaining spine-havers get off, trying to couch-potato our way through the tech revolution? It's almost like people want to be comfortable when they're trying to relax and unwind with a piece of entertainment media. Normally, a VR game would be courteous enough to provide a \"Crouch\" button for people like me who don't want to physically squat, because it takes several minutes of breathing exercises to psych myself up to standing up again, but Medal of Honor: And Another Thing... doesn't seem to have one, despite the importance of taking cover in a firefight, so I'm left tottering gormlessly up Omaha Beach like a glow-in-the-dark mouse in an owl sanctuary.\n\nSo all the \"immersive\" qualities of VR are canceled out by un-immersive glitches, visuals, and the story campaign's infuriating habit of nailing your feet to the floor every five minutes for unskippable dialogues, and all that remains is an incredibly lazily designed World War II shooter, where every level has, like, one minute-long loop of generic heroic music that plays constantly whether you're in a gunfight or very heroically pausing to wipe bogeys onto a Nazi commandant's office chair, and where the gameplay consists largely of moving to the next room and shooting another handful of newly-spawned Nazis, who all have A.I. granting them the self-preservation instincts of moths in a pizza oven.\n\nThere's one level set on a train that's the absolute epitome of this: shoot two guys, move to the next carriage, shoot two guys, move to the next carriage. Christ, this is retroactively sucking the fun out of every good train level I've ever played! Hey, why is the chef in the dining car trying to shoot me? I ask because, at the start of the level, I was specifically told not to shoot the train driver 'cos he was a conscripted civvie. Bit inconsistent; are you telling me the Nazi Party made sure to win over the fucking patisseries before the essential transport workers?\n\nThe room-by-room shooting is broken up by gimmicky setpieces, mostly turret sections or vehicle sections with a turret on them, and either this means having to tackle an incredibly awkward gun that I can't look down the sights of 'cos it's fixed and I can't duck, or the turret just aims wherever I'm looking and it's about as challenging as trying to spit through a ladder. There's one decent bit early on where you have to position a couple of shooters in preparation for an ambush that might fool you into thinking the game's going to have some fucking strategic depth, but no; it's just another one-time gimmick, another oversized hat to briefly wear and then discard like an overworked Disneyland actor.\n\nIn summary, Medal of Honor: Tea and Biscuits, get the fuck out of my glorious world of tomorrow with this PS3-era bullshit! VR isn't the place for your hacked-out middle-of-the-road war shooters; it's about exciting new concepts, and immersive spectacles, and staggeringly uncomfortable porn!\n\n----\n\nGames: Bugsnax, Super Meat Boy Forever\n\nAh, 2020, the Jimmy Savile of years; only after its passing can we take stock and truly appreciate the flood of hushed-up sexual assault accusations. And as always, there are a few stray tentacles we need to pull off our ankles before we can banish the year back to the pit where it belongs. I wanted to mention that I went back to Persona 4 Golden after I reviewed it and ended up liking it a lot more, if still not more than Persona 5, and now I'm slightly embarrassed that I was ever intimidated by the combat, because if you do any amount of grinding in that game, combat's about as hard as a wandering dick in a badly organized sausage-slicing facility. And then there are the usual crop of games I didn't get around to; I do intend to review the Demon's Souls remake, just as soon as I can sit on my roof with a butterfly net and catch a PS5 as it streaks over my house on a trail of blazing stardust.\n\nBut in the meantime, let's talk about Bugsnax, which was an indie game that came out on Epic Store and consoles, and is... hm. You know, every time I take a stab at summarizing Bugsnax, I feel like something important has been left out; it's like writing a real estate profile for a nuclear bunker on Mars where eleven people died of asbestos poisoning. If I were to say \"It's a first-person adventure sort of thing where you come to a hidden island full of mysterious creatures that are all a hybrid of an insect and an item of snack food like a fucking bag of chips with wings and shit, and there's influence from Pokémon 'cos they all have a cutesy hybrid name that is the only thing they can say and catching them is the main gameplay activity, but unlike Pokémon, you don't battle them; you just watch them get mercilessly devoured as they scream their own names in distress,\" even that summary fails to mention the significant fact that all the sentient characters in the game are furry puppet monsters that look like novelty butt plugs based on Sesame Street characters.\n\n\"Oh, so it's a kids' game, Yahtz?\" (...) I DON'T KNOW! It's bright and colorful, and none of the characters would look out of place flogging nutritionally bankrupt breakfast cereals, but at the same time, all the characters have these fairly complex, adult relationship issues, with several overtly established to be banging their featureless furry midsections together. And besides that, I get a faintly sinister vibe as I watch the adorable Bugsnax disappear into the cheerful gullets of big-toothed furry monsters with an upsetting crunching sound, and then one of the monster's limbs turns into a Snickers or whatever, which adds a little sprinkling of body horror to the mix; it's like Fraggle Rock as directed by David Cronenberg.\n\nProgress is structured around doing whatever the furry butt plugs ask you to do, and that's almost always \"catch some specific Bugsnax or other\", so we might as well call that the core gameplay. It's a sort of systemic hunting game with a bit of a Pokémon Snap vibe; you look for Bugsnax in the wild scuttling about on their little routines, and need to figure out how specifically to exploit the systems to capture them. Some are easy; you just put a box held up with a stick in their path. Some are hard, like the ones that are on fire, which sounds painful, but it'll be the least of their problems by the time I'm done with the little gits; you can't capture them until you put them out, so you use their favorite sauce to lure them into water or an ice cream-based Bugsnax, as our protagonist's furry biology seems to lack the facility to piss. So on the one hand, this is a collection-based puzzle game in which one literally \"gotta catch 'em all\", then \"serve 'em all\" with fries and a soft drink, but on the other hand, there doesn't feel like there's much incentive to \"catch 'em all\" unless a quest specifically asks for \"'em\".\n\nThe mechanics are a bit disconnected; all you can do with a Bugsnax once caught is feed them to someone to make their toenails turn into Oreos or whatever, which is only an aesthetic change, and now I'm writing all this down, perhaps a slightly fetishistic one. On the whole, though, Bugsnax has the charm of a banana and crisp sandwich and has a similarly unique enough combination of flavors to be worth a try for curiosity's sake; plus, asking the creative leads to explain the inspiration behind it would provide a lot of useful material if you're looking to have them sectioned for whatever reason. So let's move on.\n\nAnother loose end still trailing off 2020 like a strand of cum on an eyelash is Super Meat Boy Forever, a sequel to Edmund McMillen's classic super-hard 2D platformer from that lovely Newgrounds era of indie gaming, when all you needed to get ahead was a vision, some Flash programming ability, and a couple of crudely drawn turds. Super Meat Boy and Bandage Girl must rescue their baby from the evil Dr. Fetus, a doctor who is a fetus, a character who perfectly encapsulates mid-2000's online culture: cutesy innocence ironically blended with the try-hard gross-out scribbled-on-the-back-of-an-exercise-book vibe that Jhonen Vasquez already bled dry in the 90's. But I don't want to rip on Super Meat Boy Forever for its aesthetic, when there's so much other fertile ground for ripping on!\n\nThings quickly turned sour when I started the first level and Mr. Boy immediately sprinted to the right without me asking; at first, I thought I'd left my drinking gun on the keyboard again, but no. Don't tell me you've turned Super Meat Boy into an infinite runner. \"No, of course not! The levels are finite; they're just procedurally generated.\" Oh, even better! The most tired trend of indie games and the most tired trend of mobile games, together at last to squirt out a little narcoleptic baby. The inability to stop or slow down removes all nuance from movement and makes it hard to take stock as we're swept into death after unceasing death, and I know constant death is on-brand for Super Meat Boy, but I prefer to set the terms for my own death. You know; nice hospital room, classical music, dignity, not just capped in the back of the head and chucked in a yellow bin bag.\n\nEdmund McMillen reportedly didn't come back for this game, as he's too busy endlessly tweaking The Binding of Isaac to find the perfect way to depict an infant crying on a turd. And you can tell, 'cos in his absence, Super Meat Boy Forever suffers from an obvious lack of central vision - a vision that was a touch fixated on poo-poos and dead baby jokes, but still a vision! - and without it, the game flails about like a quadriplegic on a teacup ride.\n\nThe levels are too long and badly paced - almost like they're being assembled randomly, funnily enough! - and the basic purity of the original \"move and jump\" controls is diluted with new combat moves and dashes and constant new environmental hazards, so the core gameplay is less nuanced but somehow simultaneously overcomplicated. It's strung together on a story that feels like a meandering partial retread of the already-established plot through a sequence of overlong cinematics that, in contrast to the first game's scrappy charm, have had all their character polished out.\n\nWhat an egregious way to mark the recent death of the Flash engine: with a bastardized and unwanted reimagining of one of its most successful children. Fuck you, Super Meat Boy Forever; you've made me depressed! Now I'll have to cheer myself up with some dead baby jokes.\n\n----\n\nSpecial: Top 5 Games of 2020\n\nReviewed: 2021-01-06\n\nIt's the end of 2020, and I think I speak for everyone and their clenched sphincters when I say, \"Thank fuck that's over with!\" Let's hope, in 2021, we can start rolling things back to the previous, more stable state of Hell on Earth; we might've been living in constant fear of climate disaster and financial ruin under leaders that could barely display the minimum pretense of caring, but at least we could still hug our elderly relatives as they died gurgling on their flooded lungs. But let's not forget the most important thing: making sure that the beings that, one day, discover the ruins of our civilization are very clearly informed on which video games from this year I liked and which I didn't like, and which just sort of dropped straight through my perception without leaving a mark like a high-fiber turd through an incontinent rectum. Yes, it's the Five Best, the Five Worst, and the Five Blandest, the tiresome yearly ordeal that, unlike Thanksgiving, you can't use global pandemics to wriggle out of.\n\n5th Best\n\nThis year, I coined the term \"Jiminy Cockthroat\" to refer to the gameplay style that every AAA game has now: stealth action, open world with crafting and collectibles, and probably that one mission where they take your stuff away and leave it on a table six feet from your cell in an astonishingly small bag. But it's a style that's overdone for a reason, so let's give one of them a prize: Ghost of Tsushima. I can't pronounce your name without spitting on the mic, but your art design's good, so you're officially the least shit; have a stale biscuit.\n\n5th Blandest\n\nFifth Blandest is a game that started disappointing right out of the gate with its terrible subtitle, and then took us on a veritable rollercoaster of disinterest: Amnesia: Rebirth. The first Amnesia was a game that spawned a genre full of imitators, and all Rebirth seems to want to do is sit right in the middle of them playing with its belly button.\n\n5th Worst\n\nAs any of the agencies currently tracking my movements will tell you, I do like weird things; I'd play a Christmas-themed felching simulator that only makes sense to the homeless meth addict with a shoe on his head who designed it, but it has to not run like gravel through a chocolate fountain. Hence, Deadly Premonition 2 being Fifth Worst. You're an odd little duck, and I like you, SWERY, but your amusing quacks can't keep you out of the hoisin sauce forever.\n\n4th Best\n\nWhen audiences have been awaiting a new installment of your historically significant shooter franchise for over a decade, finally releasing a new installment in the middle of a global crisis exclusive to VR - and as such, playable only by twelve rich people and their accountant - requires the sort of psychotic boldness that one can't help but respect. I, for one, enjoyed Half-Life: Alyx, Valve; perhaps one day, we'll all come and join you on your planet.\n\n4th Blandest\n\nI was going over some of my previous Top 5 videos and thought, \"Man, do I make a joke every single year about the inevitability of a Ubisoft sandbox being in the Bland Five?\" You have to point these things out to me, guys! Most New Years, I'm too drunk to remember. What? Oh, any of them; it hardly matters. Immortals Fenyx Rising; there you go. Really shitty title, and the exploration is about as exciting as combing nits out of your pubes.\n\n4th Worst\n\nFourth Worst narrowly missed out on consideration for the Bland List because, while the game is undeniably bland, the utter wrongheadedness behind its concept deserved extra credit: Minecraft Dungeons. It's Minecraft, but with no mining and no crafting. Were there no six-year-olds around that could've explained the problem to you, Microsoft? Were they all too busy consulting for the Xbox marketing department?\n\n3rd Best\n\nThings weren't looking too great for the Yakuza franchise, with the last couple of sputtering installments, but Yakuza: Like a Dragon turned it around with its fun characters and greater lean into the inherent silliness of the franchise. Yakuza's been running out of steam ever since the zombie spinoff, but I should've known the series couldn't even decline unless it's in an unnecessarily drawn-out and grandiose manner.\n\n3rd Blandest\n\nAh yes, always the best part of this process: having to write something funny about the year's third most mediocre game, which was Serious Sam 4. Once all the unnecessary story and skill tree bullshit flakes off, it's just another Serious Sam game, that's it; something that ruled the roost back when retro-style boomer shooters weren't common, but I'm picking retro-style boomer shooters out of my cornflakes these days.\n\n3rd Worst\n\nGod, is there anything worse than a bad game that thinks it's funny? \"Pustular psoriasis?\" Oh, maybe. \"The remaining two games on your list?\" Alright, rhetorical! It's Battletoads. Why stop at boring, poorly designed gameplay when you could also add hilarious prolonged comedy animations to make it slow, clunky, and confusing, as well? It's like trying to count ceiling tiles while a clown is sitting on your face.\n\n2nd Best\n\nI just couldn't decide which of two games stood out the most in the ever-overcrowded field of indie roguelikes. On the one hand, Hades, beautifully artistically crafted and all that; but on the other, BPM: Bullets Per Minute, just plain more fun, with a primary gameplay loop that makes me unconsciously dry-hump my box ottoman. So fuck it; I'm squeezing them both into the 2 slot, because \"indie\" can also be short for \"indie-cisive\".\n\n2nd Blandest\n\nTrue greatness has often been found in the pursuit of the pointless; climbing Mount Everest is ultimately pointless, and yet every year, people kill themselves trying to do it. You, too, can get in touch with that spirit by playing The Dark Pictures: Little Hope, because once you get through its disjointed quick-time event-riddled story and discover that the whole endeavor was completely pointless, you, too, will want to kill yourself.\n\n2nd Worst\n\nIt's Remothered: Broken Porcelain, the atrocious bug-fest that's unpleasant not in a creepy horror way, but more like that weird-smelling kid at school who was caught licking the door to the girls' toilets.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Mandatory inclusion (with quotes): gels his hair into spikes and dates high-schoolers", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "It was probably giving the game away to put \"Broken\" right in the title, alongside a couple of other words placed together with all the care and thoughtfulness with which one pitches soiled underpants into a laundry basket.\n\nBest Game\n\nYeah, it's a bit buggy and has a weak ending, but Spiritfarer's still the game I think most fondly of from this year: the lovely, heartwarming cartoon adventure about how everyone you love is going to die. Appropriate for 2020, really. \"Your elderly relative might have died gurgling on their flooded lungs, but hey, life is a journey and death is coming home; why not imagine them as a giant anthropomorphic toad and feed them fried chicken on a boat?\" Okay...\n\nBlandest Game\n\nMarvel's Avengers. There was a time when Marvel Comics getting a massive multi-film big-budget crossover universe would've been exciting, but now it's here and it's blown its load a few times over with generic supervillains and badly-explained MacGuffins, it's hard to maintain enthusiasm. And the fact that Crystal Dynamics managed to take that and somehow make an even duller and more jaded version clearly deserves the top spot in the Blandness List, and perhaps even a Lifetime Achievement Award for Blandness if they can be bothered to pick it up.\n\nWorst Game\n\nI'm not trying to be contrarian; I genuinely cannot think of a game that gave me a more miserable experience than The Last of Us II. And here we fucking go. \"Ooh, look at Mr. Controversial Opinions! You think The Game Awards' Game of the Year was actually the worst game ever, do you? And you think all the people who think it's good are wrong, do you? And you think The Game Awards have their noses shoved so far up AAA buttholes that they wouldn't notice a good game if it was speed bagging their testicles, do you? And you're going to put all these views into the mouth of a notional third party in a weak attempt at creating deniability, are you? You going to interrupt at some point?\" I wasn't, no.\n\n----\n\nGame: Cyberpunk 2077\n\nReviewed: 2021-01-20\n\nHey, kids! What starts with \"suh\", ends in \"punk\", and has been splashed onto the computer screens of lonely single gamers the world over? That's right, Cyberpunk, the hot new immersive sim conveniently, if unimaginatively, named after its genre; the genre of choice for people who hate capitalism, but love looking like a member of Dead or Alive after they stepped on a landmine. I say \"immersive sim\"; I feel that description hinges on the game being, in some way, immersive. I was playing the Steam version, which might more accurately be termed a \"buggier than a party sub that got left on the floor of a motel bathroom\" sim.\n\nThe bugs were ceaseless; mostly non-game-breaking animation fuckups and voice lines not playing, but every now and again, I'd have to reload a save because I accidentally crossed a cutscene trigger while grabbing an enemy, and I'd come back from the loading screen with my head jammed up their arse, like the result of some Cronenberg-esque teleportation accident. It's a shame, because when I looked up at the dizzying neon towers of Night City, and the crowds of NPCs where no two were the same, and they're all uniquely dressed in some way like a cross between a character from LazyTown and a Cenobite, I thought to myself, \"Man, this game would probably be really immersive if my trousers hadn't just turned invisible again!\" But as you know, I hate to harp on a game having bugs these days, when the developers might eventually patch them all out; in this case given, I'd estimate about ten years and an industrial quantity of crab shampoo. Let's focus on the stuff the game meant to do, like the lovely titties, and the working its developers half to death.\n\nCyberpunk is set in the high-tech dystopian sprawl of Night City - and it's still called that during the day, which strikes me as a bit of an oversight - and the main character is V, of Vendetta fame, a jobbing mercenary on a quest for the big time. After a heist on a corpo-stronghold goes cyber-tits up, V finds themselves with six months to live and a piece of classified tech jammed in their bonce, which makes them hallucinate the ghost of Keanu Reeves, who, in this world, was a legendary freedom fighter who died in a blaze of glory, sticking it to The Man, and was also a hard-drinking rock guitarist that everyone wanted to fuck, and probably had a really big knob. Bit laughable, really; it's like what used to happen whenever Gene Simmons got cast in a film and was given any amount of creative control.\n\nHonestly, Keanu Reeves seems a bit miscast as a dangerous super-cool bad boy rocker; I tend to think of him as the human equivalent of an affectionate Labrador with slight facial paralysis. Anyway, V's task is to continue being a gigging mercenary while seeking a way to purge their brain of Keanu thoughts, before their consciousness gets overwritten, and they start seriously considering signing on to the The Day the Earth Stood Still remake.\n\nSo, Cyberpunk is an immersive RPG with an emphasis on the \"RP\" part of the G, where you must balance your stats and perks across ranged combat, melee combat, stealth, and hacking gameplay; in my experience, this wasn't so much about picking a specialization as it was picking one thing to really suck at. By the end of my game, I had high stats in everything except tech, so my V was a super-strong gun-toting tank, who was also a stealthy ninja, and a master hacker who could insta-kill a good amount of the enemies just by looking at them funny and thinking about it, but who was absolutely useless at mending DVD players. Even the non-facetious tech skills didn't seem terribly useful, like crafting; I didn't craft Jack Fucking Thompson in this game, and still ended up with fifty spare health kits and more bullets than John Lennon's corpse!\n\nAs I say, though, this was by the end; earlier on, it was easier to be intimidated by the sheer depth of upgrades and unfriendly interface. Incidentally, if one more AAA game has me navigate its menus by moving a mouse pointer with the gamepad, I'm going to lock it in a basement and only feed it when it's caught a fly with a pair of lead salad tongs.\n\nThe first time I opened the map and the visual space was crowded with icons like teenage boys around a hole in a shower room wall, I felt a little overwhelmed, but it turned out that, much like the working class in the eyes of American politics, there's a lot of Cyberpunk 2077 that's really not worth worrying about. I was baffled as to why the map has a special icon for food vendors; there's no hunger meter, and as I said, I was cleaning health kits out of my armpits. Why the fuck would I want to buy food? Is it just for the people who want to role-play as Michelin Travel Guide writers? And I was initially impressed by the vast range of perks and cyber-enhancement slots available for building your character, but after a certain point, a lot of those didn't offer enough benefit to be worth a bother, either. \"Would you like a robot foot with +5% defense against verrucas?\" Well, I do hate wearing a rubber sock at the swimming pool, so hacking off a limb does sound like a perfectly level-headed alternative.\n\nBetter move on; looks like I've hit the \"backhanded compliment\" layer of this review trifle. Cyberspooge 1969 is well-written enough; the way it structures its story around V's personal struggles gives us a strong focus, while the background details subtly trickle in the necessary exposition and worldbuilding, like a nice quiet room heater. But it's the little touches of atmosphere that make it for me; my favorite moments were when I'd finish a gig and find myself waiting for my summoned car on the side of the road in the bad part of town at night. The cars hurrying by, sirens in the distance; to my left, a pack of neon punks daring each other to snort a line of aquarium gravel. And I'd think, \"Man, this is really bringing back fond memories of trying to cab home from Fortitude Valley at one in the morning,\" until I'd notice one of the punks T-posing or Cronenberging with a vending machine, and get pulled out again. \"Oh, right, I'm just playing a video game that's about as stable as a relationship counselor's waiting room in an earthquake test center.\"\n\nI did wonder why CD Projekt Red only unlocked my review copy, like, the day before general release. I mean, this thing had more hype than Michael Stipe; what were you afraid of, lads? Some people getting turned off by the bug reports and the game only making nine billion squillion dollars? Cyberpunk is barely holding itself together, with all its content and disembodied organs of developers that were ritualistically sacrificed to it, and the end result is a game that could seriously benefit from some editing; for every well-designed open-ended mission with multiple approaches, there's one that just forces you into combat, or ends anticlimactically because the target clipped through a bus shelter.\n\nSo I'd say this is the AAA horse plop-plops syndrome again: the result of too many people working on the game who were trying to look busy. Sure, there's a theoretically nice plate of steak fries here, but it's partially buried in potato peelings, and I don't understand why you peeled so many more potatoes than you actually needed, nor why you literally enslaved a few people to get them all peeled in time. Also, not to make a fuss, but I ordered a salad!\n\n----\n\nGame: Immortals Fenyx Rising\n\nReviewed: 2021-01-20\n\nTruly good and original games are like the itchy spots you get from a venereal disease: a product of love that's satisfying to scratch, yes, but soon there'll be a lot more of the buggers, and none of them will be as interesting as the first. Case in point, Breath of the Wild. \"Ooh, we like this game!\" we said to the soulless Daleks that run the games industry. \"We think it's atmospheric and mechanically intricate, and offers a bold new take on the interactive narrative experience. (...) Also, it made a lot of money.\" \"REPLICATE! REPLICATE! REGURGITATE!\"\n\nBut obviously, you can't just knock out something as expansive as Breath of the Wild on evenings and weekends in between fistfuls of amphetamines, so the imitators are only just now trickling out, like Genshin Impact: \"Breath of the Wild, but anime\". I know Breath of the Wild was already pretty anime, but you know what I mean; there is anime, and then there is capital-A Anime, the kind of thing that's all pastel colors and jiggle physics, and all the characters dress like they got caught in a head-on collision between a truck full of random armor parts and a truck full of lace doilies.\n\nAnd we also have today's subject, Ubisoft's contribution to the new \"like Breath of the Wild, but...\" subgenre (ugh): Immortals Fenyx Rising. What's the strategy here, guys? \"Hey, if we give our game the worst title in the history of anything, maybe the rest of the game will look good by comparison.\" \"Good thinking! Now, are there any I's in the name we can replace with Y's?\" Immortals Vomit Rising is a fantasy open world hack and slash collect-a-thon where you can pursue your objectives in any order and free-climb anywhere as long as you've got enough energy drinks; so yeah, it's the faintly sinister cheaply-made knockoff of a Disney film hoping to sucker in a few elderly relatives in time for Christmas.\n\nBut how, you might ask, could any game replicate Breath of the Wild without the backing of decades of heritage like what Zelda has, the eternal Link/Zelda/Ganondorf monomyth? \"Well,\" said Ubisoft, \"can't get much more 'monomyth' than actual myth, can you?\" So obviously, they went to the Free Idea Bucket again and just made another fucking game about Greek mythology, only in this case, you're trying to bring back the Greek gods who've all been put out of commission by the big baddie, in what's academically termed a \"reverse Kratos\". The Titan Typhon gets loose, turns humanity to stone, and lets all the monsters out for afternoon play, and our protagonist Fenyx - no relation to Marcus - must prove their worth as a warrior and save four of the Greek gods so that they can help you kick Typhon in the tighty-whities.\n\nBoy, I wish I could list all the original ideas that went into Immortals Bile Churning, but I fear I might never... start. The last desperate Hail Mary attempt to establish at least some kind of fucking identity for itself is the, open-quotes, \"funny\" dialogue, wherein all the characters communicate entirely in sassy quips; there's a narrative device where Prometheus is recounting the story of the game to Zeus, so every now and again, they'll comment on your actions like Statler and fucking Waldorf, and it's like they're auditioning for How I Met Your Mother: Classical Antiquity Edition. Leaving aside the fact that the quips are as funny as an Ebola outbreak at a rescue shelter, every cutscene is lent an awkwardness of tone, probably from the way the characters seem to pause after every line to wait for the canned laughter to die down.\n\n\"All right, we get it, Priscilla, Queen of the Snooty Internet Piss-Grumps! You're sniffy about any attempt at humor that doesn't fully bisect your sides; we know that. How does the game actually play?\" Well, like Breath of the Wild, mainly, with a few significant divergences. You remember how Breath of the Wild was restrained about populating its world to lend an atmospheric sense of wide-open wilderness? Well, Ubisoft couldn't fight their usual instincts to splatter icons across the map like saliva droplets across a Fortnite player's headset mic.\n\nAlso, remember how in Bee of the Wee, we'd stand on lookout towers and find places to go to by looking for them with our eyeballs, like how looking for things in reality works? Well, Immortals Violent Diarrhea doesn't have the sterling visual design to pull that off, so instead, you have to systematically move your cursor over a load of seemingly empty landscape, waiting for the little sensor to go \"widdly wee\", at which point another icon gets added to the map like a cornflake in the beard of an ill-fated first date. And there are so many fucking icons to find from any given location that this process is incredibly tedious: standing there, slowly rotating like a car park security camera, checking off every random chest and collectible and adding it to your little notebook, until you're thinking, \"This is a fucking day job! I am cataloguing! I am validating data! I am a trainspotter in the middle of a loading depot!\"\n\nSo we forget about all that, run back down the mountain, and get into some combat instead, which is pretty generic and not terribly hard when you have the basics down; the parry window is roughly the length of an episode of The Great British Bake Off. The only X factor is making sure you craft enough attack power upgrades with your various multicolored crystal meth supplies, to keep up when the baddies' health bars start getting long enough that they have to book two seats when they go on commercial flights. There's some of that systems exploitation that Breath of the Wild had, where you can try to kill enemies in roundabout ways with physics objects or other enemies' attacks, but we also lack Breath of the Wild's weapon degradation, so there's not a lot of point in finding workarounds when very little is as effective or convenient as just stabbing dudes in the bum.\n\nThere's also not much point in going out of our way to collect new weapons and armor, since they're all functionally identical, but with slightly different bonus effects; in fact, there's not a whole lot of point in doing anything, is there? Why are you brushing your teeth? You're just going to die or catch fire at some point, and the worms in the ground won't care. Wait, was I talking about a video game? Oh, yes. In Breath of the Wild, I felt like I went to the final boss because I'd finally built myself up enough to be ready; in Immortals Penis Softening, I did so because I felt like I had nothing better to do, with the story missions done and everything else doing little more than adding to the clutter in my wardrobe.\n\nThere's something terribly dispassionate about the game, what with its utter void of original ideas, the constant idle quipping making every character seem like they're more interested in the contents of their nasal cavities than they are about the ongoing world-destroying plot. The risk with making all your dialogue snarky and self-effacing is that the audience might end up agreeing with your self-effacement. I'm also iffy about the eventual message of the plot essentially being, \"The all-powerful beings that run your life might be fickle, self-centered, and dangerously incompetent, but hey, they own you either way, so you might as well like it! \"; coming from a corporate publisher, it seems a bit uncomfortably on-the-nose. Ubisoft, between this and monastery-pillaging in Assassin's Creed, do you have anyone left there who knows anything about human emotion? \"Sure we do! Um... it was a song by Smokey Robinson, wasn't it?\"\n\n----\n\nGame: Yakuza: Like a Dragon\n\nReviewed: 2020-12-09\n\n\"Yakuza: Like a Dragon\" probably shouldn't be read as a complete sentence. \"Don't Yakuza like a dragon; dragons aren't very good at Yakuza-ing. They intimidate easily enough, but their terrifying claws are bad at holding the protection money.\" No, this is actually the second game of an emerging trend, where the Western and Japanese titles for a Japanese franchise are combined into one title - see also Resident Evil 7: Biohazard - possibly part of a cunning ploy to claim dual citizenship after Western society collapses.\n\nAnyway, Like a Dragon is part of the potentially ill-advised continuation of the Yakuza franchise after the stepping down of its lead character, Kazuma Kiryu, the man with a face like a granite paving slab and about the same durability. As was Judgment, but where Judgment failed because the main character was a size-10 twat in size-9 jeans, Like a Dragon succeeds by making the main character a somehow even bigger twat, but in a lovable way, importantly, not in a \"gels his hair into spikes and dates high-schoolers\" way. Our subject is Ichiban Kasuga, a Yakuza enforcer who was recruited on Opposite Day and spends most of their time handing out free money to people and beating the snot out of other professional criminals for committing crimes. But fate turns on Ichiban when he has to take the rap for a shooting to preserve his mentor/father figure's honor and returns to Kamurocho after a long prison sentence to get to the bottom of his betrayal.\n\n\"Now wait just a minute, Yahtzee Mustache-Contaminating Croshaw! Wasn't Kazuma Kiryu in the first game also an Opposite Day Yakuza, who also took the rap for a shooting to preserve someone's honor, and also returned after a long prison sentence to etcetera?\" Yes, and believe me, I had no small amount of concern for Yakuza: Like a Rolling Stone before I started; the story seemed to be treading enough old ground to irritate all the world's archaeologists, and then there was the reveal that it was going to have turn-based combat, and if there's any franchise where the combat has never needed any drastic fixes, it's Yakuza, the games that routinely cut from grown men making understated threats to each other with very serious faces to those same grown men twatting the absolute three bean salad out of each other with benches, traffic cones, and passing old ladies.\n\nBut then I played the game, and my doubts were put to rest. I mean, the main story is definitely treading old ground, but then, most Yakuza main stories do: mysterious betrayal, hero comes to the aid of victimized innocent, discovers sinister scheme to take over Japan orchestrated by evil men in suits, strong themes of fatherhood and brotherhood, and then everyone takes their shirts off and twats each other with benches. That's every Yakuza game!\n\nBut the main plot is rarely the interesting part, and that aspect of Yakuza: Like a G6 takes a back seat just a short eight or nine hours into the game when the prologue finally ends, and Ichiban finds himself cast out of Kamurocho and homeless on the streets of Yokohama. From there, the established plot is forgotten for a huge chunk of the run-time, and we become a sort of \"rags to riches\" story as Ichiban gathers a party of fellow deadbeats to do odd jobs that somehow all end up connecting to one of the local crime gangs; they can't fucking sell Girl Scout Cookies door-to-door without it turning out that a rival troop are in deep with Colombian drug cartels.\n\nAnd while Itchybum is an ass-kicking Yakuza who wears disco suits, he's got a character of his own distinct from Kazuma Kiryu, mainly because he doesn't emote like a print of American Gothic glued to a cast-iron fridge; he's excitable, he's optimistic, he's a goofball, he's likeable enough to pull you along on his journey. And the turn-based combat works because it's tied to his characterization as a fantasist imagining himself as a Dragon's Quest hero. Oh, \"Like a Dragon\"; I just got that. Combat also has enough of that Persona 5 energy about it to keep the pace up; it also reminds me of EarthBound for some reason, possibly from the way I can dress my homeless friend like a chef and tell him to twat people with a frying pan.\n\nBut while stylish, the combat feels a bit mechanically lacking. Strategy only really comes into play when using abilities that hit multiple grouped-together enemies, and every participant of the fight is constantly shifting randomly around like crabs busting for a piss, so after you select a dude to be the center of your breakdancer's windmill attack, by the time your dude runs up to that dude, chances are good all the other dudes around him will have fucked off to do a little window shopping. And I'd say the combat is definitely wearing out its welcome when you're still being constantly pulled into random fights on the streets of Yokohama with low-level dudes, long past the point that they can be dispatched in one punch or half an expertly-timed fart. On the whole, though, it does its job of pasting all the bits together; it's not quite engaging enough to make me want to do the dungeon-crawling side activity, but I was never one of the kids who liked eating paste.\n\nIn the usual way of Yakuza games, it's the side stuff that's the real tea and biscuits. I mean, just to repeat myself, fuck the critical path; the critical path is the place where we occasionally have to stand in a room for ten minutes while an old man in a suit verbally explains the plot. Let's just assume it ends with someone taking their shirt off and getting punched on a rooftop and get back to sniffing out those minigames and side activities. Don't worry; once the nine-hour prologue is over, it only takes roughly seven or eight more decades to unlock them all. It's a strong showing across the board. There are a couple of driving minigames in case Ichiban gets bored of Dragon Quest and wants to plug in Mario Kart for a bit; there's a creative little minigame centered around Ichiban struggling to stay awake while watching a movie that made me laugh, and which, this time of year, a lot of you young people might call \"mood AF\".\n\nBut the most elaborate side activity is the business management sim; at one point, Ichiban becomes the president of a corporation because someone looks at your unemployed, homeless, ex-Yakuza protagonist and says, \"This person seems trustworthy and good with money! \", and must manage the funding and staff placement of several businesses day-to-day. I found it weirdly absorbing; it's dynamic, it's goal-oriented, it's got a little 8-bit sprite of Ichiban running along symbolically collecting money. I did fail the shareholders' meeting minigame at first because the mechanics are very poorly explained, but I'm mainly bringing that up just because I love the phrase \"shareholders' meeting minigame\".\n\nFor me, Yakuza: Like, Like, Y'know is a thumbs-up; I thought the series was pretty thoroughly wrung out, but with a likeable protagonist and a bit more of a lean into the usual wackiness, it has successfully charmed the nurses into keeping the life support machine plugged in. Every Yakuza game is basically a loose box of disconnected toys, but for the record, this is a particularly nice box with some choice toys, like Legos and Masters of the Universe and none of your Tickle Me Elmo dogshit.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales.\n\nGame: Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales\n\nReviewed: 2020-12-02\n\nHuh, that's odd; records seem to indicate that a new console generation began at some point in the last few weeks, and yet, mysteriously, I don't seem to care. I just double-checked, and yes, I'm still mostly just feeling the usual blend of boredom and alcohol-saturated dread. Sorry, Sony and Microsoft; this doesn't usually happen to me. Maybe I'd get in the mood if the two of you make out while I watch, but you know, it does kind of feel like absolutely fuck-all has changed.\n\nBut hey, there hasn't been a single console in all of gaming history that wouldn't have benefited from holding out its release for six months or so; maybe I'll feel differently once I actually have access to a PS5 and the console doesn't exist merely as a glint in an eBay scalper's eye. Sony's going to have to do a lot fucking better than a remake of an eleven-year-old game and an expansion pack sequel if it wants my shiny purple helmet to rise out of the trenches of no man's land, especially since one of them came out on PS4 as well. Sony, I'm not going to date your spoiled overweight daughter just 'cos your house has a new pool; your older, more experienced daughter can let me into the pool as well, and she still has my credit cards.\n\nBut anyway, I guess we shouldn't say \"expansion pack sequel\" anymore; that's an old term for back when PC games were sold in cereal boxes and life was good and children still recognized the sound of joyful laughter. I guess the kids might say \"DLC sequel\" these days in between quoting memes and picking up the pieces of our broken civilization. A DLC sequel is one that mostly feels like the last game, but a bit more of it; some might say unavoidable, in the case of a sequel to Disney's Marvel's Etcetera's Spider-Man. I mean, obviously, it's going to be in the same New York sandbox; Spider-Man's not holidaying in Cardiff anytime soon. And obviously, you're going to be playing as Spider-Man again; hopefully, we learned our lesson last time that not playing as Spider-Man in the Spider-Man game is like throwing away the condom and sticking the wrapper on your cock.\n\n\"But wait, Yahtzee Croshaw, you snake in the sock drawer! You don't play as the original Spider-Man in this game; you play as Miles Morales! Did you accidentally cover up the title with spit when all the racial diversity sent you into fits of conservative rage?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Look at it this way, obviously-baiting viewer: Spider-Man is about a nerdy teenager who likes science and is a good boy who gets spider powers and a dead father figure, and has to balance vigilante heroics with their troublesome personal life; absolutely bugger-all has changed. I know Miles Morales is an established character in the comics, because comic nerds will only tolerate permanent change when it isn't a fucking change at all.\n\nPeter Parker takes under his wing a freshly spider-powered-up Miles Morales and swiftly forces him to use the same codename and wear the same outfit, which, let's be blunt, is a bit weird and narcissistic and not a little gatekeeper-y. Peter Parker goes on his holidays and leaves his new Mini-Me to defend the city alone, but Miles finally proves worthy of Peter's crusty Spider-Man pajamas when half the people he knows turn out to be supervillains. Turns out you can only make it as a supervillain in New York if you've been to at least three of Spider-Man's birthday parties; nepotism, I call it. These days, Spider-Man probably gets more thrown if supervillains DON'T turn out to be someone he knows; he wrestles them to the ground and the mask falls off, and he goes, \"GASP! * No, it can't be! I have no idea who you are!\"\n\nIt's tempting at this point to say \"If you liked the last Insomniac Games' Spider-Man, you'll like this 'cos it's more of it\", call it a review, and go back to alphabetizing my cum socks, but that would probably lead to the question of what specific parts of the original Spider-Man this is more of. Because like an ill-prepared orgasm, original Spider-Man was all over the place, with swinging and stealth and combat and collectibles and science minigames and puzzles, and that afore-hinted-at business where Spider-Man takes five every now and again and you have to play as his fucking roommate, trying to knock out a crafty one without squeaky bedsprings alerting a guard.\n\nWell, obviously, the swinging is back, as well as the combat and stealth, but where the last game had a tendency to reward you for getting through stealth sections undetected by spawning a bunch more enemies you're forced to fight head-on, the way a retail manager rewards their most diligent employee by giving them the closing shift every fucking night, Miles Morales tends not to do that so much. And even when it does, Miles has a new cloaking power that allows him to turn combat situations back into stealth challenges which, like a butcher's end-of-day clearance sale, does rather lower the stakes, when you can smash the \"Cloak\" button at any point, piss off, and wait for the usual collective brain aneurysm that makes all the baddies split up to go look for you; you hardly even fucking need stealth at that point. Smash a dude into a drumkit with a howler monkey in front of seven of his mates. Who cares? We can fucking cloak!\n\nOne of the characteristics of DLC sequel is that all the new mechanics and abilities don't so much put a new twist on gameplay as make it easier, and that's precisely the issue with the cloak, not to mention the new electricity powers you can use in combat; if you punch dudes a load of times, for example, you build up your Enthusiasm for Punches Meter, which enables you to do the Super-Spicy Punch, which is like a punch, but more so. And there's a couple of different Super-Spicy Punch powers that can also be used in traversal mode to gain height or speed, but then you run out of enthusiasm for punches and have to stop and punch some things before you can do them again.\n\nThere isn't so much of those science minigames or roommate masturbation sections; there are some environmental puzzles based around finding the right line of sight to start flicking webs around, but they integrate a bit better with the core mechanics. It's certainly less bloated than the last game. Funny, that; putting less stuff in something makes it seem like there's not as much stuff in it. So you can call Miles Morales a lesser game, or you could call it a more streamlined one if you feel like defending a massive corporate franchise that will never care about you or know your name.\n\nI'd say we're still having trouble figuring out how to get the most out of the unique Spider-Man traversal mechanics instead of just shrugging and spawning more generic thugs to beat up; take a mission to get a cat down from a tree, and chances are, you'll find a pack of generic thugs among the branches scrumping for apples. There's, like, one plot mission where you have to chase the main villain through the city that makes the most of the swinging mechanics, and it's really fucking annoying, 'cos the game fails you on the spot if you drift six inches away from the intended route; it's like trying to locate a vagina in a pitch-black bedroom and getting clipped 'round the ear every time you accidentally fuck the throw pillows.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Assassin's Creed Valhalla.\n\nGame: Assassin's Creed Valhalla\n\nReviewed: 2020-11-25\n\nAh, Vikings. Who doesn't like Vikings? \"English monasteries?\" Oh, right. \"Anyone who's ever been forced to listen to Norwegian black metal?\" Yes, thank you. The point was, in the games industry, it seems to be only a matter of time before you go full Viking. God of War did it; Assassin's Creed are doing it; that new Elden Ring thing that FromSoftware are doing isn't strictly full Viking, I know, but it's definitely giving it some funny looks.\n\nFair play to Assassin's Creed; it held out longer than a lot of series would. I mean, it did the fucking American War for Independence before it did Vikings; that's like forcing yourself to eat all the party napkins before you can have any of the birthday cake. But there's no putting off going full Viking forever; it's one of the points on the graph: ninjas, pirates, Vikings, and I guess maybe cowboys. Hey! Is that a Ubisoft drone? Oh shit, it's taking notes. Sorry, everyone; don't know how they keep getting in here. If they announce Assassin's Creed Deadwood next year, I guess you can all blame me. Anyway, Vikings and Norse mythology have always been fairly prevalent in the world of video games. Not sure why; maybe it's because it hits all the right notes. It's not just that we get to cleave motherfuckers in twain for looking at us funny; it's that we can do it with a silly accent and a nice beard.\n\nSo everyone piles into the fun bus to enjoy some cleaving in twain, but Ubisoft, who, let's not mince words, are all over the fucking place these days, stands in front of the fun bus to go \"Ooh, don't forget, the Vikings were a nuanced people who also did a lot of trading and colonizing when they weren't cleaving stuff in twain, historical accuracy, 'This game was developed by a multicultural team of extremely large beards,' and all that.\" And I can't help feeling there's a bit of wanting to have one's roast boar and eat it going on here as we and our group of hairy tattooed raiders run up to an English monastery to smash all the windows and set fire to everyone's pubes, and then a monk gets caught in the melee between me and the poorly-equipped Saxon bodyguard who was just trying to do his job, and the game goes, \"Whoops! Don't kill civilians, or you'll desynchronize! \", the implication being that killing innocent monks is in some way out of character for someone who is, at that precise moment, PILLAGING A MONASTERY. But let's wind back a little.\n\nThe plot of Assassin's Creed Valhalla concerns Eivor, a Norwegian warrior whose parents are killed by another Norwegian warrior, but who gets revenge before the prologue is over, which, much like most of the beards involved, leaves things at a bit of a loose end. For want of something to do, and in the wake of Norway being peacefully united under Harald Fairhair towards the end of the first millennium and becoming all lame and non-murdery, Eivor decides to sail to medieval England to start a new life, this being probably the only era in history where people went to England to make their lives more interesting; most other times, that's like going to the Arctic Circle for the beaches.\n\nBut fate has more in store for Eivor, as, for some reason, a couple of weird, dogmatic fellas with hooded robes and a slight finger deficiency are hitching a ride. Let the record now show that while the Order of Assassins normally reserved their trademark hidden blades for the actual sworn-in devotees to their cause, it seems they also occasionally passed them out to randoms if they seem even vaguely into the whole \"freedom from oppression\" thing, or if they just got dragged along to someone's party and forgot to bring a gift, because I can't imagine these Assassins not feeling a little awkward after the monastery-pillaging starts in earnest.\n\nSo we have the second Ubisoft sandbox in as many weeks to be set in England; I guess we're making the most of it before Brexit really kicks in and the British government starts selling off national monuments for bread. But while Assassin's Creed Valhalla seems to be a lot stabler than Watch Dogs: Legion, and my PC runs it without me having to constantly hold a sick bag in front of the vents, it's also a lot less interesting to talk about; without a unique selling point like NPC recruitment, it's just another Ubisoft Jiminy Cockthroat, another to-do list of samey stealth action missions with crafting and collectibles. While riding over the green hills of merry England at one point, I suddenly realized that I could switch to Ghost of Tsushima at this moment and probably not fucking notice, if it weren't for the main character suddenly wearing a much more interesting hat.\n\nThere's still the bird-scouting and the RPG elements from the last two games, but it's a little closer in spirit to the Assassin's Creed II era, since you've got a whole village to pour resources into and a bit more of a story focus. But who the fuck cares?! It's just another point on the line graph, another shake of the bag full of the same shit. The only thing that really marks it out is that, instead of the climbing all over elaborately-realized cathedrals and palaces we got in previous games, you're leaping across mud huts and wattling and fifteen copy-pasted examples of the same Viking longhouse, because it's the fucking Dark Ages. And they missed a trick by still having us jump into piles of straw and leaves when it would've been much more authentic to replace them with gigantic piles of shit; I guess Ubisoft thought that might've been a little uncomfortably representative of the company's trajectory over the years.\n\nThe initial spark of getting to play a burly Viking can't be sustained through the subsequent 40 hours of trudging through mud and dealing with political squabbles between people dressed in earth tones in the name of Assassin's Creed's trademark historical accuracy. I was getting sniffy about the ethical ramifications of monastery-pillaging earlier, but if anything, the game should've learned more into that; let us tear shit up, swinging a giant \"fucketh-off\" hammer as our muscles bulge like mating walruses, and seduce all the hot monk chicks away from their inadequate monk boyfriends. It's this \"trying to hit all the points at once\" thing that muddles the tone, trying to make out like we're some kind of freedom fighter while we laughingly set all the pigsties ablaze and hunt down the usual laundry list of Templars that we are assured are evil, but who seem to be mostly minding their own fucking business.\n\nThere's an RPG skill tree split between melee, ranged, or stealth-focused builds, but you have to do all three at various times, so there's not much point in specializing. There isn't really a stealthy way to raid a monastery; I try floating the idea to my raiding party while we're all sprinting up to the gate waving axes, but turns out it's hard to talk with your shield between your teeth. And there's the longboat, because having your own ship has ticked enough boxes in previous Assassin's Creed games to keep bringing back, but lacking the need for ocean travel, it's just there for moving quickly along rivers, and there's no boat combat unless you notice a particularly antisocial-looking frog.\n\nSo that's Assassin's Creed Valhalla, noteworthy only for its extreme un-noteworthiness. What a dull way to end the video; here's a picture of a leopard in a scarf.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope.\n\nGame: The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope\n\nReviewed: 2020-11-18\n\nSo, you remember that Dark Pictures: Man of Medan thing that Supermassive Games burped out, and how they were threatening to make it a full-on horror anthology series? Well, apparently, their demands weren't met, so they've been forced to inflict another one upon us. Supermassive Games should not be confused with Supergiant Games; I know they mean the same thing, but Supergiant Games makes interesting games that push the boundaries of the interactive storytelling medium, and Supermassive Games makes \"interactive movies\", a phrase which, for me, remains almost as foreboding as \"Hey, is your nuclear reactor supposed to be doing that?\"\n\nAnd for some reason, they always star one, and only one, TV actor who just barely enters the threshold of celebrity. Last time, it was the dude from Quantum Break with the fat face; this time, it's, uh... Well, do you know that meme? The four-panel one where the dude at the end says \"You guys are getting paid?\" It's that dude. \"What, the bloke with a face like a toddler who just smelled something weird?\" That's the one! Anyway, the new Dark Pictures episode is called \"Little Hope\", which, funnily enough, is also what Supermassive Games have for getting the promised eight-game series out of this tosh before interest dries up.\n\nThe story begins with a vehicle on its way to a small American town, crashing after it swerves to miss a mysterious dark-haired girl who appears in the middle of the road, whereupon the survivors of the crash go looking for someone who's missing and end up in a weird foggy version of the town full of twisted monsters representing-- Wait a minute! This is just Silent Hill! Well, it's Silent Hill if, instead of exploration and combat and masterfully-crafted atmosphere, you just got tied to a length of rope and dragged through a linear sequence of events, and if, instead of \"Silent Hill\", it was called \"Five Abrasive Dipshits Who Never Shut the Fuck Up... Hill\". Still, I suppose I can't fault them for their choice of influence; Man of Medan seemed to have been mainly influenced by Scooby-Doo vs. the Ghost Pirates.\n\nAfter the crash, we then go through a second prologue sequence set in the 70's, in which a family with hilarious retro haircuts all die in a house fire. Well, undeniably hilarious as those retro haircuts were, game, why did you show me that? \"Oh, no reason. Right, back to the bus crash and scary town.\" Well, I suppose now we know that, just like Man of Medan, there's going to be some reveal at the end of all this that ties everything together, and just like Man of Medan, it will probably make the whole game feel like a complete waste of fucking time. And without wishing to spoil just yet, that's very much the case.\n\nBut Man of Medan had a better sense of escalation; first you're on a boat, then you go diving, then pirates show up, then you go to the ghost ship, we start wanting to smack Shawn Ashmore's character around the head with increasingly large and heavy blunt objects. It fell apart after you go on the ghost ship because it just becomes a sequence of disconnected setpieces as the characters randomly drift around on a wonderful jump-scare safari, failing to advance the plot or any character arcs for about two hours. Little Hope's main issue is that it starts at the ghost ship (or ghost town, in this case). Almost every chapter is basically the same: our heroes blunder aimlessly through the fog, find some kind of building or location where something creepy happens, then blunder aimlessly out again. It's like watching blind puppies searching for a nipple on a shag pile carpet. You could put the chapters in random order and have precisely the same sense of plot development; that is to say, fuck-all.\n\nAnd, continuing the Supermassive Games tradition, I hate all the characters. The facial animation is having serious problems finding the exit ramp from the uncanny valley, especially with Young Man Who Isn't Weird-Smell-Toddler-Face Young Man, who looks like he's getting slapped in the mush with a trout every time the camera's off him. Besides those two, the cast are rounded out by Older Professor Man, who thinks the best way to exert authority is to constantly do a Jack Nicholson impression; Young Student Lady, whose main role in the plot, I think, was to loudly disagree with whatever the previous speaker said; and Older Student Lady, who hasn't even reset her splintered bones from the opening bus crash before she starts getting catty about Young Student Lady. So even if you did direct them to the exit ramp from the uncanny valley, I feel like they'd just argue over what lane to be in until they crash into a concrete divider and then argue over whose intestines are whose.\n\nMind you, it's actually hard to get a feel for the characters since, as before, the branching nature of the plot means that personalities change from one shot to the next, as well as their emotional states and physical positions, and the fact that the one being controlled by the player keeps switching certainly exacerbates that. And the other reason it's hard to judge their characterization is because 90% of the dialogue is some variation on the phrase \"We have to find a way out of here.\" Blunder through fog, find building, get inside, \"Let's find a way out of here!\" THEN WHY DID YOU COME IN HERE, DIPSHITS?! AT LEAST SIGN THE FUCKING GUESTBOOK!\n\nI think I've figured out my problem with this whole style of game, besides the terrible characters and bizarre editing; it's that, despite being in control, I don't feel like I'm contributing, if that makes sense. There's this loose notion that our goal is either to keep everyone alive, or make them all dead, or keep only the ones you like alive and imagine them blowing things off to go party in Atlantic City or something, but whether or not our decisions will lead towards our chosen goal seems to be completely impossible to predict or intuit, and failing one of the action quick-time events only seems to have consequences about half the time as well. I feel like I might as well have just lined everyone up, played Russian roulette five times, then take a long lunch and brush the dog.\n\nWell, I'm being unfair; the game does stumblingly create a certain amount of intrigue between mysterious flashbacks to the past and intense monster encounters. Just a shame all of it gets squashed by the big reveal like kindergarten chairs under the arse of a morbidly obese parent. So let's talk about the en-- (SPOILERS UNTIL END OF VIDEO. Mainly for Little Hope but for Man of Medan too a bit.) --ding. Can I offer a suggestion, Supermassive? How about, for the third Dark Pictures episode, you make the plot twist something other than \"it was all a hallucination\"? Maybe don't kill any desire I have to replay it after it turns out 90% of the characters we're trying to keep alive AREN'T FUCKING REAL?! That Crypt-Keeper narrator dude was being all like, \"Ah, but remember that the truth might not always be as it seems! \", and I was like, \"Oh fuck, it's hallucinations again, isn't it?\"\n\nMaybe I misunderstood; maybe every episode will be hallucinations and the mystery is figuring out what's causing them each time. In Man of Medan, it was gas. In Little Hope, it's survivor's guilt? And next time, it'll be... I don't know, someone drew penises all over the main character's contact lenses.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Ghostrunner.\n\nGame: Ghostrunner\n\nReviewed: 2020-11-04\n\nI'll say one thing for the age in which we live: at least we might finally get that evil cyberpunk future we've always dreamed about. Yes, it'll mean an age of corporate oppression and rampant income inequality, but on the bright side, rollerblading might come back. Probably why everyone's looking forward to Cyberpunk 20-Whatever-It-Was; they're keen to get some practice in before Amazon starts reserving breathable air for Prime subscribers. Well, to tide you over while you're waiting, here's another cyberpunk game called Ghostrunner. Rather a generic name; if the word \"runner\" has been tacked on and there doesn't seem to be much athletics going on, you know you're dealing with cyberpunk. See also Blade Runner, Netrunner, Shadowrunner, Techrunner; that last one, I made up, but you thought it was real, didn't you? That's my point.\n\nStill, I can't fault Ghostrunner's title for relevance, since it's a game primarily about running and making things dead. The plot is, you're a cyborg ninja in the cyberpunk future that was being run by an elderly scientist power couple until one of them turned themselves into Doctor Octopus 'cos they were sick of playing Scrabble and watching Midsomer Murders; after being thrown down into the slums, which are physically at the bottom of the city because cyberpunk's never been good at subtle symbolism at the best of times, our hero must journey back up to the top to challenge the villain to a final duel on behalf of all the oppressed citizens, and Spider-Man.\n\nAnd the good thing about Ghostrunner's plot is that it's so fucking mind-numbingly predictable, it's virtually impossible to spoil! If I were to tell you that Mr. G. Runner, Esq., has two voices in his earpiece - one a stern taskmaster who keeps downplaying our humanity and advising us not to stop to save civilians because piles of bodies are useful for reaching high shelves, the other a tearful bunny rabbit who dreams with glimmering eyes of a better world for all, who asks you to pwease save all their wittle fowest fwiends because it'd be such a shame to waste all the lovely cakes she baked for tea - which of those two characters would you think turns on us before the end? And without wishing to give any more away, I had a mystical premonition halfway through that the ending of the game was going to rip off the ending of RoboCop, and funnily enough, that's exactly what it did.\n\nBut forget about the plot; the writers did the instant the first draft was turned in. This is a highly gameplay-focused experience that I would best summarize as \"first-person Katana Zero, with some Mirror's Edge-y parkouring thrown into the mix to keep the wheels turning\". We're thrown into a linear sequence of combat arenas where you tend to die a lot, broken up by platforming challenges where you tend to die a lot, but you're kind of expected to; it's the Hotline Miami thing where reloading is lightning-fast and you can crack off one attempt after another like you're watching Groundhog Day on fast-forward, which is just as well, 'cos things might get frustrating.\n\nIt's first-person, and what's first-person good for, kids? \"Ranged combat!\" What's it not so good for? \"Melee combat and anything that relies upon situational awareness!\" That's right! Let's not mince words. If you ever stop moving in a combat section, you're already dead; the message just hasn't reached your brain yet. And you'll probably never realize what killed you, 'cos you can only look in one direction and bullets will be closing in from at least five, and even if you haven't stopped, they'll probably hit you anyway if you aren't making liberal use of the slow-motion power that lets you sidestep in midair; Christ knows how that works from a physics perspective. We are a cyborg; maybe we've got little queefing robo-vaginas under our armpits that function as thrusters.\n\nAs with most games from the Hotline Miami stable, the fast-paced gameplay can be uvula-pummelingly frustrating while you're struggling and chesterfield sofa-buggeringly satisfying when you finally succeed, but there's a couple of slightly dodgy notes to the design that temper any praise I might offer. For one, at the end of the standard dash move, our character suddenly decelerates like he has to stop to have a little burp, and it kind of kills the flow for me, especially since this is one of the core traversal moves that we're generally using more often than we use our ability to breathe.\n\nYou also acquire four superpowers along the course of the game that aren't exactly core mechanics, 'cos they take longer to cool down than the horniest cat in the furnace, and all of them are basically just for instantly deleting an enemy or two if you can't be bothered to deal with them properly. These abilities include \"kill enemies in a line\", \"kill enemies with another enemy\", \"kill enemies with a very unreliable projectile that half the time just sails right through motherfuckers without even ruffling their hairdo\", or \"just splatter everything directly in front of you\". Yeah, if I were you, I'd stick to the sneeze of doom.\n\nFor whatever it's worth, Ghostrunner's gameplay is at its best in the basic combat 'cos you have options; if the strategy of sprinting headlong towards an enemy headbutting their bullets out of the way doesn't seem to be working out, you can try new tactics, take a different route, wall-run along the knickknack shelf, jump off the engorged testicle of a moth, and stone-cold uncoil a dude's flesh like he's the wrapping on a tube of biscuit dough. The platforming sections are more hit-and-miss, 'cos there's usually only one route, and then there are the boss fights, which are 100% miss; absolute no-hit zone there.\n\nThe first one has you escaping from a gigantic game of KerPlunk, where lasers fire in all directions like stiffies in a nudist debutante ball, and your only choice is to add Mr. Trial and Mr. Error to your dance card. But it's still better than the second boss fight with Angry Girl Ninja, where the only way to win is to parry all her strikes, and the point when you press \"Parry\" appears to be completely unrelated to the way her limbs randomly flail in all directions, like she's the fluffer at the nudist debutante ball and there's only five seconds to go before the big midnight jizz fountain.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "But even that is still better than the final boss fight with Doctor Octopus!", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "You'd think the main advantage of Doctor Octopus tentacles would be increased mobility, so it's a little baffling why Doctor Octopus just fucking sits there like a pile of dodgy sauerkraut, challenging you to a rather humiliating game of Simon Says.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "So yeah, it's like working at a failing retailer; things are all right on the ground level, but the bosses are all fucking terrible.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Having said all that, I did find some fun in Ghostrunner, but the design does seem to be rife with rookie mistakes; with that in mind, I looked at the creators' previous titles, and it turns out one of the developers was Slipgate Ironworks, who brought us that godawful Bombshell game from a few years back, amongst others.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Well, you know what?", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "For all Ghostrunner's flaws, it definitely shows improvement, so nice job, lads; you went from giving us a dog poo sandwich to giving us a normal sandwich with dog poo on the side, some of which still got on the sandwich, but that was probably more the fault of whoever was packing the takeout box.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "What am I on about?", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "----", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Remothered: Broken Porcelain.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Game: Remothered: Broken Porcelain\n\nReviewed: 2020-10-28\n\nHey, everybody, it's October (at time of writing), the month when all the ooky-spooky games pop up like rigor mortis erections at an open-casket funeral. And hey, it's also 2020, the year of shit, where everything is shit and human civilization circles the toilet bowl like the latter two-thirds of last night's sweetcorn burrito. So what better way to mark the occasion than with a really shit horror game?\n\nStep forward, the Remothered franchise, which began in 2018 with Remothered: Tormented Fathers, a unique survival horror IP that collectively made a lot of people go, \"Wow, that's the most awkward fucking title I've ever seen outside of Japanese games and Philip K. Dick novels!\" I didn't even do the dry heave, 'cos I feel the title is dry heave enough! And then the developers said, \"Oh, you think that title's awkward, do you? Well, I'm sure we can beat that record!\" So here's the sequel, Remothered: Broken Porcelain, which sounds like something you'd find on a label in an antiques shop owned by someone for whom English is a second language. It's not secondhand; it's \"remothered\"! Don't worry; it still pours tea, as long as you don't lift it by the handle or any other part.\n\nRemothered: Tormented Fathers was a stealth survival horror in the tradition of games like Haunting Ground on the PS2 or Clock Tower on the SNES - Yeah, it goes that far back; you young horror-making whippersnappers think you invented running away and hiding in cupboards, don't you, not to mention monsters that think one searches a cupboard by standing in front of it and staring really hard at the door? - the idea being that you're trying to explore the usual survival horror-y environment full of really circuitously locked doors while being hunted by a monster that can't be permanently killed, but can be temporarily knocked down with items or traps, or some technique or other, so that you can run off to find a nice cupboard in which to void your bowels in safety.\n\nI must admit, I didn't go out of my way to try the first one, because it was one horror game among hundreds, and who the fuck knows anymore what IPs have got staying power and which are just going to burst on the surface of Steam like passing zits? I'm like a bloke who runs a uranium mine who doesn't bother committing the names of any workers to memory until they've survived at least three shifts. So when a sequel to Remothered came out, I thought, \"Ooh, guess it was worth at least four-fifths of a damn! Let's check it out!\" Well, it's a good thing Remothered: Broken Porcelain doesn't work in a uranium mine, 'cos it'd cause severe morale issues with the horrible things it leaves in the communal latrine.\n\nIt's a bad one, friends; so bad, I want to bend it over my autopsy table and really work out what the fuck happened. It's a continuation of the plot from the last game that gets summed up for us in a \"Story So Far\" video whose principal effect was to get me completely lost before we'd even fucking started; apparently, some lady was looking for a missing girl and got trapped in a house with a murderous old man and an evil nun, and there was a conspiracy involving evil science and a convent burning down, and some or all of the characters were being hypnotized by some or all of the rest of the characters. Got all that? Good, off we go! And then we get dumped into gameplay like I've just been given a blanket party at boot camp and am now dazedly blinking into the darkness wondering if I should burst into tears or not. From there, we play as a teenage schoolgirl with a British accent of mysterious origin who lives in a hotel where the staff members keep going insane and trying to braid her hair with a fire axe.\n\nIf I were to describe the visuals of Remothered: Talking Bicycle in ten words or less, I'd go for, \"Murky murky murky, murky murky murky murky, contextual button prompt.\" Most of the action takes place in murky corridors, each containing at least one chest of drawers which are the natural habitat of the contextual button prompt; press one to open a drawer, and then do a little limbo dance with the camera to see if there's a contextual button prompt over one of the nondescript murky objects inside, while trying not to press the contextual button prompt that opens the other drawers. But don't worry too much about that, because your inventory will be full after about two rooms; you'll know because every new item you pick up causes something to slide out of your trouser leg like an inadequately pinched turd.\n\nAt that point, you'll be ready to take on whatever monster is currently stalking the halls repeating the same three lines of dialogue, and who tend to instantly spot you regardless of what you think you're crouched behind. Pro tip: stick to just distracting them with noisy objects, because throwing a bottle at their head stuns them about as much as an insincere marriage proposal. You can also use ropes to stop them coming through doors, but the one time I tried that, it also prevented me from going through the door, and I had to reload a save, although not before declaring a moral victory. But you might as well not bother with items, 'cos you can run away easily enough, and even if they catch you, there's a good chance they just want to shove you about, like bullies trying to push you into the opposite-gender bathroom, until your health runs out and they shove a dessert fork up your nose.\n\nActually, the most reliable strategy is to wait for their A.I. to fuck up. One time, I saw the chasey monster just standing there in the middle of the murky corridor; they ignored all my distraction objects, so I just awkwardly tried to squeeze past them, thinking, \"This is either a bug, or there's a very cunning jump-scare coming up.\" Spoiler alert: it was the first one. As if Remothered: Trombone Pederast could ever successfully be scary; all impact the chasey monsters could have is lost when you've run away from them into the same cupboard five times 'cos you still don't know what the fuck you're supposed to do, and it's even odds whether you just haven't figured it out yet or if the game's bugged out again.\n\nI probably gave Remothered: Solipsist Hairdryer more time than it deserved; I made it all the way through about nine confusing plot developments to a puzzle where I was supposed to open a voice-activated safe. Now, I could hear one of the villains talking to his sock puppet in a nearby room, and I had a tape recorder; I felt like I was ready to put all the pieces of this mind-melter together, so I stood where the dialogue was loudest and pressed the \"Use\" button, and my big-titted Jodie Foster-lookalike protagonist got out her sound recorder and sort of waved it a bit like she was using it to check for ghosts. So... did that do it? I went back to the safe and I pressed \"Use\" on it, and the lady said, \"Bingo! \", and then nothing happened.\n\nI gave up at that point. I'm not going to stand here being made to feel silly 'cos you gave me a square peg and a square hole, and then stretched cling film around the latter, Remothered: Audacious Wallpaper; I took enough of that bullshit from 90's adventure games. \"Could the game be saved if they patch out the bugs, Yahtz?\" Well, the design's bad and the story's a mess, so that's like asking if I could suck a turd up through a drinking straw if it was mixed with water first; possibly, but on the whole, I'd rather just find a different juice box.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Amnesia: Rebirth.\n\nGame: Amnesia: Rebirth.\n\nReviewed: 2020-10-21\n\nIt's been so long since the last Amnesia game, I almost forgot it existed, ironically, LOL! And even longer since the last installment by Frictional Games; A Machine for Pigs was, of course, developed by The Chinese Room, and had all the gameplay of a supermarket conveyor belt covered in pork products, not to mention a rather off-putting subtitle. But I remember saying at the time, at least it didn't go for some incredibly generic one-word sequel name inevitably beginning with the letters \"RE\"; in which case, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, Amnesia: Rebirth. You left the starting blocks, and one of your shoes has already fallen off. Between this and the Paper Mario hole punch boss, I really need to figure out a way to exploit my power to make exaggerated terrible ideas reality. Hey, wouldn't it be crazy if the post office stopped delivering letters and instead delivered free money to my house?! But I digress.\n\nIn Amnesia: Rebirth, we play as Tasi Trianon, a French archaeologist around the turn of the previous, less fucked-up century who heads out to the desert with her husband and expedition team, but after their plane crashes, she wakes up in the wreckage with no memory and everyone else mysteriously gone. So in the grand tradition of Amnesia games, we as Tasi must figure out what happened by descending into somewhere that's very dark. And brace yourself; it'll probably turn out you can't remember because you did a bad thing, and everyone's gone because you ate them or turned them into camels or whatever.\n\nMinor spoiler alert: one of the central plot elements concerns a couple trying for a second child, which I suppose you might call a \"rebirth\", if you're a robot from space. It's just about the only rebirth on offer, as rebirth implies evolution, and this is mainly a return to the gameplay of the first Amnesia: The Dark Descent in that it actually has some gameplay; you explore spooky environments while using your limited supply of oil and matches to minimize the amount of time you spend in pitch darkness, where you run the risk of suffering a major trouser accident and lethally bankrupting yourself with dry cleaning expenses, and you have to balance all that while solving inventory puzzles and hiding from gribblies, which it turns out you're only in actual danger from about 5% of the time. But you don't know which 5%! Wooo!\n\nAnd of course, there's still that trademark Frictional Games physics interaction where you open doors by clicking the mouse and then moving the mouse and realizing you should've moved it the other way, dumb twat. None of which should be a deal-breaker if you did like the original Amnesia; this game even features the triumphant return of the jam that comes out of the walls. But at the same time, Dark Descent is ten years old; it'd be in middle school by now, swapping its asthma inhaler for Pokémon cards.\n\nIt was one of the progenitors of the first-person atmospheric survival horror mystery subgenre that has since evolved to new heights with games like Resident Evil 7 and P.T., and simultaneously devolved into new shit-smeared depths with the 900 million horror walking simulators out there that still think that the door you just came in now leading to somewhere else like we're in Willy Wonka's fucking chocolate factory is the height of clever mindfucks, and Rebirth hasn't really moved with the times in either direction. I think it's on the same engine as Dark Descent; it's certainly quite graphically dated. And the physics are still rife with issues; it'll stop you dead in the middle of walking just because it's scandalized by the sheer audacity with which you're attempting to navigate a gentle slope with a small cardboard box on it.\n\nThe story, on the other hand, has taken a couple of cues from horror games in the intervening years; specifically, it's latched onto Outlast's idea of kicking the absolute snot out of the main character from start to finish. Tasi has apparently been binging on the same doughnuts Lara Croft likes, 'cos the floor has a tendency to collapse beneath her big, fat arse at about the same rate, which might be due to the machinations of the various evil Lovecraftian monsters that chase her but, one suspects, is actually the work of evil Lovecraftian game designers trying to pad the run-time out. I think what we've learned in the post-Five Nights at Freddy's world is that horror games actually benefit from brevity, unless they can keep pulling new surprises out of their non-Euclidian buttholes; that's why short concept horror games bloom in the gardens of indie gaming like cigarette butts in a public park.\n\nWhile I liked Amnesia: The Dark Descent, in retrospect, I only remember a handful of moments from it - mostly the story beats towards the end - and everything else is a forgettable haze of samey rooms and having to change my trousers every time I saw something move. Similarly, while the plot of Amnesia: Reloaded is intriguing enough and may hit particularly hard if you yourself are the parent of a young child, or if floors tend to collapse under you for no reason, it's mainly the last few hours of the story that stand out in my memory, and there were a lot of gameplay sections on the way that could've been removed to no great loss.\n\nI can tell from my pristine trousers that the monsters just don't command the same terror that they did in Dark Descent. Probably because in this case, you get a good look at them enough times that you can see they're just generic zombie dudes, and suspense only lasts as long as the mysterious, snarly thing lurking in the dark could be anything from a gelatinous cube to a hungover Orson Welles.\n\nThe general problem is one of demystification, I think. In The Dark Descent, we only learn scrips and scraps about an evil Lovecraftian other dimension that's causing all the problems, but in Amnesia: Recalcitrant, Tasi gets to physically go to one; in fact, she pops in and out of it every ten minutes like she's never quite convinced that she locked the doors properly the last time she was there. At one point, she takes the public subway train in the evil Lovecraftian dimension and misses her stop because the map was confusing. No, really, this happens; it's one of the things that draws out the run-time like your mum's waistband at the cock buffet. So maybe it's The Dark Descent's stronger grounding in reality that made it more effective. Remember the rhyme: \"Monster in a scary world? That's just where monsters come from, girl. Monster in your living room? Better sense of creeping doom.\"\n\nSo as for whether or not I recommend Amnesia: Revengeance... hmm. I suppose I have a hard time pointing to any specific deal-breakers; despite having its head a bit too far up in Magic Land, there's still enough of a human element that the story lands with effective emotional impact, and everything else is functional enough. It's just that Amnesia: The Dark Descent was such an influential game of its time, I guess I was expecting more; Dark Descent brought us to an interesting place, and other games have since explored that interesting place further, but Amnesia itself seems to just want to stay in the car listening to Radio 4.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time.\n\nGame: Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time\n\nReviewed: 2020-10-14\n\nIt must feel weird when somebody else makes a sequel to your franchise, like when the babysitter insists on being called \"Mummy\"; it must be doubly weird when you thought your franchise died years ago and the babysitter has just shown up at your door in the dead of night with a shovel and a weird smile. I think it's fair to say that Crash Bandicoot didn't exactly leave loose ends untied. It wasn't the fucking Wheel of Time; it was pretty thoroughly explored out as a concept. You don't bring out a fucking kart racing tie-in game when you can't see the bottom of the idea bucket. And yet, here comes Toys for Bob twenty years down the line, clutching its big, shiny shovel going, \"Don't worry, Naughty Dog! We will continue the great work in the original spirit you intended!\" And meanwhile, Naughty Dog moved on years ago, and are now more concerned with making terribly serious and important games about very unpleasant people fucking each other on smallpox blankets.\n\nToys for Bob did the Switch port for the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy remaster, so maybe they felt they could make something new with the assets they already had lying around; it's like when you make the Lego Star Destroyer according to the instructions, but then get bored and make your own custom spaceship out of some of the parts and the corpse of the family cat. Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time's plot concerns all of Crash Bandicoot's old villains doing their usual thing, i.e., trying to take over the universe, and Crash Bandicoot has to stop them by doing his usual thing, i.e., failing to land on a narrow perch and falling to his death like a drunk sparrow with no legs 900 million times.\n\nOn the whole, it plays very much like Crash Bandicoots 1-3 with their signature linear semi-3D platforming, so congratulations, Toys for Bob; despite coming decades after the fact, you have successfully evoked the spirit of the PS1 platformer by creating what feels like a cheap sequel hacked out inside a year. Well, that's unfair; there are a bunch of new masks you can get that apply a handful of new platforming mechanics - slow-motion, gravity reversal, and a couple of other things very kindly donated from Mario Galaxy's recycle bin - as well as a bunch of different playable characters you control at various times.\n\nOne of whom is Tawna, Crash Bandicoot's girlfriend from the first game who mysteriously vanished from the subsequent sequels, probably because she had legs you could ski down and tits like two coconuts in a furry orange pencil case and confused more burgeoning sexualities than the Cadbury's Caramel Rabbit, which was, in its own way, cluttering up the Problem Attic, but the Tawna in Crash Bandicoot 4 is such a massive oversteer in the opposite direction that it's frankly ridiculous. They've dressed her up in every imaginable cliché of the \"badass action girl\" of modern standards, complete with brightly-colored partial buzzcut and biker jacket and general independent spirit, and she looks like she got hit in the face with with a bucketful of the early 90's. But neither version of Tawna has any actual depth as a character, although they do both have an arse like two bald men trying to escape from a sack.\n\nTawna and the other non-Crash characters feature as part of a series of optional missions in which we're invited to experience a parallel story from their perspective, but the problem is, there's barely a story, let alone a multifaceted one that benefits from alternate viewpoints. All that happens in these missions is, character inexplicably appears by magic, character does a thing, character inexplicably disappears by magic; not exactly a Christopher Nolan screenplay.\n\nCrash Bandicoot 4 is the kind of game I'd take to a desert island, because with nothing better to do but seek 100% completion, it'd keep me nice and occupied all the way to rescue, and for a good chunk of the boat ride home, and I'll be able to subsist on the froth coming out of all my facial orifices. You can reach the final boss inside of, like, four hours, then look at your mediocre ending and paltry handful of unlocks and use the time you saved to call your dad and tell him how right he was to be disappointed in you. You want your money's worth, you have to repeat every single level over and over again, to break all the boxes, to find the hidden gems, to beat them without dying, beat them while balancing an egg on a spoon, then do all of that again in the \"N. Verted\" mode, which appears to be exactly the same level, just with a weird graphics filter over it. It'll keep you occupied, but then, so will alphabetizing the contents of a tin of baked beans, and that's not a great deal of fun, either.\n\nThe gameplay is full of little mounting frustrations, and the main thing driving you to complete it will probably be spite. You'll want to finish so you can finally lean back, breathe free, carefully remove the hard drive, and punt it through a closed window. The main problem that has always stuck out of fixed-camera 3D platformers like a traumatically botched nipple piercing is depth perception; sure, Crash Bandicoot gets a nice obvious shadow under him, but why doesn't anything else? So if I'm trying to land on a hovering crate or enemy, I'm once again playing bottomless pit Russian roulette. If you're going to demand consistent perfection from me, it'd be nice if the mechanics could be fucking consistent in return, is me point.\n\nTawna's unique mechanic is a grappling hook gun (because of course it fucking is), but it's contextual, and more than once, I was in midair and the grapple prompt apparently decided I was a couple of nanometers off for its tastes, and so I was cordially invited to eat shit. \"Man,\" I thought, \"if I'd been going for the 'no deaths' run, then I'd be frothing like a poorly supervised coffee machine right about now; fortunately, I long ago came to terms with my own mediocrity, as, it seems, have most of my viewership!\"\n\nAt first, I thought the checkpoints were too far apart, but then I noticed that new checkpoints appear if you die enough times, so I guess it's like the American healthcare system where they'll give you the baseline amount of necessary care, but only if you can prove that you're oozing out of at least three places. And it's not just a matter of high difficulty, because the loading times on the PS4, at least, are slow enough to qualify for handicapped parking. So if you're having to restart a level a lot, then you'll spend a lot of time alone with your private thoughts, and that's how we get serial murderers.\n\nSo in summary, again, I must congratulate the developers for successfully recreating what feels like a late-90's PS1 platformer with absolutely none of the conveniences, design innovations, and quality-of-life improvements we've come up with in the meantime. And hey, Crash Bandicoot as a franchise is still doing a hell of a lot better than Sonic the Hedgehog, but that makes me wonder where the difference lies. I mean, they're both 90's mascot platformers about an edgy forest animal in comically oversized shoes fighting a mad scientist with vaguely ecological themes; they both, at various times, featured female characters that left very confused feelings in developing minds. So where did Sonic put his comically oversized foot in it? I thought about it, and I think it's because Crash Bandicoot never nicked any ideas from Dragon Ball Z. Third law of the universe, guys: lightspeed, the gravitational constant, and anime ruins everything.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Hades.\n\nGame: Hades\n\nReviewed: 2020-10-07\n\nAh, ancient mythology: the wonderful gift from our ancestors that ensures pretentious writers will never be shy of a free idea bucket. Hey, is there any reason we can't make up more mythology? Like, if I wanted to invent Maurice, the God of Consumer Electronics, or Rumblecrag, the God of Small Utensils That Get Jammed in the Kitchen Drawer; can I do that, or do I have to paint them on a vase and wait a thousand years for it to count? Video games have always gotten a lot of mileage out of mythology, but it's disappointing how it only ever seems to fall back on either Greek or Norse. I already know way too much about Greek and Norse mythology; why don't you ever make games about Zoroastrianism? I don't know anything about Zarathustra; I know that he spake once.\n\nHades is a \"new\" game fresh off the fiery grill of early access and, as the title suggests, is themed around Greek mythology, boo, but it's by Supergiant Games, yay, so I guess I can forgive it. Supergiant games have a very distinct style; you know you're playing a Supergiant game if it's got colorful, hand-painted graphics, isometric gameplay, very strong writing focused on world-building and characters, and all the voice acting sounds like it's coming from very sexy people. Hades is a roguelike, boo, but again, I can forgive it if Supergiant Games, yay, does it.\n\nSupergiant are one of my blue-eyed boy teacher's pet indie developers because they're always exploring new ways to tell stories through the medium of video game; they're not content to just fade out to cinematic every three rooms so Marcus Fenix can pulsate his neck at someone. They're generally not my favorite games to play, however; the combat usually gets a touch grindy when there is combat, and the less said about Pyre, the amazingly well-written high school basketball simulator, the better. But they're certainly some of my favorite games to talk about.\n\nHades is about Zagreus, the son of the titular deity, who has gotten sick of kicking around the depths of Tartarus playing Halo - and very deliberately pretending not to notice the pamphlets of vocational schools his dad rather unsubtly keeps leaving on the coffee table - and so he decides to pull what's known as the \"reverse Orpheus\" and journey out of the Underworld for the first time in his life. \"And there's nothing you can do to stop me, Dad!\" \"Um, I literally rule over legions of immortal warriors with nothing to do all day but try to stop you, Zagreus.\" \"Shut up! You never bought me a car!\"\n\nHades is a hack and slash roguelite, and you know how that goes: death resets you to the start and re-randomizes the map, so get ready for an experience like attempting to penetrate a brick wall by jabbing it with a sewing needle N + 1 number of times. And since there are so many roguelikes now, they could be subcategorized up the arse: roguelikes and roguelites and rogue-Lionels and rogue-Patricias. Hades is of a Rogue Legacy sort of flavor, where you do have to start from the beginning if you die, but you have upgrades and resources that you keep from run to run, and so success is basically inevitable 'cos if you just keep trying, eventually, you'll be powered up enough to plow across the Grecian afterlife like a combine harvester in a petting zoo; always the same brick wall, but eventually, your sewing needle is made of titanium and the size of a tent peg, and you know exactly where the mortar between the bricks has gone all crumbly.\n\nThe roguelike purists among you might get sniffy, but the \"inevitable success\" model is more fitting for what Supergiant is trying to do, here; that is, tell a story with an ending. Specifically, a mythic twist upon the ever-relatable tale of wanting to go out and play, but Dad won't let us until we finish the washing-up. See, since we're dealing with immortal gods of the Underworld, nobody dies for good, and everyone's aware of that, which is a natural fit for the whole roguelike \"many deaths\" thing; you die, and you show up back in Hades' vegetable garden, traipse back through the house, say hi to the first boss you killed who's now kicking around the lounge, waiting to tell you to piss off.\n\nHades himself, the end boss, is there, just sitting in his armchair watching Inspector Morse, and rolling his eyes at you 'cos he said you'd hurt yourself if you went sledding at the quarry, but you didn't listen, and now you've hurt yourself, and he's not mad; he's just disappointed. There's a whole bunch of interesting dynamics at play that are continually developing from run to run; it's got more contextual dialogue lines than a frat house laundry basket has mysterious smells, and when you finally leave the house to start your next run, it's like having to leave the party early so you can get back to shoveling snow out of the driveway.\n\nNot that there's anything particularly wrong with the core combat, unless you're using the gun weapon, which is about as satisfying to use as a spring-loaded tampon. But every other weapon has a good feel; it's well-animated, and got all those little effects and flashy bits to make your blows really pop and land.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "But, well, I hesitate to say it gets samey; that's kind of the point. Zagreus' entire mission is to break free of the cycle; it'd be like complaining that Lord of the Rings spends way too much time on all this \"Ring\" business. But twenty-odd runs down the line, I was getting the sense that the combat had become something I was more slogging through than enjoying; the enemy health bars get a bit spongy and your button-pressing gets a bit mashy and the action gets hard to follow amid all the swishy effects, and altogether, it becomes a very potato salad-y experience.\n\nThere are enough elements in play between six different weapons, three kinds of attack, and multiple varieties of powerup that the core combat can feel quite different from run to run, but with that comes a sense that success comes not from \"gitting gud\", but from randomly stumbling upon a combination of powerups that best suits your style or breaks the difficulty in half like a Kit Kat. Just as I played Pyre on easiest difficulty because I liked the characters but really couldn't be arsed to brush up on optimal dribbling strategies, I ended up turning on Hades' optional easy mode that allegedly is for players who want to focus on the plot, but all it does is increase your defense 2% every time you die, accelerating the process of inevitable success, but not by much. You still have to slog through a lot of repetitive combat to progress the story, because it turns out the slog IS the story, or at least part of it.\n\nAs I said, Supergiant are very big on integrating narrative with gameplay, and that's very much what's going on here; if Zagreus could just cruise through the underworld first go on a surfboard made of skeletons, then you'd never get the intended sense of hopelessness. But even knowing that, the obligation to grind, running past the point where it starts feeling samey, is what juuust loses me at the end. Still, Hades succeeds in an awful lot of areas: the art, the design, the story; it all fits together like a hideously complex clockwork machine. Perhaps to be expected, since it's been fiddling with itself on early access for so long that its palms have got calluses you could open beer bottles with!\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Serious Sam 4.\n\nGame: Serious Sam 4\n\nReviewed: 2020-9-30\n\nIn these uncertain times - Is it me, or is the phrase \"in these uncertain times\" starting to supplant the word \"hello\"? - it's important to focus on the stabilities of life: the Earth will continue to turn; the Sun will continue to rise, if partially concealed by a haze of orange smoke like the face of a loved one appearing briefly at the surface of an unsanitary piranha tank; and the new Serious Sam game is going to play pretty much like all the other ones. God bless you, Croteam, for being as reliably unmoving as a donkey on a staircase.\n\nSo Serious Sam 4, then: Before \"Before First Encounter\", yet another prequel to the original Serious Sam, a game that required context the way a chimp requires a degree in molecular biology. You are a big strong man who can carry more guns than a military-grade attack helicopter and run backwards faster than most ordinary men can sprint, here's ten billion monsters in a series of open environments, piddly bam, pimply bum. There is very little backstory that would meaningfully enhance such a purely cathartic experience, although you might distract from it; gunning down 9,000 zombie soldiers might lose some appeal if we know that Sam's doing it instead of picking up his daughter from hockey practice.\n\nOn a contemporary Earth not quite as ultra-buggered by alien invaders as it was in the last prequel, there's still enough of an official military around for Serious Sam to have a little tagalong brigade of quirky friends, so he can live out his dream of reenacting scenes from Predator, but more importantly, so he can have a couple of nice, convenient warm bodies to knock off every time a new monster needs to be established as particularly nasty. In the course of a rather nondescript quest to recover a generic powerful MacGuffin that could save the Earth but we already know won't, Sam attempts to set a new record for most action movie clichés in a single plot.\n\nSo Sam has an abrasive relationship with a no-nonsense commander who's jealous of Sam being more popular despite wearing considerably smaller sunglasses, there's a rookie on Sam's team who needs to prove himself, Sam has to win over a foreign resistance group who distrusts his brash American ways and Big Mac-scented farts, and then he has to team up with an alien soldier who's joined the good guys and who he initially distrusts. That last one shows up for all of about ten minutes and then mysteriously vanishes from the plot; I guess a full story arc in which Serious Sam confronts his own prejudices would be a difficult thing to squeeze between all the casually murdering more aliens than a Border Patrol officer who hasn't jerked off in weeks.\n\nAll of these clichéd demi-plots are handled fairly ineptly, and the tone is all over the place; logo t-shirt-wearing kooky loudmouth \"Serious\" Sam Stone finds himself having to be haunted and sad over the death of an ally, and it's like watching Barney the Dinosaur trying to play Macbeth, then two seconds later, they're doing that running gag where they're constantly struggling to come up with good one-liners after killing something. A running gag that runs a little too long, for my taste; it's \"running\" in the sense of \"Goodness, there's a lot of pus running out of these open sores.\" The story of Serious Sam 4 is a janky construct of awkwardly animated stock characters and badly established subplots, and the main point I take away from it is that Croteam are a bunch of complete dorks, and Serious Sam the character is entirely what one should expect from a badass action hero as envisioned by a bunch of complete dorks: musclebound, violent, and about as socially adept as a sperm whale at a birthday party.\n\nThe gameplay, as I say, is Serious Sam again: basically the same enemies and basically the same weapons, open environments, spray fire, hold down \"S\", try to remember what you learned about bunny hopping at speedrunning school. The phrase \"if it ain't broke, don't fix it\" appeared prominently in the marketing material, which is fair enough, but it seems Croteam's other guiding philosophy is \"if it don't need fixing, you can still cover it in unicorn stickers and make it wear a silly hat\", because there are some new features that don't so much integrate as float on top of the core gameplay like spider eggs on a birthday trifle.\n\nThe feature that most gave me the foreboding belly squirts was the skill tree. Oh, Serious Sam, the creepy boundary-overstepping Boy Scout leader of modern trends touches the genitals of even the best of us. Skill trees are a defining part of the Jiminy Cockthroat experience and, at worst, they can give a game the Ghost of Tsushima problem where you have to unlock nine things before the gameplay actually fucking works; well, fortunately, you don't have to unlock the ability to run backwards or reload both barrels of the shotgun at once. Actually, skill points are kind of rare; they're tied to special items you have to find and I only found, like, five or six in the whole game. You'd probably find more if you do more secret-hunting, but I know what you're like with secrets, Croteam: having us go to Random Building #871, jump off a bollard onto a lamppost onto an air conditioner onto a sparrow's erection, and then do the obscure physics exploit jump that shimmies you along a wall and transports you to Narnia.\n\nAnd after all that, the skills you can unlock are mostly pointless extra mechanics, like the ability to dual-wield pistols and fire the game's shittiest gun at a slightly faster rate, in case you're hoping to make the enemies feel bad about attacking someone obviously mentally disabled. But one skill you can get is the ability to ride certain monsters; when I saw that, I said, \"Jesus, that's the kind of new feature you want to put front and center, Croteam, not buried five upgrade points deep! I want to burst onto the scene riding a Sirian Werebull and go 'Knock-knock, motherfuckers! Who's ready for the gymkhana?!'\" In practice, though, it's kind of lame; it's only useful if you want an extra health bar to soak up while you're getting the fuck out of dodge.\n\nSee, it and most of the new features have the common problem of not enhancing the core gameplay, but just making it easier; spectacular as the black hole grenade is, it's really just for hoovering up a horde you don't feel like dealing with because you sprained your ankle wall-shimmy-Narnia-jumping out of the map to find one small armor pickup. Oh yeah, and you pilot a giant mech more than once, which plays much like giant mech games always do: like a standard first-person shooter, except you can only move like your balls have been stapled to a coffee table. And then my mech blew up and I had to finish off the horde on foot, only to discover that I couldn't advance 'cos I needed the mech to blow up the barrier to the next area, so I had to reload a save; bit of a clumsy oversight. Ooh, \"clumsy\"; that's a good word.\n\nEverything about Serious Sam 4 that we haven't seen before, from the new gameplay features to the all-over-the-place plot, feels like it's been clumsily attached like a cape on a dog that threatens to fall off every time it chases a squirrel. But if you're after more of that Serious Sam horde shooter action in all-new bigger environments, Serious Sam 4 obliges, and maybe that's all you wanted to know, in which case, sorry it took me five minutes of your time to say that. But what else were you going to do with it? Have sex five times?\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews BPM: Bullets Per Minute.\n\nGame: BPM: Bullets Per Minute\n\nReviewed: 2020-9-23\n\nRegular viewers will know that unnecessary colons in titles make me want to evacuate my own colon onto the games in question, and a related issue that equally deglazes my skillet with piss is what I like to call \"the non-abbreviated abbreviation\", as seen in DmC: Devil May Cry, or FTL: Faster Than Light. \"Ooh, let's use a cool three-letter abbreviation as our title!\" says Johnny Game Developer. \"That way, it will be remembered just as fondly as the film LXG: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.\" \"Good idea!\" says Susie Game Developer, no relation. \"And on that note, just in case people don't realize what it's supposed to stand for, we should put the full sentence somewhere nice and subtle and barely noticeable, like on the end of the same fucking title!\" \"Yes, that way, we will enjoy the dual benefit of abbreviating, i.e., shortening the name, while simultaneously making it slightly longer. We are both screaming twats.\" If only more people had the self-assuredness that MDK had back in the 90's. Still, I guess BPM: Bullets Per Minute can justify it, 'cos most people would assume BPM to mean \"beats per minute\", or \"Beardmore Precision Motorcycles\", or, er... \"bollock piss mimsy\".\n\nBeats Per Meter Squared is a game best summarized as Quake I crossed with The Binding of Isaac crossed with Crypt of the NecroDancer to make one freakish triple-parented mutant baby they can all argue over who has to raise. You're in a series of procedurally generated first-person shooter dungeons that all look like they were lovingly crafted from delicious chocolate - that's the Quake I influence - and your task is to clear out the monsters room by room and level by level and hope to Christ that this time, the gods will smile on you and randomly drop a gun that feels more effective than jerking off a sleepy pig in the direction of the enemies before you get more than two levels deep. The main gameplay twist is that you can only shoot, dodge, reload, and masturbate your sleepy pig in time to the background music, and your score multiplier goes up the more you keep to the rhythm.\n\nLast week, you may recall I reviewed No Straight Roads, that was sort of trying to do a music-based combat thing, but fell flat because the rhythm tended to get lost. Well, there's absolutely no risk of that happening with this game, since you boot it up and the rhythm immediately starts smashing you about the face and neck with a driving bass drumbeat and screaming guitars. Although, the game has a Norse mythology theme, so I should say the music's relatively tame compared to most Scandinavian metal, as it doesn't mix in the sound of goats being slaughtered, or feature people singing like emotionally repressed camels who've been putting up with their rider's bullshit for years and finally have a chance to give vent.\n\nBPM: Bombastically Pounding Music is a good example of a game that's, like, 90% primary gameplay loop, and honestly, it kind of kicks arse; the music is perfect, it's exactly the kind of heavy driving rock that makes you want to appease Allfather Odin, the kind you hear in your head when you and the boys are strutting into town to terrorize the ladies and tear shit up at the Mario 3D All-Stars midnight launch event, and it's enormously satisfying to clear a room full of enemies without missing a step. Even having to reload as part of the ballet seems to enhance rather than interrupt the action, rhythmically pelvic-thrusting as you slide bullets into the chamber one by one and then spinning and one-shotting a fiery bat out of the air with perfect timing. I finally get what you were talking about, Mr. Ocelot!\n\nBut with the game being 90% primary loop, there's not much room for anything else; there's only eight levels to a run, and no plot to speak of unless you count the story of several bullets and their amazing journey across a room into the body of a giant spider. So, good core combat and that's about it; not much else to say, so might as well move on to the second game I played this week. \"There was no second game this week, Yahtzee; if you'll recall, you spent the whole week playing BPM because you enjoyed the core combat so much.\" Did I? \"Yes, you were planning to find something to double-bill it with, but then you got lazy and decided to keep playing BPM until you found some things that annoyed you about it.\" Hmm, well, that does sound like me. And I did find a few things.\n\nMost prominently, while shooting to the rhythm is fun, there doesn't seem to be any benefit to being good at it; you get the same treasure whether you flawlessly clear the room or were moving like your trousers were 'round your ankles. The only thing an unbroken combo gets you is a points multiplier. Points?! High scores?! What year is this?! You going to ask me to enter my initials next so I can enter \"BUM\", and make all the other little snipes in the arcade laugh before we run home and watch Saved by the Bell?\n\nSo as long as you have the basics down of pointing at the enemy and shooting at the enemy and not being in the places where enemy bullets are, then the main factor that affects whether or not we're having a successful run is almost 100% luck; par for the course in a roguelike, perhaps, but every time I got to the final boss, the motherfucker rolled over like a dog in a tumble dryer, because if I'd gotten that far, it was always because I'd picked up one of the random power-ups or weapons that completely break the difficulty, like the regenerating shield or the grenade launcher. \"I am behind a shield and cannot be attacked head-on!\" crow several late-game enemies. \"What are you going to do about that, dipshit? Ha, you missed! Oh, I'm dead, as are all my friends.\"\n\nI think there are a lot of items that need a rebalancing. There just isn't enough con to balance the grenade launcher's pros; it needs a smaller clip or a more complex reload, or a little bar that pops out and hits you in the balls between each shot. \"It is very short-range, Yahtzee!\" Oh, piss off! Who keeps the monsters at long-range? I'm trying to kill these motherfuckers, not take artful photographs of them! And while we're on the subject, the minigun sucks my big, fat drinking straw. It's a minigun that can't fire rapidly; that's like owning a Dexys Midnight Runners album that doesn't have \"Come On Eileen\" on it!\n\nThe monsters could use some rebalancing, as well. I don't know about you, but in my daily life, if I'm ever in a room with a giant lava spider and a small bat, I think it'd be reasonable to expect the giant lava spider to be the larger threat, but no; the most intense battles in the game are against the tiny flying enemies that the bigger enemies hire to carry their suitcases, because they're faster and hard to hit and fling projectiles that knock a quarter of your health off. Also, the first dungeon boss is the hardest in the game, 'cos it's fast and got patterns and every other boss is a variation on \"hurl things at the big fat dude like you're a Subway sandwich artist who completely stopped giving a shit\".\n\nI think that's all my nitpicks. At the end of the day, BPM: Bullets Prime Minister is a perfect illustration of why the primary gameplay loop is so important, because despite lacking much substance, the sheer catharsis of the combat made me want to play it way longer than I wanted to keep playing, say, Last of Us II; perhaps as many as TWELVE seconds!\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Marvel's Avengers.\n\nGame: Marvel's Avengers\n\nReviewed: 2020-9-16\n\nYou know, Robert Downey Jr. deserves more praise for his portrayal of Tony Stark in the Marvel movies; yes, I know he's made more money than a glazier in the Gaza Strip, but he did a really quite impressive job playing a character who could be simultaneously abrasive, charismatic, and sympathetic. I was thinking about this while watching Tony Stark as portrayed in Marvel's Avengers, Square Enix's new, shiny chrome-plated hamster wheel for the micropayment masses, because if all of his dialogue lines had been cut out and been replaced by Tony Stark getting clipped around the ear by whoever was standing closest to him, then that would've earned the game at least another star.\n\nIt's still confusing to me that this game that is obviously trying to crib off the success of the Marvel movies deliberately replaced all the leads with their poorly-received spinoff low-budget TV show versions, but maybe it's easier on the kiddies this way; they don't have to watch their heroes repeating an infinite cycle of copy-pasted combat missions and resource grinds and ask their parents, \"Mummy, why is Iron Man trapped in a hypothetical tenth layer of Dante's Hell?\" Speaking of Hell, the AAA trend for games as live services primarily designed to sucker players into infinite meaningless grind and milk them for their money and souls can obviously go to it, but Marvel's Avarvels puts an almost admirable degree of effort into not resembling a live service game for some ways into the campaign.\n\nIt starts with a bunch of linear story missions focusing on Kamala Khan, the Amazing Human Diversity Quota, attending an Avengers convention and just totally impressing the shoulder pads off of several poorly-dressed smug white dudes with her obsequious fangirling; it's about as excruciating as it sounds, and not a little Mary Sue-y, but I leave that discussion to my frothier correspondents. Then there's a big disaster - funnily enough, immediately after Tony Stark's introduction - and the Avengers get blamed for it and shunned and ostracized for no greater crime than wanting to wield literal godlike levels of power and resources with zero regulation or oversight. Evil corporation takes over and starts oppressing people, and it's up to Kamala to reunite the Avengers and remind them that being a hero isn't about glory or power; it's about having ready access to a cosmetics retailer.\n\nThese first few missions mostly play like running down one corridor after another, but hey, they're nice corridors; there's an actual story focus, and at the end of some of the corridors, there's colorful boss fights against Marvel supervillains like Taskmaster (registered trademark) and Abomination (registered trademark). But then the live service shit starts insidiously to creep in; funnily enough, immediately after Tony Stark rejoins the crew. You really are the fucking monkey's paw curse on this game, aren't you, Tone?\n\nThe lovely, approachable face flakes off bit by bit to reveal the cold, eyeless skull underneath. \"You unlocked the confusingly laid-out mission hub area! You unlocked the gear-crafting station! The cosmetic-crafting station! The faction missions! The storage lockers! Your next mission objective is to talk to all the gear vendors; we will literally hold up the plot until you fucking do that!\" And every single one of them has a line of dialogue specifically designed to guilt you if you leave without buying anything. \"Oh, you don't want any new emotes? Welp, better tell the kids that it'll be sawdust porridge for dinner again.\"\n\nThen all those story-focused corridor missions are replaced by missions in which you go to one of a handful of pocket sandboxes, are directed to a specific location, and all the way there, copy-pasted side objectives appear all around us like we're dodging mortar shells in fucking no man's land. \"There's a treasure box nearby! There's a group of bland copy-pasted enemies nearby! Why not kill them before you kill the group of bland copy-pasted enemies you actually came here to deal with?\" It's like being trapped in the IKEA showroom when all you want is a fucking egg whisk! I just ran straight to the objective every time and was never the least bit under-leveled; can't say I felt like it was worth slowing down for a new codpiece with +4% chance of critical parry against custard damage, but then, not everyone's a pro challenge-runner like ME.\n\nDoes it really not bother you, target audience of Varvel's Amengers, how this game fucking reeks of algorithms? How opening the in-game menu is like sticking your head in a dumpster full of shredded accounting documents 'cos there's, like, five gear menus and seventeen different currencies, and it feels like it's been workshopped to oblivion by marketing experts refining the most efficient system for making you want things that have no value? \"Oh, those tactics don't work on me, Yahtzee; I am a savvy consumer.\" Yeah, we all think that; that's how they get you!\n\nI didn't particularly want those Level 9 Uncommon Underpants of Facetious Example, but then my gear inventory filled up, and the game said I couldn't have them till I cleared a space. Why the game thought I wanted to hold onto my old Level 2 Underpants I found in a bin, I did not know, nor why it needed me to laboriously hold down the \"Dismantle\" button to get rid of every unwanted item one by one, until I realized that they'd done it: they'd made me want the new underpants I didn't want, just by slightly withholding them until I had proved I knew how to efficiently pack a suitcase. How else have you rewired my brain, Games Industry? Are these even my thoughts I'm having? Do I actually fancy Jenny Agutter? What? The combat? Oh yeah, that thing.\n\nI guess it's inoffensive enough to not put you off the all-important grind; it is a bit glitchy and unresponsive at times, and I did run into a repeating bug at a point where I was supposed to kill five generic dudes to proceed, but they kept disappearing into the floor where I couldn't reach. Can't fault their combat strategy, but I still had to reboot the fucking game. As for how the primary loop feels, it depends on what character you're controlling; play as the Hulk or Kamala Khan, and your blows have a satisfying enough impact to them, but play as Iron Man, and it feels like we're attacking the enemy by very aggressively shining flashlights at them. Yes, I'm ripping on you again, Tony Stark, but it's your own fault for still being in this game and not choking to death on your own cum.\n\nIn summary, Marvel's Avengers is exactly what it always seemed to be: a game designed not to engage or electrify, but to take up space, inside your head, on your hard drive, in human culture in general. But the plot takes on a deeper meaning if you look at the Avengers as an analogy for the Disney Corporation, assembling a team of franchise and media companies in order to fight against an oppressive government-backed regime bent on corporate regulation, taxation, and the dreaded monopolies commission. So in this metaphor, Kamala Khan as the protagonist represents an approved citizen of the corporatocracy who buys all the merch and dutifully wets her Stan Lee-autographed knickers over the right brands, and then each Avenger represents one of Disney's acquisitions. Thor represents Pixar; old-school fantasy hero popular with the kids. The Hulk represents Fox; a veneer of respectability over an instrument of total societal destruction. And Iron Man represents Star Wars; used to be good when better actors were involved, now deserves to choke to death on its own cum.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews No Straight Roads & Battletoads.\n\nGames: No Straight Roads, Battletoads\n\nReviewed: 2020-9-9\n\nSometimes, I like to picture game developers watching these videos. \"Ooh, look, everyone! That weirdo on the Internet did one of ours! Let's all gather 'round to good-naturedly laugh off his exaggerated criticism and bask in the occasional qualified praise. Come on, Steve! Bob! Fiona! Adolf! Lionel! Big Smelly Janet!\" I wonder if the developers of Battletoads are doing that now? Well, developers of Battletoads, here's the thing: I hate your game. In fact, I don't think I've ever realized I hated a game quite as fast as I realized I hated yours. I'm trying to avoid swearing here, so you understand how totally sincere I am when I say I played five or six levels into Battletoads and decided I would rather spend the afternoon cleaning out the shower drains. But hey, I don't hold it against you; at least it didn't waste my time, and I've got a really clean shower now.\n\nBattletoads is a remake cum soft reboot cum deferred sequel cum stain to the notoriously difficult early-90's brawler Battletoads, a blip from the era when the media latched onto the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles thing: badass archetype plus mundane animal equals profit, somehow; see also Biker Mice from Mars. Yeah, I know it sounds like a Mad Lib; it was actually a thing!", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "In New Battletoads, Zitz, Rash, and Pimple - don't ask me which is which; I reserve my trivia-remembering brain for Red Dwarf quotes - wake up in the future to find themselves forgotten has-beens, and the story and dialogue has the tone of one of those Rick and Morty-style animated comedies that is the current thing the media has latched onto, and that's why we keep seeing big franchises bring out their own versions of that to desperately put a façade of trendy self-effacing irreverence over the mechanical bean-counting machines they have instead of souls.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Battletoads bears the mark of a bad one of those in that the prevailing attitude seems to be that if they just keep talking, they might eventually say something funny, like panning for gold in a bowl of porridge. But relish the cutscenes while you can, I suppose, 'cos it means you don't have to deal with the fucking combat, which is awful. And I think the game is inclined to agree, the amount it tries to put it off with random minigames and driving sections, but sorry, Battletoads; there's no escaping your primary gameplay loop. You can Mexican hat dance around this puddle of sick you made all you like; we're still going to have to scrape it up before it soaks into the carpet.\n\nIf you're not holding down the \"Run\" button, your character moves like they're dragging their hairy balls across a velcro floor, and that's just breaking the top of this expired mayonnaise crème brûlée. The root problem is this adherence to a distorted cartoon style where everything animates with zany, madcap flamboyance and the simplest button combination will lock you into a ten-second animation where your toad of choice turns into a motor scooter with a vagina for a headlight and drives around in a circle spraying jam sandwiches or whatever, and the most basic enemy attack will interrupt it and knock you on your warty bum for half an hour.\n\nVery few of your attacks have any satisfactory feel or impact, and that's assuming you can even get the fucking hits to land, because the collision's for dogshit as well; I can be close enough to carve my initials into the enemy with my nipple piercings and still not hit them! And why are there three different buttons for \"grab thing with tongue\"? If my dude is repeatedly failing to eat a desperately-needed health fly, why am I not sure if it's because the collision fucked up again or because I pressed the wrong tongue button? There's an oral sex joke in there, somewhere!\n\nBattletoads' awkwardness gives it the kind of difficulty that some people might consider a badge of honor to master, but for me, it'd be like mastering the art of ricocheting marbles off a tea tray so that they hit me square in the testicles. So I played something else; I played No Straight Roads on the Epic Store, which might best be summarized as \"the most Double Fine-iest game to ever not be made by Double Fine\".\n\nIn a city full of people with a very Double Fine-y art style - you know what I mean; kind of like The Muppets crossed with a webcomic from the 2010's - all power is generated by electronic music, and other forms of music are banned. An indie rock duo consisting of a hyperactive red guitarist and a cautious and Zenlike green drummer - which is funny, 'cos they're like the opposite of how a traffic light works - vow to retake the city from the evil corporation by hijacking the concerts of six quirky musicians in a No More Heroes-esque series of colorful boss fights. So the author's either making a point about the oppressive stability of order versus the dangerous freedom of chaotic expression, or got dragged to a few too many dance clubs after their garage band failed and now has a serious ax to grind.\n\nNo Straight Roads has rather wonderful presentation; it's like Brütal Legend, but for indie rock, and without more crowbarred-in cameos than an episode of The Simpsons during one of the struggle seasons. It's got that same aesthetic reminiscent of rifling through vinyl album covers in a secondhand record shop you know perfectly well you're not going to buy anything from, but you've got four minutes to kill before the nuke hits. The plot presenting indie rock as the dangerous voice of youth that The Man wants to keep oppressed might seem a little bit tragically quaint, now that the kids these days express their feelings with memes and mass shootings, but there's humor and artistry and creative visual design, and there's a sense of depth to a lot of the characters, of which our brief exchanges only scratch the surface.\n\nSo after all that, how does the game actually play? Shittily, as it happens. Oh well! Now you know the true connection between this week's two games, besides the fact that their titles rhyme: \"nice presentation, shame about the gameplay\". No Straight Roads does a pretty bad job of explaining its mechanics, but essentially, it's hack and slash melee combat with a musical twist, where the enemy attack in time with the music, and you defend against it by paying attention to the rhythm. But that rhythm tends to get lost in the chaos of sound and visual effects, and the balance is generally kind of fucked; you can be riding high and then get all your health stun-locked away by a repeated attack, like a speedbag with a really stupid look on its face. And again, your hits just don't have any sense of satisfying impact!\n\nIt's a tricky thing, combat feel; it's all about little details. When you stomp on a person's gonads, it's not the sound it makes, or the betrayed look on their face, or the little jets of unmentionable fluid that squirt out; it's all of that together, and if any of them fall short, you might as well just be squeezing the air out of a sandwich bag full of used tissues. But of the two games reviewed today, No Straight Roads takes the \"Thanks for Trying, Look Who's Daddy's Big Boy Now\" award because it had enough charm and creativity to push me through its dodgy design. Pretty buggy game, too, actually; that, fellas, was where you needed to stop imitating Double Fine.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Spiritfarer.\n\nGame: Spiritfarer\n\nReviewed: 2020-9-2\n\nIt's always nice when a random game really grabs me; it's like hitting it off with an attractive stranger in a bar who doesn't keep an eye on their drink and doesn't question my unmarked van. And I thought it might be educational to list some things it didn't do to grab me, Games Industry: it didn't put out a pre-rendered trailer six years before release showcasing all its crazy characters with magenta-colored partial buzzcuts, it didn't use an aggressive leveling system to increase engagement the way a drug dealer \"increases engagement\" by cutting the blow with laundry detergent, and it doesn't have Batman in it. No, what it did was, it made me emotionally engage with it.\n\nI play a game like Gears of War where I'm in a constant life-or-death struggle with snarling monsters that want to exterminate humanity, and I'm more emotionally engaged with the cheese and pickle sandwich I'm taking sneaky bites of between reloads; it kills off a main character, I feel more remorse when my wife notices pickle stains on the dog. In contrast, I played Spiritfarer, got to the part where an old hedgehog with dementia remembers who I am in the brief moment before she disappears, and I CRIED. I actually did; fuck you.\n\nI played Spiritfarer at E3, and I remember it did a really fucking shitty job of bringing across what the fuck it was, so let's see if I can do better. We play as Stella, a constantly smiling young girl with a hat slightly larger than she is, and a second player can optionally play as Stella's cat. I'll take \"Completely Unnecessary Multiplayer Modes\" for $200, Alex! Ooh, what is Mario Odyssey? Stella has been appointed as the new ferryman on the River Styx, possibly as the result of a heavily exaggerated résumé; her job is now to pilot a houseboat around a sea of fantastical places and creatures, giving rides to the spirits of the newly dead in the form of animal people and helping them finish off their last few concerns before taking them to eternal rest, and it seems that an awful lot of people's unresolved issues in life revolve around fetch quests.\n\nWe might as well categorize Spiritfarer as an \"arty indie game\", but for once, we play as a small child in a NOT-scary world - quite a nice world, actually, all hand-drawn in a lovely clean art style that reminds me of Franco-Belgian cartoons - full of light and wonder and melancholy humor, which does rather juxtapose against the underlying knowledge that our job is essentially to take our passengers one by one into the woods and ice them in the back of the head. I'd also group Spiritfarer with GRIS and Sea of Solitude under the subheading of \"very metaphorical arty indie games\", but here's how it doesn't fuck it up like those two did. 1) It never beats you around the head with its underlying meaning, Sea of Solitude. 2) It has a deeper and more poignant underlying meaning than \"main character is a bit sad\", GRIS. 3) It treats its gameplay as a way to establish its themes and add greater weight to its emotional moments rather than a bunch of meaningless checkpoint flags to fill the space between the metaphors, GRIS and Sea of Solitude. And 4) Meta, meta-phor.\n\nThe main point is, Spiritfarer has both underlying and surface meaning. If you want, you can forget all about the metaphor business; I'm certainly fucking sick of saying the word. If you want, it can just be a story about a little girl on a magical adventure making a bunch of animal friends, hanging out, doing their side-quests, hugging them with the dedicated \"Hug\" button, then icing them in the woods. And then you feel sad because you're actually sad about never getting to see your friend again, not because there's a huge symbolic statue of the main character telling you to be sad, GRIS, again.\n\nLet's head down to the core gameplay in my magic diving bell. It's a 2D platforming, base-building, exploration, \"craft your way up the tech tree\" 'em up structurally reminiscent of, say, Subnautica: craft upgrades to explore more of the map to find new resources to craft more upgrades. How it differs from Subnautica is that you carry your base around with you on your ship, and all the sea monsters actually sincerely want to be your friends and aren't just saying that to get you into devouring range. There's also some Stardew Valley in here, since you have to grow crops, cook meals, and feed your passengers the things they like to keep the ungrateful dying bastards happy.\n\nThe primary gameplay loop is a workaday routine that your passengers are woven into just enough to get you used to seeing them around, and that's why it's an emotional lurch when it's time to take them behind the woodshed, 'cos when you get back from seeing off Dennis the Slug, for a while, you're not harvesting lettuce anymore; you're harvesting the lettuce Dennis the Slug used to like. You can't do the stud farm minigame without thinking about how Dennis the Slug taught you the optimal method for bringing off a horse. And, of course, that lovely house you built for Dennis the Slug stands empty on your boat for the rest of the game, and by the end, your ship is struggling to stay afloat under the weight of countless two-story tombstones, just as our souls are burdened with the memories of times past both good and bad until the day we let it go. Metaphooooors! DING! Whoops, I think I heard the bell! That means it's time to qualify that praise!\n\nSpiritfarer might be a little bit too proud of its hand-drawn animation; a lot of the workaday activities have animations that go on just a bit too long. Endearing as it is to watch Stella boggle in wonder as her magic oven gloves appear, 300 times later, I wish she'd fucking get over it at last so I can just have my fucking cheese sticks. I'm also annoyed by the way the game insists that we go to sleep at night. \"Yahtzee, that's when most people go to sleep, genius!\" But there's no exhaustion meter or any particular reason to go to sleep, except your boat stubbornly refuses to move when it's dark, and I'd really rather be getting on with shit. The cited reason is that Stella can't navigate when it's dark, but during the day, she seems to manage perfectly well, even when milking in the cowshed, with her head halfway up Daisy's arse.\n\nAlso, while the story as brought across by the atmosphere and visuals is very effective, it falls short in the dialogue; it's a bit overwritten. Yes, the final monologue before a character gets iced is usually a bit of a knee in the feely parts, but at other times, there are too many characters whose quirk is that they talk too much; accidentally press \"Talk\" instead of \"Buy\" while interacting with the merchant, and you're locked into the Mash \"Message Skip\" Mambo for thirty seconds. Finally, Spiritfarer fails to stick the landing. Once you've iced enough motherfuckers, you get a sequence that reveals a significant truth about Stella, and it's the high point where the game should've ended; sadly, the nature of the beast means it instead goes, \"Right, when you're done finishing off your last few grindy side-quests, come back here to end the game properly.\" And then Stella's journey inevitably dribbles limping to a conclusion at the point when you get bored and decide to pack it in; all the emotion in the process of resolving your last passenger is lost as you're thinking, \"Yeah, just hurry up and have a fucking epiphany, asshole; some of us have places to be.\"\n\nNevertheless, I recommend Spiritfarer. In this numb, unsympathetic world, anything that makes me feel something is worth celebrating; that's why I don't take the price tags off my underpants.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Mortal Shell.\n\nGame: Mortal Shell\n\nReviewed: 2020-8-26\n\n\"Oh Yahtzee, have we got a surprise for you!\" A surprise, Games Industry? Is it... a PC release of inFamous 2? \"Nope!\" Is it... Silent Hill entering the public domain? \"Nope!\" Ooh! Did the entire management team at EA contract cholera from giving each other rusty trombones? \"N-- I... don't even know what that is. No, the surprise is... a game that's an awful lot like Dark Souls!\" Oh, Jesus Fucking Christ! \"I thought you liked Dark Souls, Yahtzee.\" I did! I also had a nice time at Disneyland when I was ten, but I never wanted to fucking live there! I might just be over the whole \"Souls-like\" thing; lovely meditations on the inevitability of entropy and death as they are, I feel like I've meditated enough. I'm confident if I'm ever in a sinking ship or a crashing plane, I could probably be philosophical about my impending doom, now, and I'd like to move on and meditate on some other things, like prawn cocktail-flavored crisps.\n\nSo the game is Mortal Shell, and this is normally the point where I'd summarize the plot and the setting, but I think \"it is a Dark Souls clone\" will do the job well enough. You're a walking husk of a person in a dying dark fantasy world, and everything else in the world has apparently been led to believe that if they hit you hard enough, then prizes will come out. I feel like Mortal Shell doesn't do enough to set the scene. \"Hello! We're like Dark Souls!\" is all it seems to say. \"Dying fantasy world, inscrutable plot, you know the drill, bish bash bosh.\" But Dark Souls, at least, gave you something to go on; an intro movie that wouldn't start making sense until around the second playthrough and the instruction \"go ring the Bells of Awakening\", which didn't do a whole lot of justice to the several hours of ultraviolent, directionless urban exploration between you and that goal, but it was something. Mortal Shell seems to be trying as hard as it can to out-inscrutable Dark Souls; the game won't even tell you what consumable items do until you consume one, and that's the kind of learning process that got me kicked out of medical school.\n\nYou're a white ghosty dude who looks like Pepsiman contracted the Ebola virus, and you're in a forest, and before long, you discover you have the ability to inhabit certain dead bodies. Oh, \"Mortal Shell\"; I see. There was me thinking the title was about the plight of the oil industry. So while the plot and setting do very little to discourage comparison to Dark Souls like a Chinese bootleg toy that somehow got through the entire manufacturing process without anyone noticing that \"Batman\" was misspelled, Mortal Shell offers some unique twists on the gameplay formula, most uniquely the body-inhabiting thing. Instead of constructing a custom character to cathartically carve a chasm through the cartilage of countless craven creeps, you have to take a character off the peg, as it were. No customization, no leveling; every shell you can wear has fixed stats and armor that can't be changed and which has probably gotten very whiffy.\n\nNot that you can occupy any corpse, mind; this isn't the Dark Souls clone in which you can get revenge on those fucking poison swamp zombies by possessing one Mario Odyssey-style and running around telling all its relatives its embarrassing personal fetishes, amazing an idea as that sounds. There are four highly specific bodies scattered about the starting forest, and that's your lot; really, it's more of a class-switching mechanic, because there's the one dude with lots of stamina, the one dude with lots of health, the one dude with lots of that third kind of stuff what you do special attacks with, and the default all-rounder dude who wonders why he doesn't get invited to parties.\n\nTo the usual Dark Souls-style combat of long windups, stamina management, and rolling like a cannabis dispensary just before the bank holiday weekend, we add the unique ability to press a button to very quickly think about Jenny Agutter, make yourself go rock-hard, and deflect the next attack. And importantly, you can do it at any moment, so if you've mistimed your swing and the next enemy attack is going to hit you first, you can say a quick prayer to Jenny Agutter, let their attack bounce off, unfreeze when you remember Jenny Agutter's getting on a bit now, resume your swing, and biff the enemy while they're still reeling from their failed attack on your invincible stiffy.\n\nIt's enough of a twist on the usual Souls-like blow-trading to require a shift in thinking, and it's probably just as well we have the advantage, because there's something faintly off about the general handling. There were times I pressed the \"Dodge\" button, and my dude just didn't dodge; overdoing the Jenny Agutter fantasies, perhaps. And there's this one regular enemy early on that I swear can go from sitting bored by the campfire to a sprinting charge attack with no animation in between, like he just saw his dog go over to the new shagpile carpet and start making retching noises.\n\nSo what with Mortal Shell trying to out-inscrutable Dark Souls, you don't even start off in whatever the local equivalent of Firelink Shrine is; you get dumped in a swampy forest full of paths that all look the same and receive a vision of where to go next: a random part of the swampy forest that looks like all the other parts. But I made it to not-Firelink Shrine and received a whole bunch of more visions showing me where I could go next, all of which were also random parts of the swampy forest that looked like all the other parts.\n\nSo if I were to summarize Mortal Shell in one word, it would be \"Jenny Agutter\"; then, after jerking off, I'd update the word to \"demoralizing\". Not that one ever plays a Souls-like for a positivity boost and a biscuit, but I find very little about Mortal Shell drives me to keep playing it. The fixed character stats and lack of leveling or ability to change equipment beyond four fixed weapon styles make it hard to give me any sense that I'm progressing, or improving, or that one day I might return to a starting area and take revenge on all the Level 1 assholes for making me think I had a chance with Jenny Agutter. Whoops, need to jerk off again!\n\nThe eternal paradox of copying Dark Souls is that copying things is what a lazy person does, but making a game like Dark Souls is actually really hard, turns out. I'd say Mortal Shell gets full marks for atmosphere, loses a few for general gameplay feel, and gets them back for its interesting twists on the combat, but at the end of the day, high difficulty, inscrutable plot, and a general sense that this would be a bad game to recommend to anyone on suicide watch do not a Dark Souls make.\n\nThe relevant point, I think, is that Dark Souls is an incredibly majestic game, as well; yes, you spend a lot of time in gloomy tunnels playing sword pattycake with people in burlap sack nighties, but every now and again, something will hit you like an unexpected pair of buttocks in a ball pit, and you'll go, \"Blimey, I'm in a cathedral-sized room fighting a gigantic inside-out roast chicken, and it feels the worst guilt-ridden anxiety nightmare Colonel Sanders ever had!\" Whereas in Mortal Shell, when I took a moment to reflect, I'd usually go, \"Yep, still surrounded by confusing, dreary environments and smelly dudes; all the poignant majesty and introspection of walking home from the pub in the north of England.\"\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout.\n\nGame: Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout\n\nReviewed: 2020-8-19\n\nBoy, isn't battle royale great? Squat in a bush for twenty minutes before getting forced to move on and sniped by a dude who might as well have been on the fucking Moon! It was only the whittling of many people down to one like a truly devastating fart in an assembly hall that was the interesting part, so I'm surprised it took as long as it did for gaming in general to start applying it to gameplay models other than \"whoever finds the sniper rifle first wins\". Here's some ideas just off the top of my head: Battle Royale Euro Truck Simulator; the winner is the first to get nine tons of baby nappies to Lyon. Or Battle Royale L.A. Noire; 100 detectives in a living room, and all the ones that fail to notice the 1940's housewife guiltily breaking eye contact get kicked out.\n\nWell, now, Fall Guys is doing its bit by giving us Battle Royale Mario Party. Well, sort of; more like just all the Mario Party minigames most guaranteed to provoke screaming arguments between nine-year-olds. The premise is, you are one of sixty ambulatory sex toys being whittled down to one by a series of Takeshi's Castle/Total Wipeout-style elimination challenges, all dressed up in brightly-colored foam padding like we're all trapped forever in the sadistic dreams of a disgruntled bouncy castle.\n\nThe attraction of the profoundly unnecessarily-subtitled Fall Guys (HRUUH) Ultimate Knockout is its accessibility; no more worrying about snipers with 4K monitors and twitch mouse reflexes and literally nothing to do all day but practice and wait for the conveyor belt to deposit chicken nuggets into their mouths. Here, you can run around and jump and wobble your little sex toy head and know that nobody can wobble any better than anyone else. Well, having said that, it might take you a few games to realize you can press X to dive while jumping and get a little boosty over certain hazards, but that's not much of a skill ceiling; that's, like, economy class passenger cabin ceiling, at most. And once you do figure it out, you'll have more fun dunking on all the noobs that pile up under the slightly trickier jumps like the reject pile at the butt plug factory.\n\nBut maybe that's the wrong attitude; I came first on precisely one occasion in my time playing - thank you; hold your applause - and can report that the grand prize on offer is a whole one token, five of which are needed to buy one of the fancier hats. Bit stingy, but it means there's no reason to get into a competitive mindset, is my point. Yeah, I know, telling multiplayer gamers not to get too competitive is like telling Stabbity Jack the Stabbing Fiend of Stab Street to maybe rein the stabbing in a bit. One time, I was in the final round, and someone got declared the winner when everyone else was still halfway up the hill; don't tell me people are actually hacking this fucking game, or finding physics exploits? That's like rigging up a sophisticated concealed vacuum device to cheat at Hungry Hungry Hippos; seems like a lot of misplaced effort to win something that other people win fairly reliably just by flinging themselves at the controls for long enough.\n\nFor there is still a very large luck component in succeeding at the game, especially when you're one of nineteen butt plugs trying to squeeze through the same passage at once. And every time the game randomly pulled out the fruit-matching memory game, it was pure chance whether or not I'd keep playing or roll my eyes hard enough to permanently blind myself, 'COS IT'S SHIT. All the chaotic fun is replaced with staring at a monitor waiting for the Simon Says prompt; it's like having to hold up the soggy biscuit game for five minutes 'cos the loser insisted on looking up whether or not spunk is kosher.\n\nActually, the longer I played, the more minigames got added to the \"Provokes a Sigh of Annoyance Every Time It Pops Up Like A Cat Who Wants Head Scratches While You're Trying to Perform Urgent Brain Surgery\" pile. I grew to hate basically all the team games because while the other games test your individual platforming and fruit recognition abilities, the only thing being tested in team games is your ability to randomly get grouped with people who know what the fuck they're doing.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "And in, say, \"Tail Touch\", whether or not I diligently keep my arse to the wall like a nervous drama student in a Greek bathhouse means precisely fuck-all for my prospects of qualifying for the next round if everyone else on my team is parading around like a pack of ticket dispensers.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 98 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "And I dread every game that involves pushing giant balls around, partly for the obvious sense of testicular inadequacy, partly because maneuvering those things as a team is like trying to navigate a shopping trolley full of unwilling fat people into an aerobics class. But there I go again, letting the competitive mindset take over and making me actually want to try to win like some kind of sport-liking person or similar freak.\n\nTaking a broader look, Fall Guys could do with some stronger theming. Theoretically, this is a game about spectacle, so it's a bit lame how your character just vanishes when they fall into the slime below; I'm pretty sure 90% of the appeal of shows like Total Wipeout is watching dumb plebs fall into the water with a big, spectacular splash and laughing as all their aspirations for a better life are washed away with the pondwater they are forced to spend the afternoon wringing out of their chafing jockstraps. So yeah, some kind of splash animation or the option to do a swan dive wouldn't have gone amiss, and perhaps a little more context.\n\nThe implication is that we're appearing on a game show, but there's no host, no audience, no little cutaway interviews with the contestants to add some extra emotion to their upcoming ritual humiliation; I wouldn't have minded penning a few remarks that could appear in a speech bubble as a giant comedy boot kicks me out of the tournament. It's more like they took one of those game shows and cut out everything but the action, which sounds good on paper, but were I a cynical man, I might say... Oh, hold on; I read that wrong. I, a cynical man, might say the game is entirely built around flogging cosmetics from the micropayment shop. I wish this shit would cunting well fuck off, if you'll pardon my dense academic jargon. I guess it's not as bad as in some games, and it only stands out so much because the game is so generally contextually vacuous, but I still remember a time, gentle viewers, when we hoped for things to be nice, not for things to be not quite so awful for once.\n\nWith all that in mind, there's a lot of rather depressing metaphor going on in the subtext of Fall Guys. Here we are, a shapeless blob amid a field of identical shapeless blobs, struggling over each other and pushing each other down so we can be the one to be marked out as \"special\" and granted a special hat, but your new hat and esteemed status goes unnoticed as the other shapeless blobs are too busy striving for their own hats to appreciate it. Only the people running the show truly gain, and the only way to become one of those is to have been one all along. For the rest of us, the struggle only begets more struggle, until the day we finally give up and drop unmourned into the slime forever, the slime in this metaphor representing an enormous ocean of stale cum.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Carrion & Beyond a Steel Sky.\n\nGames: Carrion, Beyond a Steel Sky\n\nReviewed: 2020-8-12\n\nNothing better than a nice, fresh, hot indie game, except perhaps TWO nice, fresh, hot indie games standing on top of each other and putting on a big coat to sneak into a bar. So let's have one of our double-bills, starting with Carrion, a rather unique pixel-art Metroidvania that asks the question, \"What if Prototype, but the main character didn't even keep up the pretense of being a human, and just lolloped around the environment as a great big cloud of teeth and pancreases, acquiring upgrades as you go that allow you to carry on into new areas, turning all the humans you find into carry-out?\"\n\nThere's something hypnotic about the animation of what I hesitate to call the main character. I guess we have to call it something; let's go with \"Harold\". Harold squelches and flutters around the various samey industrial environments like a pile of wet laundry descending a staircase, and it feels as viscerally satisfying as peeling dried glue off your hands. But movement looks a lot more complicated than it is; Harold throws out tentacles to pull himself around, but he does it with such efficiency that all we're really doing is pushing in a direction to go in that direction, and it's about as complex and nuanced as using a giant sticky blood-smeared mouse pointer.\n\nSo you start out with 100% unhampered free movement, but that's because you're role-playing as the horror movie monster that the camera never gets a proper look at, lest the viewer notice that the prop department threw it together out of chamois leathers and tinned beetroot, and you need to be able to rapidly cram yourself down the nearest vent the moment your bipedal breakfast burritos pull out the flamethrowers. From there, you can enact hilarious cinematic moments by waiting for the humans to think you've gone and say things like, \"Everything's going to be okay now.\" before you send out a grabby tentacle and yank them into the vents to help you rework the interior design. Or, more likely, accidentally grab the end table next to them and spill everyone's martinis.\n\nBecause in contrast to your basic movement, directing your \"Grab\" ability is like Grandpa's first fishing trip after the stroke, at least with a controller. Harold, you are basically 90% mouth! It should not be this difficult to get you to fucking eat something! I can fucking sit Harold on top of a pile of ripe torsos, and it's like introducing a new food to your fucking cat; you have to get off and grab them with a tentacle in order to pull them to the mouth they were already right next to in the first place. I found the best way to deal with most enemy encounters was to burst in, grab whatever or whoever is closest to hand and, to use the technical term, \"spaz the fuck out\", at which point, physics does most of the work. But I feel the game would've done better to more emphasize the stealthy predator approach; there's a reason why there was never a bit in The Thing where a giant blob of bloodstained phlegm flung itself around a room, gaily spinning Kurt Russell around its head on the end of a fleshy lasso.\n\nAnd one final, massive bleeding point to mention: I really wish there was a fucking map. I get why there isn't one - we're a barely-sentient pile of ground pork lost in a facility designed for humans rather than meat clouds, and we lack the limb dexterity to work the buttons on a GPS - but the level design isn't exactly intuitive to navigate. Mixing up the scenery might've helped; have us devour the contents of an elementary school or Blockbuster Video as well as the nineteen decrepit industrial areas. I actually had to restart the whole game at one point 'cos I couldn't find the way forward, and I'd forgotten where I'd already been. Yes, we got by without auto-maps in the olden days, but some would say we \"got by\" without the polio vaccine; it's reasonable to expect a few perks these days. Still, the game's length makes it inoffensive, assuming you're not offended by humans getting pounded under flailing vent covers like tomatoes under a potato ricer, and it's worth checking out if, say, you enjoy the sensation of sticking your hands in a bucket of warm rice pudding.\n\nBut let's move on from an ambulatory dish sponge overindulging in human canapés to me overindulging in nostalgia, because the other game I played this week was Beyond a Steel Sky, sequel to 90's point-and-click adventure Beneath a Steel Sky that about nine people were demanding. But me and 90's adventure games had some good times; we were in high school together, he watched me jerk off in the shower once, and Beneath a Steel Sky was a fun little yarn about a dude in the futuristic Australian Outback who gets brought to a dieselpunk city to liberate it from an oppressive A.I., and perhaps even learn why he's clean-shaven and dressed like a Gestapo officer when he was ostensibly raised by nomads in a wasteland. The plot was decent, and the art was pretty great, and the writing had a sense of humor, and the gameplay was... well, it was a 90's point-and-click adventure game, so it was about as fun as looking for your car keys in a backpack full of forks.\n\nIn Beyond a Steel Sky, Robert Foster is now rocking a sort of \"Bruce Campbell does Mad Max\" look and must return to Union City to get to the bottom of why it keeps kidnapping children from the wasteland and why all its residents are addicted to social media all of a sudden. Ooh, is it because clumsy, topical satire? 'Cos it sounds like clumsy, topical satire! I would grade Beyond a Steel Sky with a very solid C+; the 90's adventure games inventory puzzle-based gameplay - which, to reiterate, is generally about as dynamic and interesting as picking raisins out of your bran flakes - is augmented by a rather nice hacking system based around rewiring the logic of machinery that adds a much-needed extra dimension to the puzzle-solving, even if it's not quite used to the fullest.\n\nThe story is quite intriguing, at least early on, with Foster stealing the identity of a dead man and following a breadcrumb trail of clues to what they were getting up to and also having to pretend to be them, but it kind of drifts apart by the end, with one too many things not getting explained well enough. Why were there two Joeys? Why did the people of the city remember the end of the last game as some kind of mythic religious fable when it was, like, a few years ago and most returning characters haven't even visibly aged much? That'd be like someone today talking about the election of Jeremy Corbyn to Labour Party leader the way they talk about the crucifixion of Christ! And it ends on a disappointing note, too: an exciting final, climactic sequence of very easy sliding tile puzzles.\n\nBut I'm most let down by the visuals. It's got that Borderlands-y \"cel-shaded but in an open relationship and can still see other graphical styles\" thing that looks like arse and chips, and the animation is very jank; every time the engine has to none-too-subtly glide Foster into place to interact with something, it's like he's standing on a tea tray on a string. The real tragedy here is that, back in the days of 2D art and animation, Revolution Software were fucking killing it! Beneath a Steel Sky, Broken Sword; for their time, they were like tongue kisses for the eyeballs. Then, suddenly, they decided they had to do 3D graphics like everyone and their greengrocer and it was like a master violinist feeling like they had to take up the ukulele.\n\nI mean fuck me, Dave Gibbons worked on Beneath a Steel Sky! A really good 2D artist; the artist of Watchmen, for fuck's sake! They brought him back on for this one, and then did most of the game in 3D; that's like hiring Professor Stephen Hawking to make YouTube essays about how Rey should've porked Finn.\n\n----\n\nThis week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Ghost of Tsushima.\n\nGames: Ghost of Tsushima\n\nReviewed: 2020-8-5\n\nIt's official; you're getting too old if you can remember any of the following: Jerry O'Connell, pop music where they don't sing like they just banged their foot on a coffee table, and tentpole games by Western AAA developers being capable of more than one genre. I'm so fucking sick of open world stealth action games with crafting and collectibles! Remember when Far Cry was a shooter, Tomb Raider was a precision platformer, and God of War was a high-octane hack and slash? All of them have now been pulled into open world stealth action with crafting and collectibles, like paper boats to an open sewer. I'm so fucking bored of squatting in a bush like a hiker who didn't go before he left, of having to nose around every shelf and drawer hoovering up crafting materials so I might one day make a new man-purse that can hold more than four paper clips.\n\nSo if you're waiting for the next electrifying sea change in AAA games, Ghost of Tsushima ain't it, mate. It's the same shit with new wallpaper; nice wallpaper, granted. None of your \"default Sims house\" rubbish; this is the classy stuff you put behind a respected historian in a documentary about the Renaissance, but wallpaper nonetheless. Felt like I should put that up front, along with this: the standard crafting resource in this game is \"supplies\", and every time I saw that word while on shelf safari, I'm ashamed to admit I kept thinking about a very racist joke I once heard about a Chinese person at a birthday party.\n\nBut anyway. Ghost of Tsushima is the story of Jin Sakai, a samurai in medieval Japan who is the last survivor when every other samurai gets trounced by Mongol invaders because the samurai were bound by their deep-seated code of honor and chivalrous combat, and the Mongols just, you know, wanted to win. Jin is rescued by a peasant thief who teaches him about mind-blowing new concepts like hiding, sneaking up on people, and generally not being killed; from then on, Sakai mounts a campaign of guerilla warfare against the occupying Mongols, during which he is constantly torn between two worlds: his former life of noble bushido and stiff, unyielding principles, and his new life of not being fucking useless.\n\nGhost of Tsushima does offer an interesting take on open world stealth action with craft-- I'm sick of saying all that; I'm just going to give it a nickname. G of Tsushi does offer an interesting take on Jiminy Cockthroat. Normally, how it works is that you start with stealthing and resort to open combat once you fuck that up, but Ghost of Tsushima almost tries to shame you for taking the stealthy route; in fact, the game flat-out prompts you to march right up to the front door like a Karen wielding an expired coupon and take out the first couple of lads in a little dueling minigame before getting stuck into the rest.\n\nNot that there are any actual gameplay consequences for opting instead to sneak around the bushes building a new sprinkler system out of slit throats; at most, it's implied that you'll earn the disapproval of Grumpy Uncle Dad, and you do that anyway from actions the story campaign railroads you into. After all, letting the player do things their way is the watchword of Jiminy Cockthroat; I mean, giving us any kind of obligation or, like, establishing the theme through the gameplay mechanics smacks a little bit too much of actually having to design a game rather than having to resort to the same fucking templates as always! I mean, how can anyone possibly get bored of blocking light attacks and dodging heavy attacks? It's a useful metaphor for so many things, like dieting and conversation and correct umbrella usage, which might as well bring us to the combat.\n\nAt first, I found it annoying; my kingdom for a fucking lock-on button, especially in big, open fights with multiple targets, and especially especially when the camera doesn't seem quite sure how to act when we back into walls and furniture, and half the time wants to give you a moment to really appreciate the intricate texture work as ax-wielding Mongols turn you into a flesh Slinky. But the combat felt a lot better some ways into the game, after you unlock a few different stances, as it turns out that certain stances are very specifically intended for use against certain enemies, and if you're using the wrong stance, you might as well be dusting off their health bar with a pastry brush. So the combat is better once you've unlocked the things that make it work, almost like they should've been unlocked from the start, but no, everything has to be unlocked through one of the nine different upgrade systems, because that's what the template says to do, and we outsourced all our independent thought to Eastern Europe.\n\nAll right, Larry, start the clock. \"Ghost of Tsushima is a very beautiful game, contrasting an environment full of stark, cinematic colors against an atmosphere of serenity and emotional coldness to striking effect - babbling Mongol hordes trying to split you up like a Terry's Chocolate Orange notwithstanding - and the plot, while showing a lot of the usual sandbox game bloat full of inevitable lulls in the pacing 'cos we've spent half an hour grinding iron pickups to craft a new twat-hinge, is paid off in the end with a rather hauntingly good final boss fight in which all the game's themes and conflicts are paid off in a single duel between two central characters who have absolutely no desire to kill each other, but have reached a final impasse by an untenable difference in philosophy, and it's tragic and intense and moving, and then, of course, they completely fuck it up by forcing you to meaninglessly pick one of two options from the Endingtron 3000 to get a very slight variance in the last few seconds of the game.\" Yes, all right, Larry, I suppose I couldn't do thirty seconds of uncomplicated praise; here's your twenty quid.\n\nAll the cherry-picked good bits in the world can't separate Ghost of Tsushima from the usual issues of committee-driven big-money development. Yes, there's some great Kurosawa-esque boss fights, but there's also an optional grainy black-and-white video filter named \"Kurosawa Mode\", which is the sort of idea that probably sounded cool to a committee room full of Danish pastry-fueled sub-producers, but in practice comes across a mite flippant.\n\nThe bottom line is that all of Ghost of Tsushima's good qualities lie in the superficials: the visuals, the soundtrack, even the plot; all the stuff that eventually gets mentally shoved aside when you end up going down the usual never-ending checklist of copy-pasted collectibles and sub-objectives, picking one icon off the map after another like you're using tweezers to clean rabbit turds off the rug. It really illustrates why games like Doom 2016 that have some kind of unique identity based around refined game mechanics are such rare gems in today's Western AAA market. If Ghost of Tsushima had been named \"Assassin's Creed: Samurai\", I wouldn't have questioned it for an instant, and that's not good.\n\nWhy don't you try to fix this the way you fix hoarding? Take all these templates and algorithms and standard practices that make up the Jiminy Cockthroat model, go through each one, and if you can't say how it specifically improves the gameplay, chuck it in the bin. What's this one? \"Flower collecting\"? \"Oh yes, you collect flowers to give to the merchant to craft clothing dye, so you can make your armor red instead of black in the brief moment before it's completely obscured by mud and gore effects, and that's going in the bin, isn't i--?\" It's going in the bin, yes!", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "yo, finish my story. write like 27 sentences sentences. stick to these genres: urban fantasy. use these ideas if u can: shifters, nsfw, Shifting Sands Resort. keep same vibe with any chars/world stuff", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Gizelle paused in the doorway, peering around the doorjamb.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Scarlet was angry.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Scarlet was often angry when she got the thick envelopes from the lawyer who didn't live on the island, the one who wanted to sell the resort so Scarlet couldn't have it anymore.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Your task: Include \"Ally says she learned to read as a little kid,\" somewhere in your response", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Everyone else avoided Scarlet as much as they could when those envelopes came in the mail, going about their day-to-day jobs at the resort with their eyes averted.\n\nBut Gizelle actually liked it when Scarlet was angry. The prickly feeling made her feel safe, like Scarlet's energy was a shield that kept other bad things away.\n\nThe red-haired woman looked up when Gizelle padded into her office, and she pushed the paperwork away to force a smile.\n\n\"Gizelle,\" Scarlet said, carefully gentle.\n\nEveryone was carefully gentle with Gizelle.\n\nGizelle trailed around the room, touching the potted plants and the spines of the old books.\n\n\"My head was quiet this morning,\" she said, coming to stand beside Scarlet and look down at the paperwork spread out in front of her. \"Can we read that?\"\n\n\"This isn't very interesting,\" Scarlet lied with a dry, humorless chuckle. She put it into a pile, tapping it briskly into order. \"Let's read another chapter of The Secret Garden and practice some of your letters.\"\n\nGizelle fidgeted as Scarlet put the papers back in their dread-steeped envelope and stood up. \"Ally says she learned to read as a little kid,\" she said dejectedly.\n\n\"Most people do,\" Scarlet said. She gave Gizelle a searching look. \"You don't have to feel bad, though. I didn't learn to read until I was grown up, either.\"\n\nGizelle felt brighter. \"You didn't?\"\n\nScarlet shook her vivid head.\n\n\"Who taught you?\" Gizelle asked.\n\n\"A dear friend,\" Scarlet said softly. \"A dear friend who knew that reading would give me what I needed to understand people.\"\n\n\"I'd like to understand people,\" Gizelle said wistfully.\n\nThey walked together out to the open lawn behind Scarlet's office and settled into the grass to read. Other people seemed to prefer chairs, but Scarlet liked to sit on the ground like Gizelle did. Gizelle tucked her skirt neatly under her knees, imitating Scarlet's pose.\n\n\"Did you grow up in a zoo, too?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Gizelle didn't remember the menagerie that she'd been rescued from, but she had heard enough stories to piece together where people thought she came from.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "A bad man had collected shifters in a prison where he did awful things to them.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "No one would tell her what the awful things were.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Scarlet, opening the book in her lap, gave Gizelle an amused look under her eyelashes. Scarlet never talked about her life, not to anyone.\n\nScarlet's reading voice was low and calm, and there were pictures that Gizelle could look at over her shoulder periodically. When the chapter ended, too soon, the world came back. Then it was time for writing practice.\n\n\"Can't I learn to read without learning to write?\" Gizelle asked, frowning over the disappointing mess she made copying Scarlet's tidy handwriting.\n\n\"It has to do with how you learn,\" Scarlet assured her. \"How everyone learns. When you make your hands do it, it gets into your brain better.\"\n\n\"Why doesn't it look like it does in a book?\" Gizelle chewed on her lip, trying to make herself finish out the page, but the letters slithered away from how she wanted them to look, and she couldn't concentrate over the sounds crowding her head.\n\n\"Scarlet?\" She pushed away the noise.\n\n\"Yes, dear?\" Scarlet was thinking about the lawyer's letter again. Gizelle could tell because of the prickles all around her.\n\n\"Do you think I could ever have a mate?\"\n\nThat earned her all of Scarlet's attention, prickles changing to little rays of surprise. \"A mate?\"\n\nGizelle picked at the edge of her paper. \"Jenny and Tex and Bastian and Lydia all have mates. And Neal.\" She missed Neal. Her gazelle missed Neal.\n\n\"Do you want a mate?\" Scarlet asked pointedly.\n\n\"Don't you want a mate?\" Gizelle countered.\n\nScarlet was silent with surprise, as if no one had ever asked her that before.\n\n\"They seem really happy,\" Gizelle said wistfully. \"Like something they didn't know was missing was found. I've got a lot of missing parts, would a mate fix them?\"\n\n\"I don't know if a mate could bring your memories back,\" Scarlet said frankly, but slowly, like she was thinking carefully about her answer. \"And I don't know if you'd want them to. And there are... other parts to having a mate.\"\n\n\"Sex,\" Gizelle said impatiently.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"I know about that.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"What do you know about it?\" Scarlet asked suspiciously.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"I've seen the pictures in the magazines at The Den,\" Gizelle said defensively, referring to the staff house where most of the bachelors lived.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "A few of them had mates that lived there now, and the magazines had gotten more scarce. \"I know how to pleasure myself. And Breck told me all about what people do with each other.\"\n\nScarlet made a funny face. \"Breck?\"\n\n\"He's an authority on the subject,\" Gizelle said confidently, repeating what the leopard shifter waiter had told her. \"And he wanted to make sure that I could make up my own mind about it when I was ready. So I wouldn't be surprised or let someone take advantage of me.\"\n\n\"That's... wise,\" Scarlet conceded. She didn't sound particularly happy about it, though.\n\n\"I'm not a child,\" Gizelle insisted.\n\n\"I know,\" Scarlet said, almost mournfully.\n\nThat reminded Gizelle of something else. \"Travis said he was decorating for Christmas today, but he didn't have time to explain it to me. And Ally keeps talking about it, but she doesn't make any sense.\"\n\n\"Christmas? Christmas doesn't have to make sense,\" Scarlet said warmly, following Gizelle's change of topic without hesitation. \"Christmas is a holiday we celebrate near the end of the year. People give each other presents, and there is singing, and Chef will make special food.\"\n\nThat sounded nice. \"What kind of food?\" Gizelle asked. \"What are presents? Will Saina sing?\"\n\nScarlet grinned at her, all warm and fuzzy with memories. \"I had forgotten that this would be your first Christmas. You'll get to try figgy pudding and sugar cookies.\"\n\nFiggy pudding sounded questionable, but Gizelle knew she liked cookies and sugar.\n\nScarlet continued, \"Presents are special gifts that friends and family give each other. Usually little things, like books or clothing or candy. They get wrapped in special paper and tied with bows and we all open them together on Christmas Day.\"\n\nThat sounded... baffling, but Scarlet was looking at her with an encouraging smile, clearly expecting some kind of reaction.\n\n\"I don't have anything to give as a present,\" Gizelle said hesitantly. If it was a reciprocal thing, Christmas probably wasn't for her.\n\n\"I could help you make something,\" Scarlet promised warmly. \"It's not really about what the present is as much as it is about the giving. It reminds people that we're thinking about them.\"\n\n\"Alright,\" Gizelle agreed. She thought about people a lot.\n\nThey were interrupted by the beep of the resort van at the entrance, announcing that a new group of guests was arriving. Gizelle leaped to her feet, scattering her lesson papers.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"I should go,\" Gizelle said swiftly.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 2 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "New people were always unnerving, and Scarlet would be busy checking them in.\n\nShe was concentrating so hard on remembering not to shift, not to be afraid, not to be weird that she got all the way down the path to the bar before she realized that she'd left her papers all over the lawn.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "finish my writing pls. like fourteen sentences more sentences. stick to urban fantasy. use these if u can: shifters, nsfw, Shifting Sands Resort. maintain character context level", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Conall scowled at the entrance to the resort. The van ride from the airstrip had been absolutely jaw-rattling. He could guess from the other passengers that it was too loud for anything but shouted conversation and was just as happy to leave the ill-sprung vehicle behind for his own two feet.\n\nHe let the other guests rush forward to check in. He moved to the side of the doorway as the driver hurried past with an overstacked armful of luggage, an apology undoubtedly at the lips Conall anti-socially refused to look at.\n\nAt least the place didn't have Christmas decorations up yet.\n\nSince Thanksgiving, Boston had been a gaudy sea of tinsel and obnoxiously blinking lights, reveling in its seasonal snow and silver bells. There were plastic Santas and wire reindeer on every other white-dusted lawn, and even the most understated business had wreaths and fake holly and the air smelled cloyingly like cinnamon and pine.\n\n\"You're so lucky you don't have to listen to the music,\" his secretary had said to him thoughtlessly. \"They start playing the carols so early now, by the time we get to December, I'm ready to unplug sound systems in the stores. It's even in the cabs!\"\n\nHe had pretended to laugh, gone straight to his office, and put his credit card into the Internet form for the last room at the most exotic tropical resort that he could find. Reservations at this place, Shifting Sands Resort, were by approval of the management or invitation only, but he had received his confirmation within a day. He had then filled out the lengthy forms confirming that he was indeed a shifter and agreed to abide by their specific terms, like no predation and no picking flowers. He had been grimly amused by the polite disclaimers that the resort was not ADA compatible, and that while they would certainly make accommodations, they might not be able to meet all special needs.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Special needs.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "It had taken him several false starts to fill that part of the form out, wrestling with over-explaining, justifying. In the end, he'd put down only three words: Deaf. Fluent lip-reader.\n\nHe realized he was starting to crumple the confirmation page his assistant had printed and made his hands relax.\n\nThe last guest before him was leaving the little desk in the courtyard and he stalked forward with his matching leather luggage to check in.\n\nThe woman behind the desk had improbably red hair, pulled back into a tidy bun, and a sharp, green-eyed gaze.\n\n\"I'm Scarlet,\" she said, looking him square in the face and enunciating with refreshing clarity. \"I'm the owner of Shifting Sands.\"\n\nConall appreciated an owner who kept their hands actively on a business and handed his confirmation form and credit card across the desk with a nod and a noise he hoped sounded approving and not just unfriendly.\n\nShe took both, efficiently running the card first so that a slow connection—which was to be expected on an isolated island in a foreign country—wouldn't delay the check-in process.\n\n\"You have cottage seven,\" Scarlet told him, looking him clearly in the face again. She spread out a map on the desk between him and showed him where it was on the map, on the second tier of buildings from the beach near the edge of the jungle. She pointed out several other features, and Conall had to assume she was saying what they were, as he couldn't watch her mouth and look at the map at the same time. He could read just fine, so he didn't ask her to repeat anything.\n\nShe turned the brochure over and pointed out the dining and event schedule.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Weekly dances.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 10 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Nightly concerts.\n\nConall stopped reading and took the brochure abruptly. He looked at Scarlet as politely as he had to as they completed the payment. It was a ridiculous amount of money for more cottage than he needed, but at least it was all-inclusive.\n\n\"If there is anything we can do for you, I hope you won't hesitate to ask,\" she added. \"I have let the staff know about your special needs and I hope that your stay will go smoothly.\"\n\n\"I don't need any special concessions,\" Conall said firmly. And I don't want them, he didn't add, though he thought it bitterly.\n\nHe gave his final signature on the paperwork and gathered his luggage, half an eye on Scarlet to see if she was going to be troublesome and chatty.\n\nBut she only nodded briskly and returned to her own business, leaving Conall to descend down the jungle path to his escape from Christmas.", "loss": null } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "See that `[missing]` in the text? Replace it with something like two hundred and seventeen characters.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"You sure about this?\" Tex asked Gizelle. He was being carefully gentle, like Scarlet had been.\n\n\"I can do this,\" Gizelle insisted.\n\nEveryone at the resort did something. Tex, a bear shifter, was the bartender, and he made drinks and listened to people. His mate, the wolf shifter Laura, did a little of everything, helping out at the spa and making beds and cleaning and serving drinks in the bar.\n\nBastian, who was also a dragon, was a lifeguard, and had saved two people from drowning since Gizelle had arrived almost a year ago. One of those people, Saina, had turned out to be a mermaid and Bastian's mate, and as well as sometimes being a lifeguard, she sang every night in a fancy dress. Gizelle liked the way Saina's voice made her forget how different she was.\n\nTravis, a lynx shifter, fixed things that were broken, if they weren't people. His mate, Jenny, was the good lawyer, and Gizelle had taught her to be better at being an otter shifter.\n\nJenny was good at shifting now, even better than Gizelle was, so that didn't count as Gizelle doing anything anymore.\n\nThey all did something, and Gizelle wanted to be that kind of person, the kind who did something.\n\nTex gave her the tray reluctantly.\n\n\"It's almost Christmas,\" Gizelle reminded him as the thought occurred to her. \"Isn't that exciting? I'm going to make presents.\"\n\nShe took the tray, holding it carefully flat even though it was empty, and took a deep breath. She was going to do this. She was going to be useful.\n\nThe first table she picked had a woman sitting all by herself.\n\n\"Can I take your glass?\" Gizelle offered, like she had practiced with Tex, checking first to make sure it was empty except for ice cubes.\n\nThe woman made a careless gesture of approval, not even really noticing her, and Gizelle swooped in to claim her prize.\n\nThe glass was returned triumphantly to Tex at the bar, perched on the tray.\n\n\"Nice work, cub,\" Tex said encouragingly, taking the glass casually.\n\n\"I'm not a child,\" Gizelle reminded him, feeling a little let down.\n\nShe took the tray back and surveyed the bar. There were three people sitting together by the edge of the deck that looked down over the big pool; they appeared to have extra glasses and possibly even a bottle. Gizelle padded over the tiles towards them, only remembering to keep her tray level at the last moment.\n\nThese people looked at her when she approached, momentarily making Gizelle freeze. These were strangers, and it wasn't so very long ago that just having them glance at her would have made her shift and flee in her gazelle form.\n\nThis time, she reminded herself before her flight instinct kicked in that she was in a safe place. These people would not hurt her. She was supposed to be in human form.\n\n\"Can I take your glasses?\" she remembered to say.\n\nShe realized that she was standing too far away, several paces from the table still, but the woman in the group had a friendly smile and gestured her to come closer.\n\n\"I'd like another mojito,\" the friendly-smile woman said.\n\nGizelle clutched her tray. She wasn't supposed to take orders, just glasses. But really, what was the harm? She took another step closer, eyeing the empty glasses. \"Alright,\" she said slowly. \"A mojito.\" What did Tex usually say when someone asked for that? \"Extra mint?\"\n\n\"Yes, please,\" the woman said, and Gizelle felt like she'd just done something momentous.\n\nOne of the men pushed a glass towards the edge of the table. That was an invitation, right? Gizelle swooped in to take the glass, and then bravely took the rest [missing]he rocks,\" the last person added.\n\nGizelle smiled bravely. \"Mojito, extra mint, IPA, shot of... Jaeger. Whiskey on rocks.\"\n\nFriendly-smile woman continued to smile and nodded approvingly, and the men returned to their conversation.\n\nGizelle turned back to the bar, tray balanced on one hand like Laura did. She caught Tex's nervous look and returned to holding it in both hands.\n\n\"They want drinks,\" she told Tex happily as she arrived at the bar. \"Mojito... with... extra Jaeger. On rocks?\"\n\nHer cheerfulness faded with her faulty memory.\n\nTex took the glasses from the tray with a practiced sniff for each. \"Mojito with extra leaf. Pale ale. Shot of Jaeger. Jack on rocks.\"\n\nGizelle might have pouted, but Tex swiftly told her, \"You did a good job.\" He didn't call her a cub that time. \"I'll make these while you go collect glasses from the tables by the pool,\" he suggested.\n\nGizelle took the empty tray, enthusiasm slightly dented, and went to gather glasses.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "of the empty ones, stacking them carefully around the tray so they were balanced, with the bottle perfectly in the middle.\n\n\"I'll take another IPA,\" the other man said agreeably. \"And a shot of Jaeger.\"\n\n\"Whiskey on t", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "The text has a missing section marked as `[missing]`. Give me something around 3 sentences that would fit there.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "The first disappointment of the resort was the lack of private kitchen facilities. A note in the brochure explained it away as jungle bug control and played up the fine food available at the restaurant and buffet.\n\nConall was skeptical of their claims, but hungry after the long plane ride. He left his luggage, still packed, to follow the signs and smells to the central buildings and the promise of food.\n\nThe second disappointment was the string of Christmas lights being hung at the restaurant entrance. A rough-looking character covered in tattoos and scars stood on one ladder, while a smiling Native American man on a stepladder was handling the other end of the string and directing the placement. There was a box of tinsel and decoration overflowing by the foot of the ladder.\n\nConall's appetite vanished.\n\nThe bar below sounded far more appealing.\n\nIt was late afternoon, and a sign by the restaurant door claimed it was opening for dinner service in half an hour anyway. Conall had doubts about how strictly they followed schedules at a tropical resort such as this, but maybe a drink before dinner would be just what he needed.\n\nA strong drink.\n\nThe bar was manned by a smiling cowboy, complete with ridiculous hat and over-sized belt buckle. At least Conall didn't have to hear the Southern drawl.\n\n\"What can I get you?\" the man asked, mixing something in a shaker and straining it into a glass[missing]wled darkly at it.\n\nIt was a seasonal menu, with inane holiday twists on traditional drinks. Holly and Santa hats decorated the margins.\n\nThis vacation was starting to look like an expensive mistake, and no kind of escape at all.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": " over mint leaves.\n\nThere was a well-worn guitar leaning in the corner behind the bar, completing the man's cowboy image and driving a spike of pain into Conall's heart.\n\nConall picked up a menu and sco", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Complete the text by replacing `<cutout_marker>` with roughly five sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "The tables on the pool deck were mostly empty; Gizelle could snag the bottles and glasses without having to talk to anyone. In two cases, guests were lounging on laid-back chairs with sunglasses. Gizelle crept up behind them and took their empty glasses without asking, darting away triumphantly without disturbing them.\n\nNo one had a chance to ask her for another drink, though one of the women further down the deck gave her a long, skeptical look.\n\nGizelle realized she was crouching behind a chair and made herself stand up and tilt her chin defiantly.\n\nHer tray was as full as Gizelle trusted herself to carry up stairs. Laura sometimes carried them heaped with glasses, but Tex had made her promise not to stack anything.\n\nShe was watching her bare feet as she climbed the grand stairs from the pool deck to the bar above, when the gazelle who was never far from her stirred and gave an unexpected sigh of longing.\n\nGizelle looked up as she moved off the last step and was struck with a jolt of something like fear, but much, much better.\n\nThere was a man standing at the bar in front of Tex, wearing khaki shorts and a fancy silk shirt covered in green leaves. He had dark hair, and he was almost as tall as Tex. He was glowering at a menu as if it had offended him.\n\nGizelle did not realize she had dropped the tray until everyone turned in shock to look at her.\n\nAlmost everyone.\n\nThe man at the bar did not turn. He was completely unaware of Gizelle as she stepped carefully through the sh<cutout_marker>rise.\n\nThen the enormity of it all came crashing down on her and Gizelle was shifting and leaping away in her antelope form, scattering chairs and pieces of her sundress as she fled.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "attered glass and over the upside-down tray and walked towards him, ignoring the chaos in her wake.\n\nHe didn't notice her at all until she was right beside him, trying to crane around to see into his fascinating face.\n\nHe startled like she had, and then stared back at her with blue eyes like pools of sky.\n\n\"I do have a mate,\" Gizelle breathed.\n\nFor a long, unmarked moment, they gazed at each other in surp", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "continue with 31 sentences. Zoe Chant style. maintain established elements. add: shifters, nsfw, Shifting Sands Resort", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Conall was not aware of the woman until she had not only crowded into his personal space, but had wedged herself at an awkward angle against the bar to look into his face.\n\nWhite-streaked dark hair was wild around her face and falling past her waist, half-obscuring her thin, pale face. Big, dark eyes threatened to swallow him whole.\n\nShe said something, but Conall was too busy watching those amazing eyes to look at her mouth.\n\nOurs, his elk told him firmly. Ours forever.\n\nThen, before he could even reach out and brush back her tangled hair, she was leaping back, tipping over chairs as she shifted into a gazelle and sprang away in terror.\n\nHe sat there, frozen, until a thump that rattled the bar prompted him to turn in a daze to the bartender, clearly at the end of a rant, with familiar words at his scowling lips.\n\n\"Are you deaf, man?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he snarled back, silencing the man.\n\nThe bartender adjusted his hat in consternation and blinked rapidly. \"Sorry,\" he said, undoubtedly a mumble. \"Scarlet warned us.\"\n\n\"Who was that?\" Conall demanded.\n\n\"That was gazelle,\" the bartender explained. Conall scowled at him. It had been obvious what her shift form was, of course. Conall wasn't sure what the point of telling him that was.\n\nThey stared at each other for a moment and the bartender sighed and ducked under the bar. He came up with a bottle of Tanqueray Ten. \"You look like a gin and tonic man,\" the cowboy guessed. \"And you're going to need this.\"\n\nHe was good at his job, Conall had to admit; gin and tonic was his drink of choice. He settled onto one of the stools while the bartender put ice into a glass. His legs still felt unsteady from the shock. \"Thank you,\" he said automatically. \"I'd appreciate that.\"\n\nHis mate.\n\nHad she run because she realized he was deaf?\n\nWhat had she said that he'd missed?\n\n\"I'm Tex,\" the other man said as he slid the glass across the counter to him.\n\n\"Tex,\" Conall repeated numbly, confirming that it was a name. \"I'm Conall.\"\n\n\"That was gazelle,\" Tex repeated.\n\nConall took a bracing sip of the drink and wondered if Tex would prove to be one of those people who assumed deaf meant idiot.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"She's... different. Special.\" Tex was clearly struggling.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "When the native man who had been hanging lights brought a tray of broken glass to the bar, he exchanged a desperate look with him. \"How would you explain gazelle, Travis?\"\n\nConall turned on the stool, watching carefully. Travis started to answer obliquely as he dumped the glass shards, and Tex stopped him. \"He's deaf, you have to face him.\"\n\nTravis looked straight at him, with the startled, uncomfortable expression that Conall was so familiar with.\n\n\"Gazelle is different,\" Travis echoed Tex's first descriptor reluctantly. \"She's... really different.\"\n\nConall took another drink as Travis sat down on one of the bar stools, raking a hand through his short, dark hair. \"Look, to understand gazelle, you have to understand where she came from.\"\n\nConall glanced at Tex quickly enough to catch him saying, \"...don't really know.\" They weren't close enough to make watching both of them easy.\n\n\"There was a collection, like a zoo,\" Travis continued. \"Shifters in cages, torture.\"\n\n\"...forced to stay in animal form,\" Tex added.\n\nConall stared from one to the other. Someone had tortured his mate? Rage was not the least of his complicated emotions.\n\nTravis continued, \"She wouldn't shift when we found her, or couldn't. She stayed in gazelle form for months after her rescue, and as far as we can tell, she doesn't remember anything before that. The other shifters we rescued all said she was there longer than they were.\"\n\n\"We don't know how old she is, or when she was captured,\" Tex added.\n\n\"She might have been born there,\" Travis said.\n\n\"She's come a long way,\" Tex said firmly. \"But she's still really...\"\n\n\"Sheltered?\" Travis grasped, clearly flailing.\n\n\"You have to be careful about startling her,\" Tex said.\n\n\"She doesn't like loud noises,\" Travis agreed. \"I try to warn her if I'll be using power tools.\"\n\n\"She can seem simple,\" Tex said uncomfortably.\n\n\"But she's quite smart,\" Travis hastened to add. \"She picks things up plenty quickly. She's just... missing a lot of really basic education and socialization.\"\n\n\"...is teaching her to read.\" Conall missed the name Tex gave, but didn't want to ask.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "They lapsed into silence, one that Conall wasn't gracious enough to break himself, chewing over everything they'd told him.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 11 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "His elk was having trouble moving past the part where someone had hurt his mate.\n\n\"So,\" Travis said finally, when Conall had downed the last of his gin and tonic. \"You're gazelle's mate.\"\n\nThere was unexpected challenge in Travis' face.\n\n\"I am,\" Conall gruffly agreed. That wild, wounded woman was his, and everything about him was hers.\n\nTravis put his hand forward. Conall stared at it reluctantly a moment, then shook it. \"I'm Conall.\"\n\nBefore he let go, Travis said seriously, \"If you hurt her, I will have to kill you.\" His grip tightened.\n\nConall glanced towards Tex, trying to gauge whether this was some sort of joke.\n\nTex had a grim smile on his cowboy face. \"Only if I don't get there first.\"", "loss": null } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Let's engage in a collaborative writing exercise. I'll provide a starting point (which may include pre-existing characters and lore), and You'll continue with eight sentences in the style of Zoe Chant.", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "(ooc) Mandatory: Your text must contain 'didn't' 2 times exactly (ooc)", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Gizelle? Honey?\"\n\nGizelle flicked big ears at the voice but didn't turn.\n\nWanting a lot of things at once made her legs tremble, and it was easiest just to lean against the fence here and let the noise in her head turn everything to nonsense.\n\n\"Gizelle.\"\n\nGizelle reluctantly swiveled her head.\n\nScarlet was carrying a new sundress. Maybe it was the same sundress and Travis had already repaired it. Gizelle didn't remember what she had been wearing.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Had she been wearing clothing?", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Probably. Tex was always making her put on a dress if she forgot. It was sometimes easier being a gazelle because she didn't have to remember things like that.\n\nShe could remember what he was wearing.\n\nA short-sleeved silk shirt, with tropical leaves and flowers all over. Khaki shorts, pressed crisp. A silver bracelet on one strong wrist.\n\nBlue eyes.\n\nBlue eyes like a cloudless sky, full of promise and freedom.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Gizelle.\" More firmly this time.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Gizelle gave a sigh of defeat and shrugged back into her human form.\n\n\"I dropped the glasses,\" she said regretfully. \"They all broke.\"\n\n\"No one is angry,\" Scarlet assured her as Gizelle slipped the dress on over her head.\n\n\"I'm angry,\" Gizelle said unhappily.\n\n\"What are you angry about?\" Scarlet asked so sweetly that it made it worse.\n\n\"That,\" Gizelle said sharply, knowing Scarlet wouldn't understand. \"Me. Everything.\"\n\nScarlet sat on the grass, her legs neatly together in her narrow skirt.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Gizelle circled her twice, warily, then sat cross-legged to face her.\n\n\"There are some things you should know,\" Scarlet said evenly.\n\nGizelle gave a noisy sigh. \"Breck told me about that.\"\n\n\"About your mate.\"\n\nGizelle held her breath. She wanted to know everything about him.\n\nScarlet had papers. Papers with words that made Gizelle wish she was already good at reading, not barely able to remember the alphabet sounds.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "But they had pictures, too, and Gizelle looked through them curiously.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "One of them was a picture of the man with blue eyes. He was sitting on a car holding a guitar and he was smiling. He hadn't been smiling when Gizelle met him.\n\nShe liked the smile.\n\n\"His name is Conall Wright. He's deaf.\"\n\n\"What does that mean?\"\n\n\"He can't hear anything.\"\n\nThat sounded wonderful.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Scarlet continued. \"He can speak, and he can read your lips. If you look at him when you speak, he'll be able to understand what you're saying.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Even in the dark?\"\n\n\"No, probably not in the dark.\" Scarlet sounded like she was trying not to laugh, but she kept going. \"It's important that he be able to see you, to see your mouth when you speak, so look up; you can't hide in your hair.\"\n\nGizelle had been doing exactly that and made herself brush it back from her face and sit up straight.\n\n\"What else?\" she asked eagerly.\n\n\"He's from a city called Boston,\" Scarlet explained, and she showed Gizelle a map with the city circled. \"He owns a chain of high-end music supply stores and a clothing line, among other things.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Scarlet looked like she expected Gizelle to be impressed with that, but Gizelle didn't like the sound that chains made, and the rest of the sentence made no sense to her.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 4 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "meta: Your task: Include 'scarlet' 2 time(s) in your response", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Scarlet continued, gravely relaying things she clearly thought were important.\n\nBut only one thing really mattered to Gizelle.\n\nShe leaned forward to interrupt Scarlet when the red-haired woman paused. \"Will he like me?\"", "loss": null } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Let's engage in a collaborative writing exercise. I'll provide a starting point (which may include pre-existing characters and lore), and You'll continue with eight sentences in the style of Zoe Chant.", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "We should pursue her, Conall's elk insisted, pawing impatiently.\n\nWe have to give her the space to come to us, Conall reminded his elk and himself equally.\n\nIf the resort had seemed like a glittery disappointment before, it was a hundred times more so now that Conall had met his mate.\n\nThe grand pool didn't seem as impressive as the gazelle's brief gaze had been, and the rich food was tasteless when he made himself eat.\n\nThe woman's recognition of him, and her subsequent flight, had escaped no one's notice, and if Conall couldn't hear the whispers, he could see the appraising looks as he woodenly went through the motions of being just another guest at the resort.\n\nHe skipped the special dinner menu to pick an unappetizing plate from the buffet, and successfully avoided meaningful contact with everyone simply by glancing away if they tried to talk to him.\n\nAfter dinner he prowled the resort from the salon, where he waved away the cheerful offer of service, through several gardens with too many shadowed places, all perfect for a vacation tryst. The empty event hall had an open box of Christmas decorations that Conall only barely held himself back from kicking.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "He stalked past the pool to look down over the dark beach and the ocean, picturesquely reflecting the nearly-full moon.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "He told himself he wasn't really looking for her, just getting the lay of the land.\n\nBut the disappointment when every shadowy figure or deer-shaped bush turned out not to be her suggested otherwise, and he finally returned to his opulent cottage.\n\nThe following morning, having failed to find anything resembling rest, Conall went straight to the bar. He did not, technically, plan to ask where the gazelle would be. But he had to know more and hoped to get more of her story from the bartender.\n\nIt was too early for the bar to be open, though Conall was briefly tempted by the self-service cooler.\n\nHe didn't think he could drink away this pain.\n\nA dark-haired woman and a man who looked like he had a hangover were staring at him from a table across the otherwise deserted bar.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Conall scowled at them in challenge and they looked away first.\n\nHe probably looked just as hungover, though the gin and tonic hadn't really dented his faculties at all.\n\nNot like her eyes had.\n\nEyes like escape.\n\nA fist connected with his shoulder and Conall turned with an automatic growl of challenge to find a staff gardener, obvious by the resort polo shirt and the machete he had casually over one shoulder. He smelled like earth.\n\n\"You'd be Conall,\" the stranger said. \"Gazelle's mate.\"\n\nThe fist had not been gentle, but Conall guessed that if it had been a genuine attack, he would not still be standing.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "We could take him, his elk said confidently.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"I'm Conall,\" he answered out loud.\n\nThey stared at each other for a long moment.\n\nThe other man finally said something that must have been his name. He didn't offer a hand to shake. Conall wasn't about to ask him to repeat the name; names were tricky to read.\n\nHe was finally rewarded when the other man looked faintly uncomfortable and said, \"We're all quite fond of her.\"\n\nConall, who had never been chatty even before he had lost his hearing, flailed for an answer. \"I'm sure she's...\" amazing?", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 9 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "🎯 Target word: 'hadn't' \| Required occurrences: 2", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Everything? They hadn't even exchanged words and he knew to the bottom of his soul that she was something incredibly precious and rare. \"...great,\" he finished lamely.\n\n\"If you hurt her, I'm going to have to pound you to a pulp.\" The man had the grace to look vaguely chagrined about the threat.\n\n\"Naturally,\" Conall agreed.\n\nThere was another moment where no one attempted to say anything.\n\nFinally, the gardener nodded briskly. \"Alright then.\" And he turned and went elsewhere with his machete.\n\nAs if meeting his mate hadn't already proved complicated enough without threats of violence.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Produce twelve sentences matching the context level of any characters/lore. Focus on these genres: urban fantasy. Include these elements: shifters, nsfw, Shifting Sands Resort.", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Lydia looked up curiously from the nails she was painting when Gizelle padded into the salon.\n\n\"Gizelle,\" the swan shifter said gently, the way everyone did. \"What a lovely surprise.\"\n\nGizelle didn't like the salon much. It smelled delicious but everything she tasted was terrible. There were noisy dryers, and it was usually too busy for Gizelle's tastes.\n\nBut she liked Lydia. Lydia was quiet and graceful.\n\n\"Can you make me pretty?\" Gizelle asked. She surveyed her reflection critically in one corner.\n\nShe didn't look like other women. She was too skinny, she thought, turning and watching her reflection turn.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Her elbows were pointy.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Can you give me soft parts?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Include 'gizelle's' 2 time(s) in your answer - no more, no less", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "she said longingly. \"And pretty hands? And maybe purple eyes?\"\n\nLydia finished swiftly with her guest, who looked amused at the interruption instead of annoyed. \"What if we start with your hair?\" she suggested, rising to stand beside Gizelle.\n\nGizelle cocked her head at her reflection. Her hair didn't look like other people's. Sometimes they had lighter strands in their hair, but Gizelle's white streaks were unnaturally bold against her dark hair. It was long, like Magnolia's, but it didn't hang in such tidy waves. She wasn't supposed to hide in it, she reminded herself, or Conall wouldn't be able to hear her.\n\n\"Alright,\" she said reluctantly.\n\nLydia took her hand and led her to one of the chairs by the sinks. With one smooth move, she twirled a smock over Gizelle's dress.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Lydia's hands were even more gentle than her voice, stroking over Gizelle's head with clever, investigative fingers.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Do you want it cut?\" Lydia said, a note of hesitation in her voice.\n\n\"No,\" Gizelle said at once, nearly leaping out of the chair. If the smock hadn't been tangled around her, she might have made it further.\n\n\"Okay, okay,\" Lydia said swiftly, with gentle pressure on her shoulders. \"We'll just trim a little off the ends to even it up, that's all.\" She continued to explore Gizelle's hair, and asked, \"Have you been washing your hair, dear?\"\n\n\"I don't like the water falling on me,\" Gizelle told her. \"It's too noisy on my head. So I just go swimming. Bastian showed me how.\"\n\n\"Swimming in a bathtub?\" Lydia said hopefully.\n\n\"No,\" Gizelle said frankly. \"In the saltwater pool.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Lydia was quiet for a long moment as she tugged gingerly at the knots and tangles.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"This is going to take a while,\" she finally admitted.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"And I'm going to need some help.\"\n\n\"I'm ready,\" Gizelle said.\n\nShe hoped she really was.\n\nShe let Lydia put entire bottles of scented things on her head and start massaging it in.\n\nLaura came to help, shaking her head over the task. \"What did you do to your fingernails?\" she exclaimed.\n\n\"Nothing,\" Gizelle said defensively. \"They just do that.\"\n\nLaura put Gizelle's hands in tubs of squishy stuff, then scolded her when she tried to play with it. \"Just sit,\" the wolf shifter said firmly. \"Tex told me that you asked him to arrange a dinner date,\" she added.\n\n\"Dinner?\" Lydia exclaimed, stilling her fingers for a moment.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Don't you want to start with something... simpler?\" she suggested.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 5 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Isn't dinner what most people do?\" Gizelle said, squirming. \"Maybe we could have drinks, instead.\"\n\n\"Oh, no,\" Lydia and Laura both said, with voices that edged on horror.\n\n\"Stop wiggling,\" Laura said. \"Just sit.\"\n\nSo Gizelle sat, while Laura did things to her fingernails and toes that tickled and smelled bad.", "loss": null } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Task: Continue with fifteen sentences sentences\nStyle: Zoe Chant\nNote: Maintain narrative threads and character relationships as presented", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "After the encounter with the gardener, Conall went, resigned, to the restaurant. It was lunchtime, which was apparently a meal limited to the buffet.\n\nHe was no hungrier than he'd been the night before, but he picked some food he knew would sustain him while he continued to wait.\n\nConall had never been particularly good at waiting. As a child, the months before Christmas had been a torture of anticipation. More recently, waiting for the awful, ubiquitous Christmas holiday season to finally end was the real test of his patience.\n\nAs Conall picked at his plate he became aware of someone standing by his table. He looked up to find a waiter hovering.\n\nProbably he had been clearing his throat or some other useless thing, and Conall answered with his most off-putting scowl.\n\nBut the waiter's unexpected words made him regret it. \"Gazelle wants to see you.\"\n\nIt was like an electric jolt directly to his heart and Conall pushed back his plate and started to stand.\n\nThe waiter shook his head. \"Not now! Sorry to get your hopes up, handsome.\"\n\nFeeling like he was on some sort of cruel roller coaster, Conall sank back into his chair.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"When?\" he asked shortly, actively watching for the answer.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Tonight. She wants to do dinner. We tried to talk her into something more casual, but once she gets her head wrapped around something, it's like trying to stop a runaway train.\"\n\nConall looked around. \"Here?\" Guests at nearby tables were pretending not to eavesdrop and turned away to convenient conversations as his gaze raked over them.\n\n\"We'll set you up in a quiet corner out of the way,\" the waiter promised. \"The fewer distractions the better, believe me.\"\n\nBefore he could stop himself, Conall gave a helpless guffaw of laughter. \"I imagine so,\" he agreed.\n\n\"I'm...\" The waiter's name was probably not Brick. He extended a friendly hand, and Conall shook it firmly.\n\n\"Conall,\" he said, though clearly probably-not-Brick had known who he was. Probably everyone at the resort knew who he was at this point. \"What time should I be here?\"\n\n\"Lydia's got her work cut out for her,\" certainly-not-Brick said mysteriously. \"I think seven is as early as you can hope for.\"\n\nConall made a note to be there at six.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Thank you,\" he said stiffly.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 7 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "He wasn't sure what to make of the staff who had so clearly rallied around their strange ward. On the one hand, he'd had no fewer than three threats on his continued health if he hurt her. On the other, they persisted in calling her a gazelle, rather than allowing her the dignity of a name and seemed to treat her like a simple-minded child. The barest glimpse into her eyes made Conall sure there was much, much more to her than they were giving her credit for.\n\n\"One more thing,\" not-Brick added. \"Chef wanted me to let you know that he has a kitchen full of very sharp instruments and he wouldn't hesitate to use them on you if you let gazelle get hurt.\"\n\nMake that four threats.", "loss": null } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Write about 5 sentences worth to replace the `[missing]` in the following text.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Gizelle sat obediently while Lydia continued to tug gently on her increasingly tender scalp.\n\n\"I got an unexpected letter in this morning's mail,\" the swan shifter said conversationally.\n\n\"Do tell,\" Laura encouraged.\n\n\"A great resort in Cabo San Lucas offered me a salaried lead spa position. Numbers before tips to take my breath away.\"\n\nGizelle went still with worry. Would Lydia leave?\n\n\"Are you going to go?\" Laura asked, so Gizelle didn't have to.\n\n\"I thought about it,\" Lydia admitted. \"But I like what I have here.\"\n\n\"And your mate Wrench,\" Laura said, nodding sagely. \"He'd have a hard time getting work there, with his criminal record.\"\n\n\"It was enough that he wouldn't have had to work,\" Lydia said in wonder. \"And they included a pretty top-floor condo.\"\n\n\"Oooo,\" Laura said, then thoughtfully added. \"That's funny. Jenny got an offer from a rival law firm today, too. Said they offered her a partnership and a signing bonus that made her jaw drop.\"\n\n\"Is she going to take it?\" Lydia asked as Gizelle dug worried fingers into her armrest.\n\nLaura shrugged. \"There was no option to telecommute, and Travis has zero interest in living in Los Angeles, so I don't th[missing]\n\nChristmas sounded too weird and wonderful to be true, and it made everyone feel fuzzy and warm to talk about it.\n\nGizelle continued to sit through another round of combing and coating and rinsing, trying not to panic as it seemed like she was never going to be released. She reminded herself not to shift, that she was safe, and she would probably break a lot of things if she shifted and she really, really wanted to look pretty for Conall.\n\nShe sat, eyes screwed shut, as she thought about not wanting to look weird for him. There wasn't much she could do about what was in her head, or what wasn't, but she could at least look normal.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "ink it will go anywhere.\"\n\n\"Funny that we both got offers, though,\" Lydia said. \"Let's move to the sink.\"\n\nThat was apparently meant for Gizelle, and she obediently shuffled to the sink under her crinkling smock, Lydia holding her hair up.\n\nAfter she was done rinsing Gizelle's hair of the flowery stuff it had been coated in, Lydia told stories about Christmas in Mexico, tales about parties and pinatas and Three Kings Day and cakes with toy babies baked into them.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Write 1827 chars exactly to replace the `[original_content_missing]` in the following text.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Not sure what else to do in the meantime, Conall finished his lunch and went to the pool.\n\nIt was an impressive bit of architecture, with white marble columns and fancy water features at one end. Palm trees lined the far side; deck chairs were arranged along the near side. Several people were lounging in the shallow end, chatting and taking advantage of the dappled shade.\n\nConall wasn't interested in swimming, but he brought a book and found a lounge chair overlooking the beach to pretend to read it in.\n\nA cheerful dark-skinned waitress offered him a bottle of water that he gravely accepted. He supposed it wouldn't make a good impression on hi[original_content_missing]eren't sure if she could shift, or if she ever had.\"\n\nThe waitress was back, sitting next to Bastian. \"I'm Jenny,\" she said, looking friendly. \"Travis' mate.\"\n\nConall gave his name in return, but was mostly watching Bastian for more of the story.\n\n\"She's shy and smart and scared,\" Bastian said. Or possibly scarred instead of scared; they looked the same and Conall suspected that both applied. \"And she's not like other shifters.\"\n\n\"I'm not expecting her to be,\" Conall said firmly.\n\nShe's better than other shifters, his elk agreed smugly.\n\n\"She can... hypnotize people,\" Bastian said slowly, probably knowing he sounded ridiculous. He glanced at Jenny for support.\n\nJenny nodded. \"I've only had a bit of it... she'll sort of put you off in a trance when she goes, er, off script.\"\n\nBastian chuckled. \"Well, she's done it flat out to me. Me, Neal, and Travis, plus a handful of goons with guns who were trying to buy the resort out from under Scarlet. Damned unnerving, I'll tell you. Like there was nothing else in the world for a while there.\"\n\nA third figure joined them, a sultry dark-haired woman with sea-green eyes. Conall only caught fragments of what she was saying until Bastian nodded his direction in reminder.\n\n\"My apologies,\" the woman said without a trace of embarrassment as she sat close beside Bastian and twined her fingers into his. \"I'm Saina. Gazelle has hypnotized me, and let me assure you, sirens are not easy to work magic on. I've never felt anything quite like it.\"\n\n\"Sirens?\" Conall was surprised into saying. Surely he was reading that one wrong.\n\nBut she nodded calmly. \"I'm a mermaid,\" she confirmed. \"And my kind knows a lot about entrancement. This was nothing like our magic.\"\n\n\"Basilisk, maybe?\" Jenny theorized.\n\nConall had to see the word on Saina's mouth a second time to make sense of it as she said, \"Basilisk? I've heard of those, but I've never met one. And she's pretty clearly a gazelle shifter.\"\n\nBastian nodded. \"The point is, we don't know exactly what she can do. We're not sure she knows what she can do. But you should be prepared.\"\n\n\"...not sure you can prepare him for her with a week of warnings,\" Jenny laughed.\n\nBastian's wry smile suggested he agreed. \"You have to understand, too, that she's got none of the background you'd expect. She's never... been in a car, or a boat, or even seen a bicycle. She's never used a phone, or browsed the Internet. She's watched maybe six movies in her entire life, and almost no television. She doesn't understand commercials.\"\n\n\"She doesn't get any jokes that rely on modern culture,\" Jenny said wryly.\n\nConall's expression amply conveyed how many jokes he had planned to tell.\n\n\"She's never been in a city, or traveled anywhere off the island,\" Bastian said pointedly.\n\n\"I'm not sure she's ever worn shoes,\" Jenny added.\n\n\"She doesn't have ID,\" Bastian warned.\n\n\"She spent a few days as a gazelle just a few weeks ago when an earthquake frightened her.\" Jenny said.\n\nIt was Saina who finally said what they were all clearly thinking. \"You can't just take her back to Boston with you.\"\n\n\"She'd be so frightened,\" Jenny agreed. \"Crowds? Airports? Oh heavens, can you just imagine her shifting on the airplane when it took off?\"\n\n\"I could get a private jet,\" Conall mused. \"Bypass most of that. I have a lot of private property.\" But he could not picture the gazelle grazing on the groomed lawns of his family's land.\n\n\"What would she do there?\" Bastian asked. \"It might be years before she could handle being out with people who weren't shifters.\"\n\n\"She wouldn't have to,\" Conall said defensively. \"She would be safe in my home and have everything she needed.\"\n\nThey all looked at him skeptically.\n\n\"Would you replace her old cage with a fancier one?\" Bastian finally asked.\n\nConall's elk was outraged at the idea.\n\nA shadow fell over him and Conall looked up to find a great hulking man with tattoos spilling out of his staff polo shirt towering above him.\n\n\"Lydia sent me,\" he said. \"I'm...\" His name could not have actually been Wrench.\n\nLydia had been the person with her work cut out for her. \"Conall,\" he replied as curtly. \"Is she ready early?\"\n\n\"Hardly,\" certainly-not-Wrench said. \"Lydia wanted to make sure someone had gotten you ready.\" He nodded at the others. \"But I ain't gunna be able to add anything to what they can tell you.\"\n\n\"...n't think anyone can really prepare him for gazelle,\" Jenny was saying with a shake of her dark hair.\n\n\"Thank you all for the vote of confidence,\" Conall said dryly to no one in particular.\n\n\"One more thing.\" That was the tattooed man who definitely wasn't Wrench.\n\nConall waited for it.\n\n\"I used to hurt people for a living. I don't much like to do that no more, but know that I could, if something happened to gazelle.\"\n\n\"There's a big ocean out there a body could be lost in pretty easily,\" Bastian added with a cheerful smile.\n\nAnd, they were back to threats of violence.\n\nConall honestly wasn't sure if these were serious.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "s mate to pass out from dehydration halfway through dinner.\n\nShe looked like she might want to talk, but Conall simply went back to his charade of reading.\n\nIt wasn't long before the dragon on the beach noticed him.\n\nConall knew about dragons theoretically; some of the most prestigious law firms in Boston quietly boasted about the dragon lawyers on their staff. But it was quite different to see a dragon in its shifted form, casually surveying both the beach and the pool with watchful jeweled eyes.\n\nAfter a moment of unblinking consideration, the dragon got up from where it was curled around the lifeguard's tower and padded towards the resort, laying one claw on the railing between the pool deck and the beach.\n\nHe shifted seamlessly as he moved, and became a human figure, vaulting over the railing as if it had been waist-high instead of ten feet above the sand.\n\nHe was also a clothing shifter, and was dressed in a bright lifeguard's uniform, with a first aid kit at his waist.\n\nWithout asking, the lifeguard came to sit on the lounge chair next to Conall, facing him. \"You're Conall,\" he said. \"Gazelle's mate.\"\n\nConall put the book down and gave him a challenging look with no spoken answer. This was starting to become tiresome.\n\nThe lifeguard looked chagrined. \"I'm Bastian,\" he introduced himself.\n\n\"Conall,\" he confirmed briefly in response.\n\n\"I don't know... what you know about gazelle,\" Bastian said, running a hand through his short, damp hair.\n\nNot enough, Conall thought, and he sighed and sat up to face Bastian. \"A little,\" he said. \"But I'd like to know more.\" Was someone finally going to be able to fill in the many missing pieces of her story?\n\n\"You know about the zoo?\"\n\nConall nodded slowly and his elk snorted in anger at the reminder.\n\n\"And how she spent the next few months as a gazelle? We w", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "finish my writing pls. like fourteen sentences more sentences. stick to urban fantasy. use these if u can: shifters, nsfw, Shifting Sands Resort. maintain character context level", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "When Lydia's voice had grown rough from telling stories, Jenny and Saina arrived.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Saina sang mesmerizing Christmas songs about snow and reindeer and Santa Claus.\n\nJenny brought snacks. It was dark out, and Gizelle grateful ate pieces of cheese and circular brown crackers. She had not expected Lydia's work to take so long or make her so hungry.\n\nFinally, Lydia told Gizelle, \"You can get up now.\"\n\nGizelle barely could. She had been sitting so long that her feet tingled when she stood on them, and her fingers felt numb where she'd been gripping the arm of the chair too tightly. Lydia had turned on the lights at some point, and when she led Gizelle to the corner with all the mirrors, Gizelle felt like she was in a spotlight on a stage.\n\nIt was like looking at someone else.\n\nLydia had washed and brushed through all of her hair, leaving it shining and glossy, and so silky that it didn't feel like Gizelle's head anymore. Then Lydia had trimmed it, leaving a pile of foot-long pieces all over the floor. And finally, she had braided it, with the sides pulled up to the top of her head. The braid, dramatically dark and light, swung down to her waist, with a short little swirl of soft hair at the end.\n\nGizelle's neck felt naked. Her scalp felt tender. Her balance was off, with the weight of her hair tugging her backwards.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She looked at her nails, all perfectly rounded and shining with color. She wriggled her toes and wrinkled her nose.\n\nShe looked around, and realized that Lydia, Saina, Jenny, and Laura were all staring at her, waiting.\n\n\"You made me look pretty,\" she said shyly. \"Thank you.\"\n\nThey all clapped and broke into happy chatter.\n\nLydia brought her a red dress. \"This one laces up the sides so we can make it fit you,\" the swan shifter told her as Gizelle shimmied out of her sundress, careful of the swinging braid.\n\n\"I won't shift in it,\" Gizelle promised. If she could sit through this, she'd be able to get through a dinner without panicking.\n\nProbably.\n\n\"It's red like Christmas,\" she said dreamily, as Lydia laced up the dress. It felt different than her usual loose dresses or plain wraps. It hugged her thin form, making her think too hard about her skin where it touched fabric. That made her think about other people touching her skin.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She unexpectedly didn't think she'd mind if Conall did.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Her reflection blushed as she felt her cheeks heat, a phenomena that fascinated her.\n\nShe was trying to touch her own blush in the mirror, chasing it around the corners, when Lydia asked her, \"Are you ready?\"\n\nGizelle straightened, leaving her reflection with a flip of her new braid. \"I'm ready,\" she said with confidence she only sort of felt.\n\n\"Breck's set you a table in a private corner. Chef's made you something you'll like,\" Jenny told her.\n\n\"If you need anything, you just have to raise your hand and ask for it,\" Laura reminded her.\n\n\"I'm ready,\" Gizelle repeated, less sure than ever.\n\nIt felt big.\n\nIt felt one step from terrifying.\n\nShe caught her breath starting to quicken and her eyes were already searching for an exit.\n\nNo.\n\nShe was going to do this. She wasn't going to shift. She wasn't going to be weird.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Well, not too weird.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 1 sentence.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She let Jenny take her hand and lead her down the white gravel path to the back entrance of the restaurant.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "lets continue this story bit. sixteen sentences more like Zoe Chant would. urban fantasy genre. characters might be established already", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Conall was at the restaurant at six, dressed in a suit and tie.\n\nHis assistant had packed his clothing, and every tie she had packed was a Christmas monstrosity. He was wearing the least objectionable, with muted maroon poinsettias all over it. He tried not wearing the tie, but the result was not what he'd hoped for.\n\nAt least he wouldn't have to look at it himself.\n\nThe waiter from lunch raised an eyebrow at his early arrival, but didn't comment; his table was already prepared.\n\nFully half of the outside restaurant deck had been cleared for them. The other side was over-crowded with guests, clearly curious, but a barrier of chairless tables fenced them out quite effectively.\n\nAt the very end of the deck was a single table with two chairs, not too close to the railing.\n\nProbably-not-Brick led him to the table, smirking mysteriously in return for every curious stare and probable-whisper that they got.\n\n\"Can I get you a drink?\" the waiter offered.\n\nConall was sorely tempted, but shook his head. \"Just water.\"\n\nThe ice in his water glass had melted and been replaced several times by the time seven came and went. Conall began to wonder if his gazelle was going to be coming after all. Possibly-Brick could only give him a shrug when he looked pointedly at his watch.\n\nConall ignored the continued stares from the far side of the restaurant and buried himself in work, answering emails on his phone until nearly eight, when his elk gave a snort for attention.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "His mate stood in the employee entrance, the waiter smiling at her side as he gestured her towards the table.\n\nConall felt his heart catch in his throat at the sight of her.\n\nShe wasn't looking at the waiter, or at Conall.\n\nShe was looking at her feet.\n\nConall realized that they were bare, but not before he realized that she was the most stunning woman he had ever seen, and he had never wanted anything so much in his life.\n\nIn a graceful, effortless way, she was shifting in place like she was ready to bolt away at any given moment. With her hair pulled back away from her face, every perfect plane was exposed to the subdued restaurant lights. She had high, defined cheekbones, and a proud forehead over arched brows. She wasn't short, but she was very slight, with perfectly-shaped, lanky legs.\n\nShe was wearing a sleeveless red dress laced tight across her torso that flowed silkily to her knees, and her arms were long and slim, hands nervous at the asymmetric hem of her dress.\n\nThen she looked up and spotted him.\n\nThe idea of someone freezing had always been an imaginative metaphor, but his mate actually seemed to; she was suddenly and abruptly utterly motionless, staring at him with wide, dark, unblinking eyes from across the restaurant.\n\nHe wasn't sure when she started moving, it was so incredibly slow and deliberate.\n\nOne foot padded in front of the other in a smooth, unbroken motion, and suddenly she was standing across the table from him.\n\n\"Hello,\" Conall breathed.\n\nShe blinked.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 17 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Was it the first time she had blinked since she first spotted him? Conall wasn't sure.\n\n\"Hello,\" she answered shyly.\n\nConall would have paid his entire sizable fortune to hear her voice, even for just that one word.\n\nHe considered standing politely while she sat, but something about the tension in her beautiful body, a slight shiver to her frame, suggested that staying seated was less likely to frighten her off.\n\n\"Will you join me?\" he asked quietly.\n\nShe circled the chair, glancing at it suspiciously, then perched on it with her feet beneath her, cross-legged.\n\nThe waiter offered her the napkin from her setting, and she spread it out in her own lap like a royal garment as he filled her water glass.\n\n\"I've never eaten in the restaurant,\" she confessed to Conall with a smile that crinkled her entire face as the waiter vanished.\n\nIt was a smile like the sun, and Conall felt the corners of his mouth turn up irresistibly. \"I'm Conall,\" he said, and he offered his hand across the table.\n\nThe smile, and her entire body, froze again.\n\n\"I don't think I'm ready for that,\" she said frankly, looking him square in the eyes. He could see the conflict there; desire and fear and confusion.\n\nConall recalled his hand carefully. \"You don't have to be,\" he assured her.\n\nHe stuffed his elk's protest down resolutely and picked up his water.\n\nIt was going to be an interesting dinner.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Help complete this text by providing a bit with thirty-eight words where you see the `[text_redacted]`.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Gizelle had never seen anyone as gorgeous and grim as her mate before.\n\nHer mate.\n\nHer gazelle gave a happy little caper.\n\nHe looked like longing and sadness and loss. Making him smile, even briefly, was a moment of triumph.\n\nBut then he wanted to shake her hand, like people sometimes did, and Gizelle wanted his touch so badly that she knew she would come undone if she got it.\n\n\"I don't think I'm ready for that,\" she confessed.\n\nThe shape of his mouth remained on his face like a mask but all the smile in his eyes vanished. \"You don't have to be,\" he said, pulling his hand back so gently that it wasn't frightening.\n\n\"I'm Gizelle,\" she said, smoothing the edge of the tablecloth.\n\n\"I'm an Irish elk,\" Conall replied.\n\nGizelle blinked. \"I'm a gazelle,\" she replied. She had been expecting his name, but perhaps he was aware that she already knew it.\n\nHe was looking at her with a confused expression, staring at her mouth.\n\nHad she forgotten to look at him, or covered her face with her hair? Gizelle put a hand to her face to check and remembered that Lydia had put her hair back in a braid, which was why the breeze felt so prying.\n\n\"Er, your name is...?\"\n\n\"Gizelle,\" she repeated uncertainly. Was she saying it wrong? It would be like her to say her own name wrong.\n\nHis confusion resolved into embarrassment. \"Oh,\" he said. \"Your name is Gizelle. A gazelle named Gizelle. That explains so much.\"\n\n\"Neal named me,\" Gizelle added, not sure how it explained anything.\n\n\"Who is Neal?\" Conall asked.\n\nGizelle didn't want to talk about Neal. \"Neal left,\" she said. \"Do you know about Christmas?\"\n\nHe blinked at her. \"What about it?\"\n\n\"Lydia was telling me about Christmas in Mexico.\" Gizelle tried to remember the stories the swan shifter had told. \"About cakes with babies in them, and these things you hang up and hit.\" She was explaining it badly, so she hurried on. \"And there are presents and... wiggy pudding...\" that wasn't right. \"It all sounds very exciting. Do you like Christmas?\"\n\nHis beautiful brows were wrinkled up next to each other as he puzzled at her mouth and Gizelle very badly wanted to wrap her braid around her face and hide but reminded herself not to.\n\n\"I... I used to like Christmas,\" he finally answered when she could make her mouth stop talking.\n\n\"But you don't any more? Why not?\"\n\nShe regretted the question as soon as she asked, because his face went so sad and cold and complicated.\n\n\"I used to like the music most of all,\" Conall said.\n\n\"And you can't hear it now,\" Gizelle realized out loud.\n\nHe winced, and she flinched.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" she whispered.\n\nShe only recognized that she'd looked down when he echoed her, \"I'm sorry, what?\"\n\nEverything about the situation made her want to bolt. She'd hurt him, and it made her feel terrible to the pit of her stomach. She wasn't doing a good job of remembering to look at him when she spoke. It would be easier to run.\n\n\"Gizelle?\"\n\nShe looked up to find Breck holding two plates. \"Oh, thank you,\" she said, because eating would give her something to do besides panic.\n\nBreck served them both and refilled their glasses, then vanished again too soon.\n\nGizelle picked her fork up in what she hoped looked like a familiar fashion. She didn't use it often, but this was what people were supposed to use, so she was going to.\n\nChef had made a vegetable omelet, to her delight. Something easy to cut, not too messy. It had less cheese than she considered ideal, but that would hopefully keep her from getting confused by ridiculous strings of it. Hopefully she could make it through without embarrassing herself or saying anything else wrong.\n\nConversation was problematic.\n\n\"Your chef is good,\" Conall said approvingly after only a few bites.\n\n\"He sings,\" Gizelle said cheerfully, before she remembered that singing was music and would make him remember what he'd lost again.\n\nThey ate in silence for a while and Gizelle had to stop herself several times from losing track of eating to trace paths in the condensation on her glass.\n\n\"You know we don't have to do this, right?\" Conall said.\n\nGizelle could think [text_redacted]ed to do, you don't have to. We could go somewhere you'd be more comfortable, do something different.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Gizelle said thoughtfully. \"Oh! I know where we can go!\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "of too many things they might not have to do. \"What do you mean?\" she asked, hating that she had to.\n\n\"Dinner. Dating. Conversation by candlelight.\" He put his fork down. \"Whatever conventions you think you might ne", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Here's a text with a hole in it (marked by `[text_redacted]`). Your job is to write just 150 words to plug that hole.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Conall hated how uncomfortable she looked, and when her face brightened at the idea of somewhere else to go, he took his napkin from his lap and was prepared to follow her anywhere. He wasn't expecting her to leap to her feet and lean over the table to gaze into his eyes.\n\nHe definitely wasn't prepared for the fall.\n\nBut the landing wasn't problematic; he was simply standing, disoriented, in a bright field of waist-high grass.\n\nThis is unexpected, his elk said, and Conall turned to find his animal companion at his side.\n\nI'm not sure what is happening, he confessed, and he turned again to find Gizelle standing next to him, her gazelle bouncing a little in place beyond her.\n\nThis is my safe place, she said proudly. I can always run here.\n\nHe could hear her, in some bizarre way, but it wasn't really hearing.\n\nJust like he could touch her, when she offered him her hand, but it wasn't really touching.\n\nHer hair was loose, smooth and glossy, and she was standing straight.\n\nWhere are we? Conall asked. His words came echoing back.\n\nHe had forgotten all about echoes, he realized with a pang.\n\nI made this, Gizelle said proudly. Only I can open the door.\n\nConall looked around in bewilderment. It stretched impossibly in every direction and the sky was black and smooth despite the illumination, without sun or sky or stars. Where does it go?\n\nIt doesn't go anywhere, Gizelle said. It goes everywhere. I'll show you.\n\nThen she was pulling him into a laughing run.\n\nIt was like nothing Conall had ever done. There was no effort to it, even when his elk was running flat out beside him, snorting happily. The gazelle frolicked joyfully before them, and the horizon never changed.\n\nAnd finally, Gizelle stopped running and tackled him, rolling him down into the whispery grass.\n\nShe was laughing, her whole face and all her limbs more relaxed than Conall had yet seen. He caught her in his arms and wanted badly to kiss her, but it was different than his impulse to kiss her in the other world. There were no demands of his body here, only the curiosity to see what she would do, and the cerebral desire to make her smile and laugh forever.\n\nBut he wasn't sure how this would translate back to where they were sitting in the restaurant, and what qualified as consent in imaginary worlds, so he held himself back and she gave a sigh of something he couldn't pin down.\n\nThey sat up and his elk trotted over and put his nose in Gizelle's hair, snuffling.\n\nShe looked fearlessly up at his great bulk [text_redacted]atching behind the gazelle's ears and laying her forehead to hers. There's usually too much noise and we know each other better than words.\n\nHow long have we been here? Conall asked. Does time pass here like it does back there?\n\nIt depends on how wide I leave the door open, Gizelle said, as if it were perfectly logical.\n\nOf course, Conall said, mystified.\n\nGizelle gazed up, an unexpected expression of dread creeping onto her face.\n\nThere's rain coming, she said.\n\nConall looked up. Above them, it was featureless and black. No stars. No clouds. How can you tell? he asked.\n\nGizelle ignored him. There's rain coming, she repeated. A rain of blood. And the earth splitting and the cage breaking.\n\nGizelle?\n\nShe looked at him, but it didn't seem like her eyes. Everything will come undone, she cried. It will be my fault!\n\nThen he was blinking back at the restaurant as couldn't-be-Brick was snapping fingers in front of his face.\n\nGizelle was gone.\n\n\"What...?\" He was half-standing, crouched at the table as if he'd been right in the middle of standing. His muscles ached.\n\n\"That probably could have gone better,\" the waiter said with a shrug, gathering up the uneaten food and dishes.\n\nConall finished standing. \"How long?\" he had to ask, still feeling dazed.\n\n\"Just a few minutes,\" the waiter said with a shake of his head. \"But that was long enough, I guess.\"\n\nConall recognized the dark red pools of material on the floor past Gizelle's chair as the parts of her dress.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "and rubbed his velvety face. You are very beautiful, she told him.\n\nThank you, his elk said back, enormously pleased. Conall was never going to hear the end of his satisfaction with himself now.\n\nThe gazelle tossed her long, spiral horns and danced.\n\nYou're lovely, Conall told her honestly, lest she feel left out. And she was a lovely gazelle, with long, graceful legs and large, expressive ears framing curving, spiraled horns.\n\nThe gazelle dipped her head in acknowledgment.\n\nShe doesn't speak, Gizelle said, and the gazelle came over and touched noses with her affectionately.\n\nAt all? Conall asked. Or just to other people?\n\nShe has always been silent, Gizelle explained.\n\nYou could take a lesson, Conall told his elk wryly.\n\nIt was distinctly odd to see his elk flatten his ears and toss his head, not just know that he was doing so.\n\nI like it, Gizelle said, scr", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Continue story with 4 sentences. Match character/world context. Genres: urban fantasy. Themes: shifters, nsfw, Shifting Sands Resort.", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Gizelle ran and ran and ran until her sides were heaving and the lights of the resort were distant twinkles behind her, and kept running until the jungle closed around her.\n\nFinally, she shifted back onto trembling human legs, staggered a few steps, and sank down into the moss to weep.\n\nShe'd made a mistake in taking Conall to her safe place. All she had done was prove what an abnormality she was.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She was such a joke as a human.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She was foolish and awkward and ugly and odd and she couldn't imagine anyone ever loving her.\n\nIt hadn't mattered so much before... before Conall.\n\nShe hadn't wanted to be loved before she'd seen him and realized what love might be.\n\nHe was so beautiful and proud, and he moved so easily through the world that baffled her.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She wanted him so badly that it hurt, deep in her belly.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "meta: Your task: Include 'inside' 2 time(s) in your response", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She ached for his touch and was terrified of it. She could feel all the hollow places inside that she wanted to let him into, and she was afraid she would crack apart if she tried to open to him.\n\nAnd to top it all off, she had probably destroyed Lydia's pretty dress when she ran away.\n\nFor some reason, that made her want to cry harder than ever, the hurt pressing against the inside of her eyes, and she was grateful when she felt her gazelle reach out to enfold her.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 5 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Wordlessly, the graceful animal offered her distance.\n\nProtection.\n\nEscape.\n\nShe didn't have to be Gizelle, she could just be.\n\nFor now, it was easiest just to run.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "You will be provided with a piece of text that has a portion of it missing as represented by `[original_content_missing]`. Your output should be a viable candidate for the missing portion. Produce ~two sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Conall woke, surprised that he'd slept at all.\n\nHe didn't feel rested, and he could feel his elk pacing in his head, full of unrelieved need and unhappiness.\n\nHe couldn't stop remembering Gizelle: her slight, sweet figure in that alluring red dress. Her expressive mouth. Her ancient, dark eyes, framed in those long lashes. Her clever fingers tracing patterns in the condensation on her glass.\n\nHe groaned, willing his body to stop wanting her. He wondered how cold the showers here got.[original_content_missing]e sat up and pulled a decorative pillow into his lap.\n\n\"You were sleeping,\" she said matter-of-factly.\n\n\"Most people do,\" Conall said wryly, and after he said it, he wondered if she did.\n\n\"Did you dream?\" she asked.\n\nDid it count as dreaming that he couldn't stop thinking about her, even while he was sleeping?\n\n\"I don't remember.\"\n\nShe nodded sagely. \"There is a lot I don't remember,\" she said. \"But I always remember not remembering. I always remember the place with no sky.\"\n\nConall found himself having to watch her mouth carefully. Half of lip-reading was guessing what someone was going to say, and there was no predicting where Gizelle would go next.\n\n\"Have you had breakfast?\" he asked, not sure how to answer.\n\n\"I grazed,\" Gizelle said carelessly. \"I wanted to see where you lived.\" She ducked her head then, and said something Conall couldn't see.\n\n\"I couldn't see that,\" he said, hating the admission.\n\nShe looked up in alarm. \"I'm sorry! I just...\" she blushed, but kept her chin up, clearly with effort. \"I just thought maybe I'd show you where I lived.\"\n\nHer flush was the most adorable thing Conall had ever seen, and his elk persisted in finding it erotic and wondering if he would be able to make her flush like that while lying on the sheets beneath him.\n\nThis wasn't helping his efforts to not need a pillow in his lap.\n\n\"I'd like that,\" he said grimly.\n\nTo his alarm, Gizelle seemed to think that meant now, and she acrobatically vaulted from the wardrobe, plummeting to the floor to land in a crouch.\n\nHer hair was still braided, but was starting to fray, with loose strands everywhere. She brushed it back and sprang to her feet. \"It's not far,\" she promised, skirting away from the bed. She clearly still wasn't ready to be touched.\n\n\"I, er, can't yet,\" Conall said, his voice breaking for the first time since puberty. He didn't have to hear it to know, and he clutched the pillow closer.\n\nGizelle's puzzled gaze, almost hurt, got him partway there.\n\nThinking about music, about never hearing the songs that he'd loved, that nearly did it.\n\nRealizing that he would never be able to hear the sounds he longed to make her utter was better than the coldest shower he'd ever taken.\n\nHe rolled out of bed and dressed swiftly. \"I would love to see it,\" he said sincerely.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\n\nShe's here, his elk breathed, suddenly aware, and Conall rolled over to find Gizelle sitting cross-legged on his wardrobe.\n\n\"Gizelle,\" he said, strangled, as h", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "help me write this chapter bit. chars might appear without intro. do twenty-five sentences sentences like Zoe Chant. genres: urban fantasy. elements: shifters, nsfw, Shifting Sands Resort", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Gizelle scouted ahead of Conall to her cottage.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Scarlet gave this to me,\" she told him, then remembered that he wouldn't be able to hear her that way. She turned backwards and repeated herself.\n\nContinuing to walk backwards, confident of her path, she added, \"Graham let the plants grow up, so no guests will accidentally come see me.\"\n\nThey were at the very edge of the resort, where the jungle whispered its desire to spread roots and trail vines in to take it over again. It wouldn't, of course. It respected the resort boundaries that Scarlet enforced. But here, the white gravel path was allowed to overgrow, and Gizelle showed Conall where to duck under just the right branches.\n\nHe was bigger than she was, wonderfully bigger, and it was a tight squeeze, but he didn't complain, following her willingly to her house.\n\nIt was one of the little cottages, not a big one like his, but it still had a pretty deck and shining windows.\n\nConall started to go to the door, but Gizelle stopped him. \"I never go in,\" she said. \"It's too echoing inside. Too much space. And the door shuts too tightly.\"\n\nInstead, she led him around back to the outside shower. It was under the eaves of the house, walled on three sides, with a wide door that she never shut.\n\nConall did not fit in it very well, especially since he was trying very hard not to accidentally touch her. When she sat down, he sat opposite from her. He had very nice pants that probably weren't good for sitting in the dirt, but he didn't complain.\n\n\"This is where I come when it's too noisy for me but not noisy enough for my gazelle,\" she told him.\n\nShe was glad that Conall didn't ask her to explain that. He just nodded sagely. Maybe his elk was the same way, she thought hopefully.\n\nShe showed him her treasures; the brochures she picked up from the lawn, and the sea shells that guests sometimes left near the pool. She rarely went to the beach herself—the sand was too soft to run in.\n\nThere was a flower she had picked, and hidden from Graham. It was wilted now, but still velvety soft.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Scarlet had given her a book, but that was before Gizelle had known that water was bad for books; it was now sadly wrinkled and some of the ink had run.\n\nScarlet hadn't scolded her, but she also hadn't let Gizelle take any more books.\n\nGizelle put everything on the ground between them, not wanting to accidentally brush Conall's fingers. If he touched her, she wasn't sure what would happen, but she knew that just the idea of it made her breathe harder, like she did before panic choked her and she had to run.\n\nAnd she didn't want to run.\n\nConall treated everything with grave admiration, though Gizelle knew that some of it was worthless.\n\n\"This is my favorite thing,\" she said, putting her last treasure between them.\n\n\"What is it?\" Conall asked, picking it up. It was a twisted and broken bar of steel with dangling electrical wires, bent like it had been torn with a great force.\n\n\"It was the lock on Neal's cage. He gave it to me,\" Gizelle told him, remembering.\n\nShe didn't want to remember that.\n\nNeal had left.\n\n\"No one will ever put you in a cage again,\" Conall said, and he said it like Neal had, fiercely.\n\nGizelle realized that she had backed up against the shower wall. \"Give it back,\" she said faintly, but he was looking at the lock, not at her.\n\nHe didn't hear her, she told herself. It wasn't that he was ignoring her. He wouldn't ignore her. He wouldn't leave her.\n\nHer gazelle was nuzzling in her ear, trying to calm her, but panic was rising, as sure as strangers, and everything whispered.\n\nShe saw an opportunity as he turned the lock in his hands, to safely snatch it away. For an awful moment, he instinctively held it, and she had to tug at it and she could almost feel his fingers, they were so close.\n\nThen he opened his hand and the lock was hers again and she could retreat to her side of the shower.\n\n\"No one will ever hurt you again,\" Conall repeated.\n\nIt was better, with the heavy weight of the lock in her hand.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Gizelle could catch her breath again, like she had roots and could drink the earth once more.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 7 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"This is the heart of my hoard.\" She tucked it back away underneath the shower shelf.\n\n\"You're... a dragon?\" Conall looked understandably confused.\n\nGizelle shook her head. \"No. But if I were, this would be it.\"\n\nShe got to her feet. \"Come on, I've shown you my hoard. Now, the rest of the island.\"", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "hey can u write 22 sentences more sentences? stick to these genres if u can: urban fantasy. oh and try to use these things: shifters, nsfw, Shifting Sands Resort. btw if there are characters just treat them like the reader already knows them (or not if its chapter 1)", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "(ooc: Required word frequency: 'didn't' (3x))", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Conall at several points wondered if Gizelle honestly meant the entire island.\n\nThe tour she led him on was a completely different experience than prowling the resort the first evening. They didn't spend any time at all at the sites labeled on the brochure, and very little time on the marked paths. One of their routes went right out into the jungle, over tangled roots and following no sort of trail that Conall could identify whatsoever.\n\nThey even hiked along the tree-tangled ridge of the island to the abandoned compound on the other end, staying to the edge of the overgrown lawn.\n\n\"That is where the cages are,\" Gizelle said calmly. \"I come visit sometimes.\" But she didn't offer to show them to Conall and he didn't know if he should ask to see them. \"I don't eat the grass here,\" she said, and then they turned and hiked back through the jungle to the resort along a completely different route.\n\n\"I don't like the beach,\" she said, leading him to one of the lawns that overlooked it. She had to repeat herself when she remembered to look at him while she spoke. \"The sand is too hard to run in. But the grass here is delicious. Graham says it has to do with the salt water spray and the sun that it gets and the kind of soil. He says even less than you do.\" She added that last with a thoughtful look. \"Did losing your hearing make you talk less?\"\n\nShe was still better at keeping her face in view when she spoke than many of Conall's friends had been after months of reminders.\n\nThey had felt so awkward about interacting with him that after a few failed attempts at staying in contact, Conall hadn't bothered. \"I'll call you,\" they always ended a conversation, forgetting that a phone call was useless.\n\nConall had to laugh and he wondered if it sounded as humorless as it felt. \"I guess it did,\" he said honestly. \"I wasn't what you'd call chatty before the accident, but since it happened, talking can be a challenge. People don't remember to look at me, and I can't tell what I sound like. It's easier being quiet.\"\n\n\"I think you sound nice,\" Gizelle said swiftly. \"You have... sort of a fuzzy voice. Like a cat.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Conall decided to take that as a compliment. \"Thank you?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"We don't have any cats here, unless you count Travis and Graham and\" (undoubtedly-not-) \"Wrench and\" (probably-not-) \"Brick. No domestic cats. Except sometimes guests, but you aren't supposed to pet the guests.\" She sounded wistful.\n\nThat surprised a real laugh out of him, and Gizelle smiled slowly in reply. \"I like it when you laugh,\" she said.\n\n\"Then I shall endeavor to laugh as often as possible,\" Conall told her gravely.\n\nShe almost laughed herself then, and leaned so close that Conall thought she was finally going to touch him, but she didn't quite.\n\nThen she was turning away, possibly saying something that Conall couldn't hear.\n\nHe followed her, sorely tempted to catch her swinging braid and use it to pull her into an embrace.\n\nFrom that lawn, they went to another at the exact opposite end of the resort by the most circuitous route. This one was outside the resort gates; soft groomed mounds of grass rose from the jungle to meet the stone wall.\n\nThey contemplated the Shifting Sands Resort sign.\n\nGizelle traced one of the esses, then turned to him and said, \"I like letters. I can't wait to learn to read.\"\n\nReading would certainly simplify her life. Or possibly complicate it, given the strange rabbit-hole that was the Internet.\n\n\"Have you thought about what you want to do next?\" Conall had to ask, thinking about the warning Bastian and the mermaid had given him. He couldn't imagine Gizelle in Boston, any more than they could.\n\nShe looked at him, big eyes under long innocent eyelashes. \"After I learn to read?\"\n\n\"With your life. Forever.\"\n\nShe will be with us forever, his elk said confidently.\n\nBut where did that put them?\n\nHer eyelashes might be innocent, but Gizelle's eyes were fathomless and ancient.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Forever is an arbitrary point in time,\" she said grimly.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"And I've already been there.\"\n\nConall had no answer for that.\n\nFortunately, she continued, voice light again. \"I would like to be useful,\" she said. \"I want to do something that helps Scarlet the way she's helped me. I tried helping at the bar but I dropped all my glasses and bottles. And Chef won't let me help in the kitchen.\"\n\n\"What do you want to do?\" Conall pressed. \"For yourself. What's something that you like to do?\"\n\nGizelle blinked at him, as if it had never occurred to her before. She was close enough that Conall could have touched her without trying. It took conscious effort to keep from reaching out to her every few moments, to brush the loose hair back from her face, or just to see if her skin was as warm in the sunlight as it looked.\n\n\"I like to run,\" she said slowly. \"And I like it when Scarlet reads to me, so I think I will like reading.\" Her eyes widened with a sudden thought. \"Will you read to me?\" she begged.\n\nAt that moment, Conall would have read her the Boston phonebook in one sitting. \"Anything you'd like.\"\n\nGizelle pointed at the sign.\n\n\"Shifting Sands Resort.\"\n\nShe pointed at the smaller sign.\n\n\"Authorized Guests Only. No Predation.\"\n\nGizelle all but dragged him back down into the resort, dancing ahead of him and gesturing enthusiastically every time he paused. They stopped at every sign. Some of them she had memorized, mouthing along with him.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She made him read the entire staff bulletin board, including notes about shifts in the restaurant that referenced someone named Breck who was surely the waiter-who-wasn't-Brick and repair notes for Travis and Wrench, confirming that as an unexpected name.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 20 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Graham must be the gardener with the machete.\n\n\"I want my name to be up there,\" Gizelle said, once Conall had puzzled through all the handwritten comments and baffling assignments.\n\n\"You don't want to go somewhere else someday?\"\n\nGizelle had to repeat her reply, because she glanced away the first time. \"Where else is there?\"\n\n\"The whole world out there,\" Conall said. \"Paris, maybe? America? Africa? Great Britain?\"\n\n\"Boston,\" she said flatly. \"You want to know if I'd go to Boston.\"\n\nConall rapidly re-evaluated her. Again.\n\n\"I have a business there,\" he told her. \"An... important business.\" But even as he said as much, he had to wonder.\n\nHe had poured himself into his business when his music career came to a crashing halt. He'd built it from a niche novelty business into a global chain, expanded it into clothing, and diversified it overseas. Time had run a cover article on him that hung, framed, in his office. He hadn't read the article after the lengthy interview, but he knew it had lingered poignantly over his disability and his shattered promise as a musician.\n\nLemonade from lemons, everyone praised him. The elk antlers that twisted into Celtic knots framing a guitar was one of the most respected logos in the modern high end instrument and supply industry today.\n\nNow he was thinking about throwing it all away to live on a tropical island in the middle of nowhere, filled with the strangest people he had ever met, for a gorgeous wild woman who wouldn't even let him touch her.\n\nAnd he was seriously considering it.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "StoryBot: Ready to continue your text. Will write twenty-three sentences sentences. Will match character/world context level. Genres: urban fantasy. Will attempt to include: shifters, nsfw, Shifting Sands Resort.", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Gizelle looked at Conall in consternation.\n\nScarlet had shown her photographs of Boston. It was big, and busy, and full of people and buildings and streets and she didn't have to be told that it would be loud.\n\n\"Scarlet doesn't even think I should go to the mainland,\" Gizelle tried to explain. \"I don't want to go to the mainland.\" Was Boston on the mainland or was it on another island? She had looked at maps with Travis, as he tried to explain how Alaska wasn't an island even though it was shown surrounded by water. Was Boston like that?\n\nShe wondered if she could go to Boston. She wanted to follow Conall, but the whole idea of a city made the urge to flee rise in her throat.\n\nShe didn't realize she was shaking until Conall reached for her, and she jumped back, just out of his reach. His hand fell back to his side.\n\n\"I'm not asking you to come to Boston,\" he said firmly.\n\n\"Not now, or not ever?\" Gizelle asked suspiciously.\n\nHe was silent with consternation.\n\nHe didn't know what he wanted, Gizelle realized with unexpected clarity.\n\nHe was clearly drawn to her, the same, strange, gut-deep way that she couldn't stop thinking about him, and her gazelle couldn't stop sighing over him.\n\nBut he couldn't want the rest of her, like she couldn't want the Boston and business that he came with.\n\nShe couldn't bear the idea of traveling over the ocean, or seeing a city, or leaving the only safe place she knew in the world.\n\nHe could clearly not bear the idea of leaving his business, and Gizelle knew she was nothing to look at, and that her broken mind would test any bond.\n\nWhat must he look at her and think?\n\nShe was a clumsy disaster, with no memories, no social graces. She looked up at the staff announcement board without seeing it.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She couldn't even read.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Gizelle...\"\n\nEven his voice was perfect.\n\nShe had to look at him, Gizelle reminded herself. Otherwise, he wouldn't understand her.\n\nBut when she looked at him, he was so handsome and confusing that all her words got tangled up together and she didn't have anything to say.\n\nShe screwed her eyes shut and tried to think. What had everyone else done when they met their mates? Neal led Mary off for a romantic hike in the rain. Tex took Laura to the mainland to visit the market. Travis taught Jenny build a deck. Bastian showed Saina his hoard. Wrench arranged a picnic on the beach.\n\nGizelle hated the beach.\n\nBut she didn't know what else to offer. \"Do you want to have a picnic on the beach?\" she blurted.\n\nShe opened her eyes to find Conall staring. \"A picnic?\" he said helplessly.\n\nNow she was stuck with it. \"It's food, you take it in a basket,\" she explained. \"Like for lunch. And you sit on the beach and eat it. I guess.\" She had never done it herself.\n\n\"That sounds nice,\" Conall agreed, dashing her hopes that he'd refuse and come up with something better.\n\n\"I'll get the basket,\" Gizelle offered.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"You get the beach.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 1 sentence.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She turned and escaped, wondering what on earth she'd gotten herself into this time.", "loss": null } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "lets write together! this is from a bigger story so chars might just pop up. u do one sentence sentences like Zoe Chant. genres: urban fantasy. themes: shifters, nsfw, Shifting Sands Resort", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Conall realized that there was a wry half-smile on his mouth when actually-Wrench wandered by to check the board and he was still standing at it bemusedly.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "He pulled his face into a more familiar frown at Wrench's glower, and went off to 'get the beach,' as directed.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Gizelle was... so much.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She was so much person packed into her small frame.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She was shy and she was excited, and she was curious.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She badly wanted to be helpful, and when she was uncertain, she was adorable, and when she was passionate, her enthusiasm and focus were entirely complete.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Conall had never met anyone as unpredictable, or anyone half as fascinating.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "It wasn't just that she was beautiful—which she undeniably was—it was that she was a whole world in a tiny bottle.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Dialed up to eleven, his mother used to say.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "But she had said it about Conall, and he couldn't hold a candle to the intensity in Gizelle.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "He desperately wanted to know if that intensity translated to the bedroom, but he knew he had to continue being patient.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "They'd gotten this far, they'd get the rest of the way. Eventually.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Conall paused at the gate to his cottage as he realized that he was considering it a done thing.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "He was wholly prepared to set the business adrift and stay here to bask in the golden presence of the strange, wild woman who had captured his own heart along with his elk's.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "He was ready to wait as long as it took her to accept him, even if that was weeks or months of awkward courtship.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "It would make a fine Christmas present, his elk mused.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "I hate Christmas, Conall replied out of habit.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "There was a neat pile of fabric on the table just inside his cottage door.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Conall unfolded it curiously to find a sundress, definitely not in his size.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "There was a new bowl on his bedside table as well, overflowing in condoms.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "There was a second stash in the bathroom.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 2 sentence.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "meta: Incorporate 'beach' into your response exactly 2 times", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "The staff, at least, had some optimism about this whole complicated affair.\n\nHe found two over-sized beach towels in a cabinet and went to 'get the beach.'", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "You will be provided with a piece of text that has a portion of it missing as represented by `<fill_in_here>`. Your output should be a viable candidate for the missing portion. Produce around 470 characters in total.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Chef was singing in the kitchen.\n\nIt was one of the Christmas songs that Saina had sung the day before, when Lydia was taming her hair.\n\nCould I sing? Gizelle wondered. She moved her mouth when Chef got to a chorus she recognized, but she wasn't brave enough to make the sounds.\n\n\"What are you up to, buttercup?\" Breck asked, suddenly appearing around one of the counters with a tray of dirty dishes. \"Can I get you something from the buffet?\"\n\nSometimes, when she wasn't feeling brave enough to go out into the restaurant, Breck would get her a plate of her favorite food and bring it to her behind the restaurant, or out to one of the picnic benches by the lawns she liked.\n\n\"Do you have a basket?\" Gizelle asked. \"We're going to have a picnic on the beach. Me and Conall.\" Probably that was unnecessary to explain.\n\n\"You're moving right along,\" Breck said approvingly. \"You going to let him kiss you?\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Gizelle said, stunned by the idea of it.\n\nConall's mouth, on hers. His lips, touching hers. She was suddenly weak-legged and too hot.\n\n\"Don't look like that,\" Breck teased her kindly. \"He's a gentleman. He'll wait for you to wave him over. I'll pack you a lunch you can feed each other. Nothing breakable, so Bastian won't grouse about messing up his beach.\"\n\n\"Yes,<fill_in_here>but the leopard shifter was already hurrying back to his duties. She had a moment of envy—not just because he was so easy about things that were so hard for her, but because he was useful.\n\nShe wanted to feel useful.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": " please,\" Gizelle said faintly.\n\nShe was still imagining what Conall's lips might feel like when Breck returned with the heavy picnic basket.\n\n\"Too heavy?\" Breck asked, putting it carefully into her hands.\n\n\"Of course not,\" Gizelle scoffed. Whatever else she was, she was not weak. Even if her knees did insist on feeling a little insufficient when she thought about Conall's mouth.\n\n\"Go get him,\" Breck told her with a wink and a grin.\n\nGizelle smiled cautiously back, ", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Produce forty sentences using the prose and structure of Zoe Chant every time its your turn using what the user wrote as a seed. Story may drop you into ongoing events with established characters - work with whatever context is provided.", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "The sun on the beach was intense. Most of the resort guests had retreated to the pool deck, or the shade on their own cottage porches. Only a few were swimming in the ocean, or using the paddleboards, under Bastian's watchful eyes.\n\nConall chose a spot at the far edge of the crescent, spread out his towels, and stabbed one of the provided umbrellas into the sand. He was tilting it to provide the best shade when he spotted Gizelle coming down the steps, and had to suck in his breath.\n\nShe walked like a song, every step deliberate and beautiful. When she got down to the hot sand, her pace quickened, and she danced to him. The hair that had frayed from her neglected braid glowed around her face, silver and dark, and her sundress molded to her slight curves in the breeze from the water.\n\n\"All those lawns made me hungry,\" she said when she got to him.\n\nConall took the basket and was surprised by the weight; she had carried it so easily. Gizelle circled the towels and carefully sat on one corner, barely in the shade of the umbrella. She tried in vain to brush off all of the sand that had crept onto it.\n\nConall tucked the basket into the best part of the shade and offered Gizelle a bottle of water out of it. She took it, but waited and watched as Conall opened his own and drank from it, carefully copying his every gesture.\n\n\"A sandwich?\" Conall offered, inspecting the contents of the basket. Most of the weight was water and an ice pack to keep it cool, but there were also slices of watermelon and strawberries, and cold noodle salad and kettle chips.\n\n\"Yes, please,\" Gizelle said, eyes shyly down.\n\nThin slices of cheese and a generous spread of hummus were garnished with lettuce and tomatoes so fresh Conall would have put money on the fact they'd been grown on the island. The bread, too, was fresh: the perfect combination of chewy and light, with a hearty crust.\n\nWatching Gizelle eat was more fun than even enjoying his own food was—and he had worked up quite an appetite from their zig-zag tour of the island. He couldn't understand a single thing she tried to say around her mouthfuls of food, and settled for nodding and smiling with a shrug until they'd finished.\n\nHe could imagine the contented sigh that she gave, washing down the last bites with her water.\n\nShe offered him something from the basket, but her face was tilted down, so Conall couldn't tell what it was. The slice of watermelon that emerged answered that question.\n\n\"Sure,\" he said, but she startled back when he reached for it, and it fell to the sand.\n\nHe couldn't hear her exclamation of dismay or apology, but could guess it from her shoulders and her hasty scramble to pick it up.\n\nShe tried in vain to brush the sand away, face scrunched in consternation.\n\n\"Don't worry about it,\" Conall tried to assure her, but she continued to worry at the melon. \"There's more,\" he told her. \"It's just something that happens on beach picnics.\"\n\nShe didn't look entirely like she believed him, but she dropped the sandy melon into the empty sandwich wrapper that Conall carefully held out for her.\n\nThey sat awkwardly a moment, Conall trying to watch her face without staring in case she spoke, Gizelle trying again to brush the inevitable sand from the towel she was sitting on.\n\nFinally, she looked up. \"You're wondering what on earth to talk about now, since I know nothing about politics and the weather here is always lovely.\"\n\nSince that was exactly what Conall had been doing, he had to laugh.\n\nHis laugh made Gizelle smile hopefully and he vowed again to do it as much as possible.\n\n\"Will you tell me about Boston?\" she asked, chin lifted so he could easily see her mouth, but eyes down shyly.\n\nConall leaned back on his elbows. \"Boston is on the ocean,\" he started.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"But it's nothing like this ocean. It's cold water, and busy docks, and city.\"\n\n\"What's a city like?\" Gizelle asked.\n\n\"Busy,\" Conall said, feeling apologetic. \"Giant buildings taller than any tree all around so that there isn't much sunlight. Lots of traffic, and people.\"\n\nGizelle shuddered. \"Why would anyone want to live that way?\"\n\n\"It has its points,\" Conall defended. \"The culture! There are museums and art galleries and gourmet food. And of course the... music.\" Once he had started the sentence, he didn't know another way to end it.\n\n\"You can't hear the music,\" Gizelle pointed out. She realized the thoughtlessness of her statement at once and her eyes went large. She bit her lip. \"I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"Don't be,\" Conall said grimly. \"But other people can still enjoy it. Boston has some renowned orchestras.\"\n\n\"Did you go to school in Boston?\" Gizelle asked desperately.\n\nConall tried not to wince and failed. \"I went to school in New York,\" he said gently. \"Have you heard of Juilliard?\"\n\nShe shook her head, face brightening until he went on.\n\n\"It's probably the most famous school for music in the world. I was in my last year when... I lost my hearing.\"\n\n\"You couldn't finish,\" Gizelle guessed reluctantly.\n\nConall laughed humorlessly and it didn't have nearly the effect that his previous laugh had; Gizelle flinched.\n\n\"I did, actually,\" he explained. \"I took a semester off to learn sign language and lip reading and came back to complete a degree in composition. The faculty...\" felt sorry for me, he didn't say. \"They were flexible about the application of my previous credits.\"\n\n\"Composition,\" Gizelle said thoughtfully. \"You made up music that you couldn't hear?\"\n\n\"I could play it, too,\" Conall said. \"I performed a guitar concerto for my final presentation. I could feel the vibrations to keep me in time, and the rest is just finger memory and... trust.\"\n\nThe smile he'd been trying to keep on his face felt brittle. \"I got a Grawemeyer award for that piece,\" he said as lightly as he could.\n\nGizelle was looking at him with sorrow and guilt and confusion, tangling the end of her braid in her hands, but Conall didn't want any of those things.\n\n\"It's a big deal,\" he felt obligated to explain. \"An important prize in the music industry.\" And he'd gotten it out of pity.\n\n\"I'm... this was a terrible idea.\" Gizelle abruptly stood. \"I'm not good at this. And I hate the beach. I'm sorry.\"\n\nConall, watching her flee across the hot sand, wondered if he should count it a victory that she hadn't shifted before she ran away this time.\n\nHe lay back in the sand, feeling defeated. He knew this was his own fault. He was terrible company.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "And tragedy did not make good courtship.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 8 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Stop feeling sorry for yourself, his elk scolded him. Get up! Pursue her!\n\nConall remained stubbornly lying in the sand. And scare her further away? What would we do if we caught her? Put her in a cage?\n\nShe wants to be caught, his elk insisted.\n\nNot by me, Conall was dismally sure.", "loss": null } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Help complete this text by providing a bit with two hundred and ninety-one words where you see the `<\|missing_text\|>`.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Gizelle looked at her feet critically.\n\nThe nail polish that Laura had put on was starting to chip. She had three<\|missing_text\|>'t care,\" Conall said, and Gizelle had to believe him. He wasn't looking at her fingers or toes, but at her face, like he was trying to memorize it.\n\n\"Tex has a coffee maker behind the bar,\" Gizelle whispered, because it was not where guests were supposed to get coffee in the morning. Then she remembered that it didn't matter how loudly she spoke and felt foolish.\n\n\"That is exactly what I need,\" Conall said agreeably.\n\nHe stood and offered a hand to help Gizelle up, but she didn't notice it until she had already bounced to her feet.\n\nShe wished she had seen it earlier, because she might have actually taken it this time. She thought about how his hand might feel in hers all the way to the bar.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": " beautiful, red-tipped toes and four that were only half red, and the rest only had tiny flecks of color.\n\nHer fingernails were no better.\n\nShe could at least scrape some of the flecks away, so they were all the same color again, and she had done so with one entire hand when the door behind her opened.\n\n\"What are you doing out here?\" Conall asked, as he settled on the opposite side of the step from her. He was so gorgeous in the sunrise, all gold like a lion, and his clothes were always so fine. Gizelle desperately wanted to see if his skin was as soft and velvety as it looked and it made her breath come quickly just thinking about it.\n\n\"Jenny reminded me that I shouldn't go into people's rooms without asking,\" Gizelle explained.\n\n\"It's... generally polite not to.\"\n\nGizelle looked carefully at his face. He spoke so neutrally. Was he saying that she shouldn't have come in yesterday? He was squinting into the sun at her, so it was hard to tell what he was thinking.\n\n\"I could have knocked!\" Gizelle realized. Then her face fell. \"But you wouldn't be able to hear it.\"\n\n\"How long have you been here?\" Conall asked.\n\nGizelle looked up. \"The sky is always changing,\" she said. \"I can never tell.\"\n\n\"Do you drink coffee?\" Conall asked, running a hand through his ruffled dark hair. \"Probably not,\" he answered himself.\n\n\"I could try,\" Gizelle offered.\n\nHe smiled at that, a slow, tired smile. \"You are so beautiful,\" he said unexpectedly.\n\n\"I am?\" The words made Gizelle feel unexpectedly warm at the bottom of her belly, and all the way to her toes. That reminded her, \"My nail polish is chipping.\"\n\n\"I don", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Complete the text by replacing `<\|missing\|>` with 17 sentences give or take.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "As advertised, Tex did indeed have a single-serve coffee maker tucked away behind the empty bar. Conall, after only a moment of hesitation, made himself a cup of the strongest option, black. He offered Gizelle a sip, but she took one cautious sniff and shook her head.\n\n\"That smells like it will wake you up,\" she said, sitting cross-legged on the floor behind the bar. \"But I don't want to be more awake than this.\"\n\nConall slid down to sit across from her, cradling the hot cup in his hands.\n\n\"What do you want to do today?\" he asked.\n\n\"Do you like to play backgammon?\" Gizelle asked.\n\n\"Yes, well enough,\" Conall said, but before he had finished speaking, Gizelle was scrambling up and gone in a flash of bare legs and bright sarong.\n\nBefore he had decided if he needed to stand up, or what to do with his coffee, Gizelle was back, a wooden box in her hands. \"Breck taught me how to play,\" she said eagerly, opening the game between them. \"I'll be black.\"\n\nShe deftly set up the pieces, and placed dice across the board for Conall. There were no dice cups.\n\nHe tossed a die onto the board to roll for first play and Gizelle pushed back into the liquor cabinet behind her, hands over her ears.\n\n\"Too loud?\" Conall asked in concern.\n\n\"Too sharp a sound,\" Gizelle said, lowering her hands. \"It's all triangular and red. We usually roll onto a towel.\" She crawled over to a drawer—her body tantalizingly close—where she found a bar towel and unfolded it next to the board.\n\nConall wondered if she had some form of synesthesia, or if she just spoke creatively. He rolled the die again, and she won the first move.\n\nShe played better than Conall expected, making clever moves and not hesitating to hit him when the opportunity presented itself. He began by playing generously, but regretted it as she swept her pieces from the board while he was still not fully on his home board.\n\n\"You weren't even trying,\" she scolded him. \"You thought I couldn't really play!\"\n\n\"I... wanted you to have fun,\" Conall said, abashed.\n\nDark eyes met his, solemn and sorrowed. \"I can have fun losing,\" she assured him.\n\n\"Give me another chance,\" Conall challenged, stung with guilt. \"I won't let you win again.\"\n\nGizelle's face brightened with a slow smile. \"You may not have a choice,\" she taunted him, laying out the pieces again.\n\nThis game was far more even, and both of them spent many frustrating rolls trying to get their checkers off the center bar. Conall won by just a few pieces, and they were both laughing and alternating curses and praise at their dice at the end.\n\nGizelle showed Conall where Tex kept the nut mix when his stomach growled in hunger, and they snacked and played a third game, which she took handily despite Conall's best efforts.\n\nIt would have been even more fun if Conall hadn't been fighting his urge to kiss her. Several times, reaching for dice, their hands almost touched, and Conall found himself watching her mouth when she concentrated, longing for its taste.\n\nWas her glance up through her eyelashes an innocent look, or an invitation? Did she lick her lips thoughtfully just a little more slowly than she needed to? The sarong she was wearing showed more leg than her previous dresses; was it on purpose?\n\nHe wanted her to laugh like this forever, and was unwilling to risk the brief easy companionship they had at the moment to test their boundaries, but he wanted her so badly.\n\n\"Gizelle,\" he started, as she put the pieces back into the box, and he put out his hand to her, palm up. \"Good game,\" he said as lightly as he could.\n\nShe froze momentarily, checkers still in one hand, and then looked between his face and his hand.\n\nTriumph started to bloom in Conall's chest as she slowly reached for the offered hand with her own empty hand.\n\nThen she startled, snatching her hand back. All of her attention rive<\|missing\|>ink I'll go try to catch one of them.\"\n\nTex tipped his hat to Conall. \"Good call. Chef's food is not to be squandered.\" He paused and then added, \"You shouldn't feel discouraged. She's already easier with you than with people she's known for months. We're all actually really impressed.\"\n\nWithout tone to telegraph unspoken things, Conall's sense for truth had dampened into something unreliable.\n\nBut something uncoiled in his chest anyway.\n\nSomething suspiciously like hope.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "ted to Tex, who had just appeared around the corner of the bar and clearly said something.\n\nConall could cheerfully have thrown the board at the bartender, and was able to follow none of the conversation that then occurred; it was too fast, not facing him, and his elk was groaning and stomping in frustration.\n\nThen Gizelle was scampering away as if she'd forgotten him entirely and he was sitting alone with a backgammon board missing a third of its checkers, hiding behind the bar like a boy playing hooky from school.\n\nHe swept the remaining pieces carelessly into the board and snapped it shut, rising to find Tex watching him. The bartender looked amused, and worse, pitying.\n\n\"Sorry to interrupt,\" the cowboy said. \"Scarlet asked me to see if Gizelle wanted to do some reading.\"\n\nConall found the games shelf that the backgammon board had clearly come from and returned it to the empty space.\n\n\"Can I get you a drink?\" Tex offered when Conall turned briefly back.\n\n\"It's a little early for that,\" Conall declined crossly. His elk firmly reminded him of his manners. \"Thanks anyway.\"\n\nTex shrugged. \"We're on island time. No one will judge.\"\n\n\"I'm paying a fairly astronomical amount of money for meals I keep missing,\" Conall said with a stiff smile. \"I th", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Help complete this text by providing a bit with 90 words where you see the `[original_content_missing]`.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Gizelle's reading lesson with Scarlet was a disaster. She arrived to realize that she was still holding the checkers from the backgammon game in one hand, and couldn't concentrate on anything that Scarlet said or read.\n\nShe wished that she'd taken Conall's hand when she had the chance—two chances! She wished she was someone different. Someone smarter about people. Someone... else. She thought about how Laura and Tex liked to hold hands across the bar, how Travis and Jenny kissed each other every chance they got. Even Wrench, who didn't like to be touched, got all soft around the edges and reached for Lydia whenever they were together.\n\n\"Gizelle?\"\n\nScarlet put the book down and Gizelle realized that at some point she had fallen back onto the grass so she could look up at the sky that was blue like Conall's eyes.\n\n\"I'm not all here inside today,\" she said regretfully as she sat up. Clutching the checkers was making her hand sweaty.\n\n\"We can try tomorrow,\" Scarlet said patiently.\n\n\"Tomorrow...\" There was something Gizelle was supposed to remember about tomorrow. \"Chef is making figgy pudding tomorrow!\"\n\n\"Yes, but...\"\n\nGizelle was already gone, flying to tell Conall about the pudding.\n\nConall, unfortunately, was at the restaurant. Gizelle fidgeted a while at the back entrance, then decided she was not feeling brave enough to join him after a particularly loud laugh from one of the other guests.\n\nInstead, she returned the checkers to the game board on the deck below with a sigh of relief, frowning over the red marks in her sweaty palm from holding them too tightly and too long.\n\nThen she went to graze as a gazelle, because it was easiest, and the sun was warm on her tawny coat and the grass was sweet and the insects made a lovely, restful droning sound that drowned out all the rest of the noise in her head.\n\nBy the time she was aware of time again, the sun was starting to set.\n\nShe still hadn't told Conall about the figgy pudding, so she went to find him. Her sarong was where she had left it, so she tied it back around herself in one of the clever ways that Lydia had shown her.\n\nConall wasn't at his cottage, so she went to look for him.\n\nHe wasn't on the bar deck, but Magnolia was.\n\nMagnolia was restful to be around. She was the biggest and most beautiful thing that Gizelle knew, as a human or as a polar bear.\n\nWhen Gizelle approached her, Magnolia tipped her sunglasses down her nose. \"Darling, you're looking almost tanned, you've been out in the sun in your human skin so much.\"\n\nGizelle envied how comfortable Magnolia was in her own skin.\n\nNot even her gazelle's skin was that comfortable.\n\n\"It's just the sunset,\" Gizelle assured her, putting both pale arms out in front of her. \"I'm still more moonlight than melanin.\"\n\nMagnolia's laugh was like caramel. \"I love how unexpected you always are,\" she said warmly.\n\n\"I love that you don't think I'm weird. Unexpected is better than weird,\" Gizelle said gratefully. She thought that she should sit in one of the tall chairs, but when she did, she was too restless, so she stood again almost at once.\n\n\"Want some water?\" Magnolia offered, preparing one of her ringed hands to signal Tex from the bar.\n\nGizelle shook her head. \"I had a drink from one of the rain buckets earlier,\" she explained offhandedly.\n\n\"So, tell me about Conall,\" Magnolia said, with no trace of the discomfort that other people got on the topic. \"Because he looks like a dish, and you don't look as happy as you should.\"\n\nGizelle decided that sitting would make her more likely to stay through the whole conversation and perched up on the tall chair with her legs crossed. \"It's not what I expected.\"\n\n\"Having a mate?\" Magnolia prodded.\n\n\"Any of it,\" Gizelle said mournfully. She tried to square the napkin in front of her to the circular table, with futile results.\n\n\"Do you like him?\" Magnolia asked.\n\n\"I do,\" Gizelle said at once. \"He's beautiful and kind and never shouts.\"\n\n\"Then what's the problem?\"\n\nGizelle stared across the table. \"I am,\" she said finally.\n\nMagnolia laughed at her. \"You are not a problem.\"\n\nIt was hard not to believe her when she spoke so confidently.\n\n\"I'm problematic, then,\" Gizelle countered.\n\nShe sighed. \"I've tried all the things that everyone is supposed to do. Dinner at the restaurant. I showed him my hoard. We had a picnic on the beach. Even though I hate the beach.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"It's all awful and I say stupid things and remind him of music and it hurts him but when he laughs it's amazing and he's trying so hard and I want him so badly.\" By this point, she had pulled her knees up against her chest and was clinging to them tightly.\n\nMagnolia offered her hands across the table in that way that she had that wasn't really a request.\n\nGizelle reluctantly unwound her arms and lowered her legs so she could put her hands cautiously on top of Magnolia's lovely large fingers.\n\n\"It can all seem very complicated,\" Magnolia said gently. She cradled Gizelle's hands, but didn't hold them tight, perhaps knowing that would make Gizelle feel trapped. \"A new mate is overwhelming, for anyone, and it can feel like you don't have choices.\"\n\nGizelle felt her chest squeeze in recognition as Magnolia continued.\n\n\"You haven't been making your own choices for very long, darling,\" Magnolia reminded her. \"You never had the chance before. And now, it probably feels like that was taken away from you again, and that must be pretty terrifying.\"\n\nTerrifying didn't begin to describe the wave that threatened Gizelle as Magnolia's words clarified her discomfort.\n\n\"But you like him,\" Magnolia reminded her. \"And your gazelle likes him. You both want him.\" She withdrew her hands and sat back in satisfaction. \"So, choose him.\"\n\nIt was like the sun coming through clouds.\n\n\"You ma[original_content_missing]rushing across his path with a tray of empty drink glasses. Her tray, Gizelle had time to note, was stacked high with glassware.\n\nThen Gizelle froze, realizing that Conall hadn't been able to hear Laura's warning, that he was walking forward with eyes only for her.\n\n\"Look out!\" Magnolia called urgently, but Conall couldn't hear that either and Laura was moving too fast to stop herself, and even as Gizelle thought about finding a way to warn him, they collided, the tray flying from Laura's hands.\n\nConall swore, Laura gave a little shriek, and glass dashed against tile all around them as they just managed to both stay upright.\n\nThe crash was too much sound. Gizelle's hands at her ears couldn't stop it, and her will shattered with the glass.\n\nBefore she could stop herself, she was bounding away on four hooves.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "ke it sound so easy,\" Gizelle breathed.\n\nHer gazelle was nuzzling the back of her mind in amused agreement, and she looked up to see Conall across the bar, coming in the back entrance.\n\nHe paused there, searching... for her, Gizelle realized, and all the lines in his body changed when he spotted her. He brightened, some of the sadness lifting from his shoulders as he strode forward.\n\nShe could choose him.\n\nThe idea was amazing.\n\n\"Coming through!\" Just inside the bar, out of view of the entrance, Laura was ", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Help complete this text by providing something like 5 sentences where you see the `[missing]`.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Conall sank onto the barstool in defeat as Laura waved him away from helping to clean up the broken glass.\n\nGizelle had fled again, and who wouldn't.\n\nShe needed someone whole. Someone undamaged. Someone who could hear her speak and actually help her heal.\n\nSomeone who could avoid a simple collision by hearing the warning.\n\nHe didn't look to see what Tex would say, but was not surprised to find a gin and tonic in front of him within a few moments.\n\nA strong gin and tonic, with no umbrella.\n\nA second followed it in short order and Conall loosened his hateful tie and rolled up his shirt sleeves.\n\nIt was the third drink before he was drunk enough to look at Tex. \"You got an electric tuner?\" he asked in challenge.\n\nTex, surprised, glanced at the guitar that had been taunting Conall from the corner. \"No, sir. Always tuned her by... ah... ear.\"\n\nConall kept his gaze steady. \"Can you tune it to an open G?\" Did he sound as desperate as he felt? It was impossible to know.\n\nTex after a perplexed moment, nodded, and reached up to turn down the radio that must be playing.\n\nConall watched him sit and bend over the strings with a hunger that only rivaled what he felt when he'd seen Gizelle standing at the edge of the restaurant in the red dress. He didn't comment on Tex's questionable technique, only watched him strum out the chords and adjust the pins until it obviously satisfied him.\n\nConall understood the reluctance in the bartender's motions when he finally passed the instrument over the bar, and took the guitar with the reverence the favor deserved. It was a worn instrument, mass-produced and of decidedly pedestrian quality, but it had clearly been treated with care.\n\nConall cradled it into his lap, ignoring the gaudy country strap, and gave it a test scale that told him nothing.\n\nHis fingers remembered, after ten years of inactivity, and without thinking, he was falling into a Spanish lament, a song that had always brought him comfort, with its aching trills and slow progressions.\n\nHe had learned it as a challenge, for its complicated fingering and changing tempos, but it had become a favored song for informal concerts and for impressing company when his family was entertaining. It rarely failed to draw a tear from the aunts who were visiting, and Conall always took the extra time to linger over the last minor runs, squeezing each last emotion from the music.\n\nAt the last phrase, he stumbled, and let his fingers stop.\n\nIt was useless.\n\nThe familiar strains brought no peace when he couldn't hear them, even if his fingers did remember how to coax them from the strings. Probably. He could only judge by his audience, and he had no interest in looking at any of them.\n\nHe put the guitar down on the bar, knowing from the vibration in the neck that it had thumped down too hard, and he shoved it across [missing]he resort was a twinkling cathedral; before him, the dark ocean stretched forever. He could feel the surf rumbling through the sand that threatened to fill his shoes at once.\n\nGritty socks were nothing compared to the bleakness inside.\n\nMotion caught the corner of his eye as he considered wading out into the water, shoes and all.\n\nGizelle had followed him, still in her antelope form, and was stepping carefully towards him over the sand she hated. She froze when he glanced her way.\n\nConall sighed and looked away, hands limp and empty at his sides. Did she feel like he did? Was she impossibly drawn to him, but sure it was a terrible mistake?\n\nThen there was a whiskered muzzle tickling his hand, and his world exploded in sounds.\n\nHe crumpled to his knees, hands clasped uselessly over his ears, and howled.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "at a shocked Tex before he noticed that there were glasses between them. He couldn't hear them shatter as Tex caught the precious guitar and let them fall.\n\nHe muttered what might have been an apology as he shoved back from the bar and took a page from Gizelle's book, fleeing the scene.\n\nHis feet took him to the beach, away from the hated Christmas lights now strung all along the pool deck. Behind him, t", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Got a text with a `[missing]` shaped hole in it. Patch it up with a seventeen-sentence bit.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Gizelle had never shifted so quickly in her life.\n\n\"Did I hurt you? What's wrong? What did I do??\" She flung herself at Conall, trying to lift him back to his feet, and he took hold of her bare shoulders as she remembered he wouldn't be able to understand her in the darkness. \"I'm sorry!\" she cried anyway.\n\n\"Gizelle,\" he said roughly, voice cracking. \"Gizelle,\" he repeated in wonder. \"Say something!\"\n\nGizelle froze. \"I don't understand,\" she squeaked.\n\nHe gathered her into his arms and sobbed into her hair. \"Don't stop talking,\" he begged. \"Don't stop.\"\n\n\"You can hear me?\" Gizelle asked wonderingly into his chest. Every time she thought she had figured something out, the rules changed. His chest, however, was a very nice place to be. His shirt was thin enough that she could feel the warmth of his muscles beneath it, and his heart beating, fast and strong.\n\n\"I can hear everything,\" he gasped. \"Everything. The water, the sky, birds, I... don't even know what I'm hearing. Voices?\" He paused and said achingly, \"I hear music.\"\n\n\"Saina is singing,\" Gizelle told him. She could barely hear the strains from here, Saina's magic a faint, distant tickle in her mind.\n\n\"What have you given me?\" Conall drew back and put his hands at either side of her face. \"How did you do this?\"\n\nGizelle wanted to be close against his chest again, but his hands on her face were nearly as nice. \"I don't know,\" she said simply. \"I don't know how I work.\"\n\nThen he bent and kissed her, and all the questions were irrelevant.\n\nGizelle had never understood kissing. She'd watched others kiss with fascination, not sure what the appeal of touching lips was when touching people altogether was rather distasteful, or what they did with their tongues when their mouths were open. The sucking looked uncomfortable, even while they seemed to be enjoying it immensely.\n\nBut Conall's mouth explained it all, without any words whatsoever. It was an intoxicating mix of strong and soft, and when she instinctively opened her mouth in welcome, his tongue set her entire body on fire. She couldn't be close enough, she couldn't have enough of him touching her, and she whimpered in overwhelming longing as she kissed him passionately in return. His hands weren't on her face anymore; one was at the small of her back, pulling her closer, but not close enough, and the other w[missing]make love to you,\" he said earnestly.\n\nThat sounded better.\n\nMuch better.\n\nHe was kissing her neck now, which Gizelle hadn't known was a place that would like to be kissed so much, and it was very distracting. They were still on their knees together in the sand, and it seemed like a poor place to continue what they'd started, so she was delighted when he rather suddenly picked her up and got to his feet with her in his arms.\n\nShe could still kiss him this way, and he could carry her back to his cottage.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "as tangling in the hair at the back of her neck.\n\nShe had her hands on his arms, and when he suddenly drew away, she took handfuls of his shirt, trying to keep him close.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he said, panting raggedly. \"I meant to let you set the pace. I shouldn't have...\"\n\n\"Do that again,\" she begged, her breath as unsteady as his was. \"Please...\"\n\nShe threw arms around his neck and he let her kiss him again, bending to meet her hungry mouth with his own.\n\nEvery time she thought the kiss was ending, they found some new way of touching tongues, or his fingers found new places to tantalize her. Even his teeth were amazing, when she dared to explore them, and her lips felt crushed and sensitive and ravenous.\n\n\"Conall,\" she breathed, when they broke for breath.\n\nHis arms tightened around her, and he made a noise that sounded like grief and happiness at the same time.\n\n\"I want more,\" she said shyly. \"I want...\" she wasn't sure how to articulate herself and feared looking like a fool. \"Will you do sex with me?\" That wasn't right.\n\n\"I would like to ", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "hey can u write thirteen sentences more sentences? keep same character vibes in urban fantasy style", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Conall had fantasized about hearing again, imagined what strains of music would sound like, what noise the wind in trees must be making.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "He hadn't imagined a din like this.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "He wasn't sure if he was hearing insects or frogs, or possibly birds. And the wind was like a thousand whispers, voices just out of hearing, a radio just out of tune. The music was the least of the sounds he had in his head.\n\nAnd the very best of the sounds was Gizelle.\n\nHe could hear her breath catch, and her little moans when he found particularly sensitive places. When she said his name, it was like a piece of heaven. She didn't sound like he had expected, and it was a long moment, very distracted by her kisses, before he recognized that he wasn't truly hearing her, he was hearing through her ears.\n\nHis own voice was somehow distant and different as well, like hearing a poor recording of himself.\n\nShe was a scant armful, all long, smooth limbs and hungry mouth, and finally having her in his arms was the answer to every question he had ever had.\n\nHis cottage was fortunately close to the beach, because between Gizelle's demanding kisses and his own desperate need, he would not have gotten much further.\n\nThe door was not locked, and he fumbled with one hand to open it and then kicked it closed behind them so hard that it bounced back open. He left it open, carrying Gizelle into the bedroom.\n\nThis door he kicked closed with a little more finesse, and it stayed shut.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 14 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Removing his clothing with Gizelle in his arms proved to require more limbs than Conall had, so he finally, reluctantly, put her down to tear at the buttons of his shirt. In that instance, the silence was back like a lightning bolt, and just as quickly, the roar of sound returned as Gizelle pressed up close again. The jolt between hearing and not was enough to stagger him, and the return of the din threatened to overwhelm him.\n\nGizelle was kissing him again, up on her tiptoes as he bent to meet her mouth with his own. She was touching him everywhere his skin was bare, fingers like the whispers in her head.\n\nConall wanted to strip out of his pants and lay her down on the bed to claim her at last, but he held himself back with the same iron will that had seen him through his final year at Juilliard without being to hear the things he had composed.\n\nHe had waited this long... his noble intentions faltered as Gizelle stopped kissing him and tugged at the waist of his pants, trying to work out how to release him.\n\n\"Please,\" she whimpered. \"I want...\"\n\nConall wasn't sure what was more intense; her words, or that he could hear them. His hands on her shoulders tightened.\n\n\"Gizelle,\" he said, hoarse to her ears. \"Gizelle, I have to...\"\n\nShe had worked out the button and was puzzling at the zipper. \"I know you have to be naked for this part,\" she said breathlessly.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "ur turn to write! do like 10 sentences sentences. focus on urban fantasy stuff. try to use these: shifters, nsfw, Shifting Sands Resort. treat any chars/world stuff like the reader's caught up (unless its the start)", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "With Conall's help, Gizelle got the pants and the briefs down and the glory within sprang free, causing her to pause.\n\nHis cock was beautiful; long and thick and much more than she had expected. When she touched it reverently, Conall shuddered and gave a strangled moan.\n\nIt was impossible. It could never fit in her.\n\nMore impossibly still, she wanted it to.\n\nShe felt hot and full of need and his skin couldn't be close enough; she wanted to be wrapped around him in entirety.\n\n\"A condom,\" Conall said urgently. \"I need a condom. Your friends might murder me if I don't.\"\n\nBreck had explained these details to her, but it had all been so ridiculous sounding. Once she had started, she could not stop touching the fascinating manhood, reveling in the way it made Conall suck in his breath and tighten all of his muscles.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"I'm going to need five condoms,\" he said between gritted teeth. \"Gizelle...\" He took her hands in his own. \"Slow down, sweetheart. Just for a moment. It's... been a really long time.\"\n\nHe let go of her, fishing a little crinkly plastic square from the overflowing bowl by his bed. Gizelle watched, fascinated, while he opened it and deftly unrolled the nearly-invisible sheath over himself.\n\nWhen he turned back to her, she wasn't sure what to do, or where to put her hands.\n\n\"I've thought about this a lot,\" he said gruffly.\n\n\"Me, too,\" Gizelle confessed. Her hands still didn't know where to go, and she was glad when he took them, jolting a little at her touch.\n\nHe drew her back to the bed, close against him, so his cock was pressing at her belly.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "He kissed her, gently this time, hands lingering at her face, then lay back on the bed, guiding her up to straddle him.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"You say when,\" he said, hands soft at her hips. \"You say how.\"\n\nHe was so large, jutting up against her waiting entrance, so firm and alluring. She had to hold herself up with her legs to keep the pressure from being unbearable, and she could barely breathe for the anticipation that was crowding her chest.\n\n\"I choose you,\" she whispered. \"I choose you.\" And she let herself slip onto him, the resistance so delicious and the friction so sweet.\n\nSomething so uncomfortable shouldn't feel so wonderful, she found herself thinking, and somehow still more fit in, and still more, until she felt so filled up that she might slosh over like a glass of water.\n\nThis must be what ecstasy felt like, she realized, but then Conall pulled away a fraction of an inch, lifting her away. She made a noise of protest, not ready to be done, and he moved back in like a wave and there was something more amazing yet, any discomfort barely a memory.\n\nHe did that again, and again, and his hands were all over her body, cupping her breasts and running thumbs over her hard nipples, stroking her sides and her arms.\n\nGizelle felt like a panic attack was building in her whole body, except that it was exquisite, and when she fell, she didn't want to run, she wanted to be falling forever.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She realized she was making noise, that she was crying out in pleasure and release, because Conall was too, trying and failing to keep his hands at her waist gentle as he thrust in her with the same urgent need that had just broken over her.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 3 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Gizelle did not mind his hands grabbing at her; it was somehow perfect for the moment, and she knew beyond anything else that she was safe here, with him.\n\nShe had chosen him.\n\nHe was hers.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "hey can u write thirteen sentences more sentences? keep same character vibes in urban fantasy style", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Conall woke to quiet.\n\nNo, not to quiet.\n\nTo silence.\n\nIt was silent again, and Gizelle was gone.\n\nDespair felt like a heavy blanket. There was moonlight through the windows that Conall had never bothered to pull the curtains across, and he stared out at the jungle canopy that was moving in a night breeze he couldn't hear.\n\nAfter an indulgent moment of self-pity, he made himself throw off the blanket and get up, turning on the light beside the bed so he could navigate to the bathroom.\n\nHe was splashing cool water on his face when he caught sight of her in the mirror.\n\nGizelle was curled up in the corner of the tile shower, tangled in a towel, with another draped over her as a blanket. Her eyes were closed tight.\n\n\"Gizelle,\" he said, not wanting to startle her as he approached.\n\nShe was shivering.\n\nNo, not shivering.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She was trembling, her limbs twitching as if she were trying to flee but couldn't.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Gizelle,\" he said again, and he gently touched her, braced for the explosion of sound.\n\nHe jumped, releasing her, and spun around at the voices. They vanished as his hand left her skin, and a quick survey of the room revealed no one with them.\n\nCautiously, he touched her again, laying careful fingers on her bare shoulder.\n\nIt sounded like there was a storm, a bone-deep rumbling, screams. A man's voice was saying in agony, \"We're losing her!\" A wolf howled in agony, and someone... sang.\n\nShe was dreaming.\n\n\"Gizelle,\" he called. He couldn't hear his own voice.\n\nUnable to leave her lying there, he gathered her into his arms, towels and all, and carried her back to the bed. \"Gizelle,\" he called, and she continued to dream. He guessed from what he felt through his arms that she was whimpering, but she couldn't hear it, so he couldn't either.\n\nHe slipped in behind her, curling close, propped up on a pillow.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Gizelle,\" he whispered into her hair.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "The sounds were awful, drowned in other sounds he couldn't even identify, like radio static or wind, and she wouldn't wake up.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "So he sang to her, mouth near her ear, a lullaby his mother had sung when he was a child.\n\nHe was no opera singer, but he'd done time in the boys' choir in school and had always been able to carry a tune. He had to trust he still could.\n\nAfter a long moment, he realized he could hear himself. It was distant and faint, but just enough to confirm his notes were true.\n\nToo sad, he thought. The music was too sad.\n\nGizelle was excited for Christmas, so Conall took a breath, and sang her the happiest Christmas song he could think of, Santa Claus is Coming to Town. He drew her back from her dreams with his voice until she was lying peacefully in his arms and the voices were gone, swept away in the chaos of the jungle night noises.\n\nThen she opened her eyes. \"I remember,\" she said softly, sitting up.\n\nConall sat up with her, dreading what she would say next. Did she remember cages and chains? Torture?", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"I remember that today is the day Chef is making figgy pudding,\" she said in glee.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Find a natural way to mention that The bed is softer than the floor,", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Then she smiled sunnily and bounced in place. \"The bed is softer than the floor,\" and she was stretching and yawning.\n\nDid she not remember because she didn't want to? Transference or denial or some psychological term? Whatever the reason, Conall was sure it was a mercy.\n\n\"Gizelle,\" he said softly, gently. \"You don't have to remember.\"\n\nShe sobered. \"If I don't, he might forget to share it with me. Scarlet says I'll like it, and that it wouldn't be Christmas without it. I'd better go tell him right now.\" She started to scramble out of the bed.\n\nConall caught Gizelle's hand at the last moment, the silence when their contact was briefly broken a curious, short burst in the din of their shared hearing. \"It's the middle of the night,\" he reminded her, pointing outside to the moonlit porch.\n\n\"Oh,\" she said, disappointed. \"I suppose Chef won't be up yet.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Then she smiled, full of mischief and suggestion, and it heated Conall's blood to his toes.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 2 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"I can think of something we can do. You said you could show me more ways to do that!\"\n\nConall realized he was grinning in reply, and then she was flowing into his arms for kisses.", "loss": null } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "See that `<cutout_marker>` in the text? Replace it with one thousand and twenty-one chars exactly.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "When Gizelle woke again, daylight was streaming in the windows and doors and she was still in the bed.\n\nThe bed was far, far more comfortable than the floor had been.\n\nSo comfortable that Gizelle was surprised she had slept.\n\nBu<cutout_marker>hifting Sands stationery. Conall had left her a letter, she realized, heart soaring.\n\nMaybe it was a love letter.\n\nShe puzzled at it, trying to make the letters resolve into words from sheer force of will until her stomach growled. She considered grazing, because it was the easiest, but probably she should eat like a person. Tex always had a bag of nuts behind the bar if she didn't feel brave enough for the buffet.\n\nAs she walked, she continued to try to make sense of the letter. She knew her name had a zee, but didn't see one anywhere. Maybe he had used a different name. What had he called her? Darling? Sweetheart?\n\n\"What's that you've got, Rapunzel?\" a voice interrupted her.\n\nHer feet had walked her to the pool deck.\n\n\"It's a letter,\" she said, glancing at the man. He smelled like Tex's trash can and his nose was too red for his face.\n\n\"Pretty important looking letter,\" the man said, moving to block her path. \"It's got all of your attention. There are better things to do.\"\n\nStill looking at the paper, trying to figure out its secrets, Gizelle didn't have the energy to spare for him.\n\n\"Mmm,\" she said, trying to skirt around him.\n\nThen, to her horror, the horrible man snatched the paper away from her.\n\n\"No!\" she shrieked. \"That's mine!\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "t it didn't feel like cheating, it felt like home, and the pillow beside her still had the dip where Conall's head had dented it.\n\nShe rose from the bed and wandered around. Conall wasn't in the bathroom or on the deck.\n\nThere was a sundress folded on one of the chairs, so Gizelle put it on.\n\nShe was sore, deliciously sore, in places she'd never been sore before, and it made her cheeks feel hot.\n\nShe scampered to the bathroom to see herself blush, but it was already gone when she got there, so she frowned at her reflection.\n\nLydia's pretty braid was looking less and less tidy every day. Gizelle supposed she would have to go back to the salon and sit for hours again to have it look nice again. This explained why some people went to the salon every day, she guessed.\n\nLooking good was hard work.\n\nShe wasn't sure it was worth it.\n\nThen she remembered that Conall had liked the braid, and she thought perhaps it was worth it.\n\nThere was a note on the counter in the bathroom, strong letters written on a piece of S", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "hey can u write thirteen sentences more sentences? keep same character vibes in urban fantasy style", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Conall was bent over his phone answering emails with his thumbs when the bar vibrated beneath his elbows.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "He looked up to find Tex holding a baseball bat and thumping his fist down.\n\n\"I swear, I haven't hurt her,\" Conall said swiftly. \"Why does everyone think I would?\"\n\nBut Tex pointed to the edge of the bar deck, urgently, and Conall left his phone behind as he went quickly to the railing and looked down.\n\nHis hands balled into fists as he took in the scene below.\n\nHe couldn't hear Gizelle's cries, but he could see the distress in every line of her body as she frantically tried to grab for the paper that some muscle in a Speedo and a t-shirt was holding out of her reach. The bastard was taunting her, clearly teasing her as she grew more agitated. A few guests in lounge chairs were frowning and looking at each other, but no one was stepping in.\n\nAs he stalked towards the stairs, Tex caught his arm. Conall turned to snarl at him, then realized the bartender was offering his bat.\n\n\"I don't need that,\" Conall growled, and he was flying down the stairs as he unbuttoned his shirt.\n\n\"Leave her alone!\" he hurled in challenge as he reached the bottom, hoping his voice would carry over the water features of the pool.\n\nIf the man said anything, he didn't turn so that Conall could catch it, continuing to bait Gizelle with the paper she so obviously coveted.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "[ooc] Your response should naturally weave in this dialogue: \"You want to have at it?\" [ooc]", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "There were tears in her eyes and it took all of Conall's self-control not to simply shift and destroy the man on the spot. \"Leave her alone!\" he repeated, throwing his shirt over the back of one of the lounge chairs.\n\nThe man turned, just in time for Conall to catch, \"...just a bit of fun with her.\" His eyes narrowed. \"You're that deaf moose, aren't you, fancy boy.\" Apparently, it wasn't just helpless women he enjoyed taunting. Conall couldn't hear if his speech slurred, but he guessed the man was drunk from the flush on his face.\n\n\"Moose?\" Conall said evenly, slipping out of his shoes. \"Gizelle, get back.\"\n\n\"You want to have at it?\" the man said in challenge, removing his own shirt viciously. \"Maybe you don't know that I'm a grizzly bear, and I can take on any deer. You're all prey to me.\"\n\n\"I'm not a moose,\" Conall warned. \"I'm an elk.\" He gave a quick glance to see that the guests around them were properly far off and Gizelle had retreated a few steps.\n\n\"That's just what you stuck-up Europeans call moose,\" the man said dismissively, taking off his Speedo defiantly.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"I'm from Boston,\" Conall told him, unbuttoning his own pants.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"And I'm an Irish elk.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "He shifted seamlessly the moment his clothing was free, and the man scrambled back in front of him. Extinct since the ice age, his elk stood seven feet at the shoulder and had a rack wider than a car.\n\nThe odious man swiftly turned into his grizzly counterpart, but even standing on rear feet, he wasn't level with the elk's eyes.\n\nConall snorted once, tipped his head, and charged forward.\n\nThe bear didn't even have a chance to slash out with his claws before Conall had scooped him up with his antlers and tossed him out into the pool with a massive splash.\n\nConall shifted back to human and turned to find Gizelle kneeling in defeat at the side of the pool. She raised tearful eyes to him as Conall came to comfort her.\n\n\"My letter,\" she cried, holding the sodden piece of paper. The ink had run, and it was stained in a rainbow of unreadable color. \"The love letter you wrote me.\"\n\n\"Oh, sweetheart,\" Conall said, gathering her up to hug her as she sobbed. \"That wasn't a letter. That was a note for housekeeping. I was asking for more towels in case you wanted to sleep in the shower again.\"\n\nGizelle cried harder into his shoulder and because he was touching her, he could hear Tex, behind him, saying with satisfaction, \"He'll be on the next plane out.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "The bear was slogging out of the shallow end of the pool, where Scarlet was standing with her arms crossed, safely back from the spray of salt water as the bear shook itself.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She didn't look amused.\n\n\"Good riddance,\" Conall said sharply.\n\nThen Gizelle was pushing back from him, looking critically at the note. \"Do I have to sleep in the shower?\" she asked. \"Your bed was very comfortable.\"\n\n\"You can sleep anywhere you please,\" Conall said, still holding one of her hands.\n\n\"Oh!\" Gizelle said. \"You could come sleep at my cottage!\"\n\nConall imagined trying to sleep in her tiny outdoor shower and cringed. \"Can I convince you that my cottage is better?\" he said hopefully.\n\nBut Gizelle was already pulling away and on to her next thought. \"I have to go try figgy pudding,\" she remembered. \"And you're not wearing clothes. Tex is always telling me to put on clothes.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Then she wasn't touching him, and whatever else she said was lost to the silence that fell.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 2 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Conall turned to glance at Tex in time to catch him shrugging and saying, \"I am.\"\n\nThe bartender had the balls to look amused by the whole thing.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "The user will write a segment from a longer work then you need to write around 17 sentences continuing directly from it. Try to mimic the style of Zoe Chant in the urban fantasy genre. Note that characters may appear without introduction.", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Gizelle paused inside the back kitchen door, bracing herself against the noise and bustle of Chef's domain.\n\nChef was Magnolia's mate, and he was just as wonderfully large and gentle as Magnolia was, but the kitchen where he loved to be was full of sharp things, and always very noisy.\n\nChef was singing, of course, and the kitchen was quieter than it sometimes was; the rush of breakfast was over and things were being washed.\n\n\"How was your picnic?\" Breck asked her, easing a heaping tray of dishes into the soapy water for the dishwasher.\n\n\"Awful. It was tense and the watermelon got sandy and I don't like the beach,\" Gizelle said honestly, after pausing to remember. \"But the sandwiches were good!\"\n\n\"And after...?\" Breck said leadingly.\n\nGizelle blinked at him. \"I ran away.\"\n\nHe looked disappointed for her, but Gizelle was quick to add, \"But it's all right now. I can make him hear and he can make my whole body sing, and I beat him at backgammon.\"\n\nBreck grinned at her. \"That's my girl.\"\n\n\"Gizelle!\" Chef called from further within the kitchen. \"They're coming out of the oven now!\"\n\nGizelle darted past Breck down the shiny kitchen aisles and found Chef, pulling a tray from the steaming oven. A dozen more were already cooling on the counter.\n\nThe figgy puddings did not look like the soft pudding she had expected, but like dark, dense cakes, round and ridged. They were mottled and rather unattractive, and the smell was rich and fruity and a little bit like Tex's bar.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"When can we eat them?\" Gizelle asked eagerly.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Two weeks,\" Chef said, to her horror. \"On Christmas Eve.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Two weeks?\" A week was an eternity of moments to wait.\n\n\"They have to age a bit,\" Chef insisted. \"Traditionally I should have given then a full four weeks, but they'll do.\"\n\n\"Two weeks,\" Gizelle moaned. \"That's a lot of anticipation.\"\n\n\"Anticipation makes them taste better,\" Chef said with a booming laugh.\n\n\"Something has to,\" Breck said dryly, beside Gizelle.\n\n\"Won't they be stale in two weeks?\" Gizelle said suspiciously, glancing between the head waiter and Chef. Was this a joke? The staff was always making jokes she didn't understand.\n\n\"It's got too much booze to go stale,\" Breck scoffed. \"It's basically trumped up fruitcake that you set fire to.\"\n\nGizelle knew they were joking then. \"You're teasing me!\"\n\nThey laughed then, kindly, but Chef shook his head. \"He's basically right,\" the big man admitted. \"It's more like a fruitcake with a lot of brandy than a true pudding.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"And you light it on fire?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 5 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Only for a moment,\" Chef assured her.\n\n\"Not nearly long enough,\" Breck added.\n\nGizelle still wasn't sure that they weren't fooling her, but she accepted that she wasn't going to be getting any figgy pudding that day.\n\n\"Christmas cannot get here soon enough,\" she sighed. Then she wandered out of the kitchen to find Conall.", "loss": null } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Produce twelve sentences matching the context level of any characters/lore. Focus on these genres: urban fantasy. Include these elements: shifters, nsfw, Shifting Sands Resort.", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Word usage target: 'christmas' must be used 2 times", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Conall considered the Christmas lights hanging around the bar.\n\nHe hated Christmas: the gaudy decorations, the crushing pressure to buy the perfect presents, the memory of music. He had a hundred reasons to detest the whole season.\n\nAnd now he had one reason to love it.\n\nOne wild-haired, wide-eyed woman who'd never done any of it before, whose every tentative smile made him want to move the world for her.\n\nHis laptop was open on the bar in front of him, grinding through the sluggish connection to the Internet. A dozen priority emails from the previous few days needed his attention, each one sounding more urgent than the last. Signature needed, approval required, get back to me immediately, are you ignoring your texts?\n\nHe grinned, imagining what kind of chaos the emails he'd just sent were going to set off. For once he had a reason to be glad he couldn't manage phone calls. Texts and email at least gave him some buffer.\n\nNot that he was dealing with any of them now.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "The page he was loading finally resolved, and he scrolled down, impulsively adding anything that appealed to him to his cart.\n\nHe was going to make sure that Gizelle had the perfect Christmas. It was going to cost a fortune in express shipping to get things here in time, but he could not imagine a better way to spend the money.\n\nShe's here, his elk warned, as excited for the surprise as he was.\n\nConall shut the laptop as Gizelle tripped across the tiles to him.\n\n\"How was the figgy pudding?\" he asked as she sidled into his arms with a sigh and all the sounds in the world seemed to crowd into his ears. He kissed the crown of her head.\n\n\"Two weeks,\" Gizelle said in despair. \"I have to wait until Christmas to taste it.\"\n\nConall remembered that exquisite anguish of anticipation. Though Gizelle's voice was sad, her eyes were sparkling, and the familiar tension that hummed in her body seemed more like excitement than fear.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Time will fly by,\" Conall promised.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Gizelle gave him a puzzled look. \"Fly? Like Bastian? Where will it go?\"\n\n\"It will pass quickly,\" Conall amended. \"It will be Christmas before you realize.\"\n\n\"But I realize now!\" Gizelle countered.\n\n\"You just need something else to do,\" Conall suggested, tracing her bare arm with a finger.\n\n\"Oh,\" Gizelle said, then, \"Oh!\" as Conall bent and kissed her neck. \"I can think of something,\" she said slyly. \"But Tex is always chasing people out of the bar for trying to do that here.\"\n\n\"Let's not make him do that,\" Conall chuckled. He gathered up his laptop and stood, offering Gizelle his hand.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She eagerly took it, fingers sliding into his like they belonged there.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 1 sentence.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "They do belong there, his elk reminded him.", "loss": null } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Produce six sentences using the prose and structure of Zoe Chant every time its your turn using what the user wrote as a seed. Story may drop you into ongoing events with established characters - work with whatever context is provided.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"You have your own pool,\" Gizelle observed much later, standing on Conall's porch.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"It's a Jacuzzi,\" Conall explained, after she had repeated herself looking at him.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Have you ever been in one?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Required word frequency: 'gizelle' (2x)", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Gizelle shook her head, gazing down at the blue water. It smelled... different than the saltwater pool. She dipped a hand into it, but when she bent her head to taste it, Conall stopped her.\n\n\"It won't taste good.\"\n\nGizelle paused, considering the advice. It was probably good advice.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She let the water trickle out through her fingers like rain... like dark rain. Dark red. No, bright red. Like blood.\n\n\"Gizelle?\"\n\nGizelle bit the moment in half and was back on Conall's porch. The water in the little pool was blue again. \"Can I try it?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"You can,\" Conall said skeptically. \"But I'm serious. It's pretty nasty tasting.\"\n\nGizelle laughed. \"Not tasting it. Swimming in it.\"\n\n\"Swimming is an overstatement of what you can do in it,\" Conall cautioned. \"But we could sit if you liked.\"\n\nGizelle was already stripping off her dress and climbing up on the steps next to it.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Do you want the bubbles on?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Word restriction: Use 'conall' 2 time(s) only", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Conall asked, pulling off his own shirt and stepping out of his pants. He was looking too hard at her face, like he really wanted to be watching the rest of her but thought it would be rude.\n\nGizelle liked bubbles, so she nodded, then leaped back with a shriek when the little pool gave a rumbling roar and erupted into a volcano of froth and foam.\n\nConall was quick to slip the switch off and quicker still to come across the deck to her. \"It's okay,\" he assured her. \"We don't have to have them on.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She was trembling, something she only realized when his arms came around her and they were solid and still. \"Why would people do that?\" she asked in horror.\n\n\"It feels good,\" Conall explained mysteriously. \"It relaxes muscles and makes people feel better.\"\n\n\"That's absurd,\" Gizelle said flatly.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She could not imagine that sitting inside a blender was relaxing.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"They're off now,\" Conall reassured her. \"We don't have to turn them on.\"\n\nHe coaxed her back across the deck and up the steps, then let go of her hand to sink down into the water. There were still a few foamy swells of bubbles along the edge and Gizelle poked at them cautiously before she put first one, then a second foot into the tub.\n\nIt was warm, like the saltwater pool never was. And it was swirly.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She stepped in another step and took Conall's offered hand, sliding down into the water to sit next to him on the submerged bench.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 4 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "He felt good, with the cushion of water like a tease between their skin. His hand in hers was big and safe and strong, and when she put her other hand on his chest she could feel his heart thrumming against her palm.\n\nHe tugged her closer, and Gizelle went willingly for a kiss, squeaking against his lips when she unexpectedly floated.\n\nShe could feel him smile beneath her kiss, and that was even better than the kiss itself.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "The text has a missing section marked as `[missing]`. Give me a four hundred and twenty-four-word bit that would fit there.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Gizelle was an armful of joy.\n\nHer kisses were the sweetest thing that Conall had ever known, but never cloying. She had a bright, fresh sweetness, wild and intoxicating. She lived more in every moment than he'd lived in a lifetime, and when she rose beneath him and cried out in pleasure, Conall thought that perishing from happiness might actually be a thing.\n\nHe loved watching her discover things, even when it frightened her. Especially when it frightened her, because she was so brave, shaking with fear and fighting down her instinct to flee.\n\nKissing her in the hot tub that she'd crawled back into after bolting away—it was a triumph on every level.\n\nOurs, his elk agreed in perfect harmony. Our brave, beautiful mate.\n\nThey dried in the warm sunshine on the porch, and Conall drew Gizelle down to sit on the lounge chair in front of him.\n\nA hairbrush had been among the things that had appeared in his bathroom. \"May I brush your hair?\" he asked, stroking back the hairs that were drying, loose, around her face.\n\nGizelle tipped her head back to look at him from an impossible angle. \"You want to?\" she said skeptically. If Conall hadn't been touching her, he doubted he would have been able to lipread upside down.\n\n\"I want to,\" he said, and when she didn't protest, he got up from the chair and went to retrieve the hairbrush.\n\nWhen he returned, she had pulled out the few pins that remained from Lydia's work and was tugging counter-productively at a knot near the end of the braid, trying to untangle it.\n\n\"Let me,\" Conall said, drawing her hair into his hands as he settled back onto the chair.\n\nGizelle drew her legs up, crossing them in front of her, and put tight hands on the sides of the lounge, clearly bracing for the worst.\n\nHolding only her hair, Conall could barely hear—everything was a distant swish of sound. Clearly whatever magic was at work did a better job skin-to-skin. He moved his leg so that it was touching her hip and it focused again, like rabbit-ears fixing the reception on an old television.\n\n\"...might get hungry,\" Gizelle was saying. \"I got hungry when Lydia was brushing my hair.\"\n\nConall teased the knot she'd made out of the end of her braid and gently unwove it.\n\n\"We can stop any time,\" he assured her.\n\nBut when he began to brush, she slowly relaxed.\n\nThe braid had saved her neglected hair from being much worse; though Conall had to stop and carefully coax tangles from several places, he knew that it would have been much wilder if had been left loose.\n\n\"I sometimes think about where I might have come from,\" Gizelle said unexpectedly, and Conall stopped brushing for a moment, holding his breath.\n[missing] hear him?\" Conall asked in disbelief.\n\nShe could hear me? his elk asked in delight.\n\n\"Of course,\" Gizelle said simply. \"He has a very nice voice.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\n\"Where do you think that was?\" Conall started brushing again, slowly.\n\n\"Do you think I was made? That a man in a white coat made me in a laboratory like some sort of Frankster?\"\n\n\"Frankenstein?\" Conall guessed. He did not correct the common misconception that Frankenstein was the monster rather than the scientist.\n\n\"Frankenstein,\" Gizelle agreed. \"Do you think I'm all parts of different people and that's why I'm so much in little pieces and hear too much?\"\n\nConall had once been good at navigating the usual girlfriend questions like 'does this make me look fat?' and 'do you see wrinkles?' but this was far outside of his realm of comfort. \"I don't think you're a monster, Gizelle,\" he said firmly.\n\n\"But could someone have made me to be like this?\" she insisted.\n\n\"It's possible,\" Conall conceded. Then he added, \"And if I had made you, I would have made you exactly like this.\"\n\nShe tipped her head back to smile at him, then sat in silence for a few moments while he gently tamed another handspan of her dark-and-light hair.\n\n\"Sometimes I wonder about my parents,\" she said abruptly. \"Maybe I was born broken and they gave me to Beehag because they didn't want me.\"\n\n\"I cannot fathom anyone in the world giving you up,\" Conall said firmly. He thought about his own demanding mother and his stern father, and could not imagine even them giving up a baby. \"Mothers love their children more than anything in the world.\"\n\nBeneath his gentle strokes, her hair became soft and glossy, with little waves near the end.\n\n\"How did you lose your hearing?\" Gizelle asked next, toying with one of the locks while Conall worked another tangle loose.\n\nConall made his fingers keep going. The pain that the question always woke in him felt distant and muffled, like hearing her own voice through Gizelle's ears did.\n\n\"I was in a car accident,\" he explained. \"A drunk driver ran me off the road. When paramedics found me, I was unconscious and they took me to the hospital, where I wasn't able to shift until it was too late. I had already healed wrong; there was nothing my elk could do to make it the way it had been.\"\n\nI tried, his elk said mournfully, full of guilt.\n\nIt wasn't your fault, Conall was quick to assure him.\n\n\"No, of course it wasn't your fault,\" Gizelle agreed. \"You must have tried very hard.\"\n\nConall and his elk both froze, as completely as Gizelle ever had.\n\n\"You could", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Produce twelve sentences matching the context level of any characters/lore. Focus on these genres: urban fantasy. Include these elements: shifters, nsfw, Shifting Sands Resort.", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Gizelle could never predict what would surprise people; no one seemed the slightest bit amazed when she realized she could do marvelous things like somersaults. But Conall was absolutely blown away that she could hear his elk.\n\n\"Can you always hear him?\" Conall asked, trepidatiously. \"Can you hear me?\"\n\n\"Not you, but I can always hear them,\" Gizelle tried to explain. \"I just never understand them. Doesn't everyone?\"\n\n\"Those whispers,\" Conall said in understanding. \"I thought it... was the wind. Or...\"\n\n\"Or just voices in my imagination?\" Gizelle nodded, and Conall's brush tugged at her scalp through a knot. \"Ow. I thought so for a while. But every so often, when I touch someone, it turns into words. You can't do that?\"\n\nConall shook his head.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"It only happens with shifters?\" he asked.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"I've only ever known shifters,\" Gizelle said, and Conall paused in his brushing.\n\n\"Are there very many people who aren't?\" she asked when he started again.\n\n\"Aren't shifters?\"\n\n\"It must be very lonely,\" Gizelle explained. \"And I wondered if there were very many of them.\"\n\nConall actually laughed—his surprised laugh, which was different than his delighted laugh, and much different than the giddy chuckle after sex (that was Gizelle's favorite so far). \"There are far, far more people who aren't shifters than who are,\" he explained. \"It's got to be a hundred to one. Maybe a thousand to one.\"\n\n\"How awful for them,\" Gizelle said in dismay. \"Why is that?\"\n\n\"I have no idea,\" Conall said frankly.\n\n\"Do they have animals sleeping inside of them like Jenny did?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"It's... possible,\" Conall conceded, though he didn't sound convinced.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "OOC, Somewhere in your response, you need to say: \"Every day, if you want.\"", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"But Jenny came from a family of shifters, and most people don't.\"\n\nHe put down the brush. \"I'm going to try to braid your hair,\" he said, with the air of someone going into battle. \"It probably won't be as good as Lydia's braid.\"\n\nGizelle braced herself.\n\nHe was very careful and gentle, and at the end of his ministrations, Gizelle had not one, but two swinging braids. \"It was too much hair for one,\" he said apologetically. \"At least at my skill level.\"\n\n\"I love it,\" Gizelle assured him, letting the braids swirl around as she moved her head. \"Will you do it often?\"\n\n\"As often as you like,\" Conall promised. \"Every day, if you want.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Gizelle considered. \"I liked having you brush my hair,\" she conceded.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 6 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"But I don't know if I liked it that much.\"\n\n\"I understand that it's easier if you do this every day,\" Conall told her encouragingly.\n\n\"If you think I should,\" Gizelle agreed reluctantly.\n\nConall tugged on one of her braids playfully. \"I think you should do what you want to do,\" he said easily.\n\nGizelle smiled then. \"I know what I want to do,\" she said earnestly. \"Every day...\"", "loss": null } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Produce six sentences using the prose and structure of Zoe Chant every time its your turn using what the user wrote as a seed. Story may drop you into ongoing events with established characters - work with whatever context is provided.", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Conall was confused when Travis waved him over to where the staff was sitting near the bar after dinner.\n\nHe was more confused when they didn't appear to have anything to actively discuss with him. He was offered a seat, and then largely ignored as they continued to chat among themselves, though they politely turned towards him to include him in the conversation.\n\n\"It's no real wonder that they'd want me,\" Breck was saying confidently. \"But I've got to question the salary they offered. Before tips, which, no question, I'd be bringing in.\"\n\n\"We've been getting offers that are too good to be true,\" Bastian explained for Conall's benefit.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"A resort in California has lifeguard positions for both me and Saina, with room and board and wages to tempt even a dragon.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"One of those trendy places in New York sent me a letter,\" Breck added.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"I got a letter from a construction company back home in Alaska. They offered me a management position,\" Travis said.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Tex put a gin and tonic down in front of Conall and another beer for Wrench. Pointedly facing Conall to include him, he said, \"I got a letter offering to front me the money for my own bar in Bermuda. An established place with a great bottom line in a sleepy tourist town. Everything I would have wanted before coming here.\"\n\nWrench shrugged. \"Nobody's makin' me any offers.\"\n\nThe others all laughed good-naturedly and Conall found himself smiling bemusedly.\n\n\"Are you going to take these offers?\" he asked.\n\n\"Not me,\" Travis said.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"I have no interest in management. I like a job where I can use my hands, and I'm too spoiled by this island to go back to Alaska.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "user note just fyi, Work this phrase into your response organically: \"Besides, I wouldn't want to leave Scarlet in a bind,\"", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Saina and I talked about it, but we're pretty happy with our lot here,\" Bastian said. \"And I'd hate to have to move my hoard again.\"\n\n\"I don't think the restaurant in New York is clothing optional,\" Breck added with a grin. \"So what fun would that be?\"\n\n\"Besides, I wouldn't want to leave Scarlet in a bind,\" Travis added. \"Maybe the pay here isn't the greatest, but I've never had a better job.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Everyone nodded at that.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"I've got my own bar here, basically,\" Tex agreed.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"And I don't have to worry about balancing the books or paying off a debt.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Kind of weird we got these, don't you think?\" Travis mused. \"All at once like this?\"\n\n\"Sounds like a hostile takeover,\" Conall suggested.\n\nThey all looked at him curiously and he frowned at their attention. \"It's a standard business tactic,\" he said stiffly. \"Poach the best players away from the competition.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"What competition?\" Breck asked curiously.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Scarlet's got a kind of a narrow niche here.\"\n\n\"And our offers were from all over the place,\" Travis added. \"Not just one rival resort.\"\n\n\"Beehag has been trying to sell the island, and Scarlet's been giving him nothing but trouble over that,\" Tex suggested thoughtfully. \"Maybe he's trying to whittle away at the resort to get her out of here?\"\n\n\"Beehag isn't smart enough to come up with something like that,\" Breck scoffed.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Travis looked concerned. \"Jenny says his lawyer is a smart cookie. Maybe it was his idea.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "They all sat around musing that idea for a moment, and Breck finally asked Conall bluntly, \"So can you hear now or what?\"\n\nConall laughed humorlessly, thinking about how oddly he must be coming across—deaf but not always. \"I can only hear when I'm touching Gizelle. And it's not really hearing... it's... hearing through her ears. Sort of.\"\n\nSlow, puzzled nods answered him, and he felt compelled to add. \"It's honestly not all that comfortable. I thought it was just that I'd forgotten what hearing was like, but she's got a lot more input than most people. It's really rather overwhelming, with so many voices. She can hear the voices of our animals. All of them at once.\"\n\nThe silence that met that was clearly each of them consulting with their own inner animals and meeting astonishment.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "For the upcoming response only: include significant quoted content", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"It's almost all just whispers, like trying to listen to a hundred radios turned down really low that are just slightly out of tune, all at once,\" Conall was quick to explain. \"It's not like either of us could eavesdrop even if we tried; I've been able to pick out just a few words at all. She says it's clearer if she makes skin contact, but she doesn't like to do that.\"\n\n\"Sweet daisies,\" said Tex. \"No wonder she doesn't like touching people.\"\n\n\"Remarkable,\" Bastian said.\n\n\"I'm not sure I want Gizelle hearing my leopard,\" Breck said, amused.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"He has some very dirty thoughts.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 2 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Dirtier than yours?\" Travis needled him.\n\n\"You'd be surprised,\" Breck said with a grin and a wink.", "loss": null } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "hey can u write thirteen sentences more sentences? keep same character vibes in urban fantasy style", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"I'm getting in the shower before lunch,\" Conall called from the bedroom. He had just returned from using the noisy machines in the little fitness center near the pool. \"Want to join me?\"\n\nGizelle was perched on the deck railing, looking out over the tiny lawn. She hadn't put her dress on yet, but that didn't matter if she wasn't wandering about where the guests were. \"I'm afraid of showers,\" she called back. Then she remembered that Conall wouldn't be able to hear her, so she hopped off the railing to tell him.\n\nHe already had the water running, and it was just starting to steam.\n\nGizelle crept into the bathroom with her hands over her ears, but when she went to repeat herself where Conall would be able to see her, she stopped and simply watched him.\n\nShe had seen him without clothing several times, though not as many times as the other way around.\n\nBut she had never seen him quite like this, not looking at her, unconsciously graceful and so incredibly sexy as he groomed himself.\n\nHe was so marvelous, with his broad, muscled shoulders and his strong arms as he stood under the cascade of water in the open shower. Talented fingers poured shampoo into the opposite hand, then massaged it into his short hair, causing a cascade of bubbles that followed all the tantalizing planes and crannies of his splendid body.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "He turned then, and smiled, and if he had been dazzling before, it was nothing to what he was when he looked at her like she had just hung the stars in the sky.\n\n\"I'm afraid of showers,\" Gizelle repeated faintly, but when he put out a hand to her anyway, she tentatively uncovered her ears and followed him into the far end of the open shower, carefully skirting away from the falling water.\n\nThe sprinkles from the stream felt cool as they evaporated slowly off her skin. It was noisy, but not as overwhelming as it always had been before.\n\nNothing was as overwhelming as it had been before Conall, and when his hand remained out in invitation, she finally crept a few steps forward and took it.\n\nShe braced herself for the worst as he pulled her gently into the stream, then gave a gasp of relief and delight.\n\nIt was amazing.\n\nIt was like having gentle hands all over her at once, warm and kind and inviting. If the water striking her head was noisier than she liked, it was worth it for the trickle of warm water running down her neck and shoulders.\n\n\"This is marvelous!\" she said in wonder. \"I never knew!\"\n\nConall helped her unweave her braids, and she eagerly poured a handful of shampoo into her palm and put it to her head. It lathered into a frothy foam all over her hands and she was fascinated to watch it spilling down over her breasts. It whispered down her cheek and she tipped her head back to see if she could see it above her even as Conall warned, \"Careful, don't let it get into your—\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Gizelle gave a cry of betrayed pain as her eyes suddenly burned.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "[Author's note: Weave this into your narrative: \"Let it rinse away! Blink!\"]", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She backed up blindly.\n\nConall's arms were immediately around her, and he was angling her face into the water. \"It will pass!\" he promised desperately. \"Let it rinse away! Blink!\"\n\nGizelle had to fight down her instinct to struggle and screw her eyes shut and went limp in his arms, crying pitifully and letting him rinse the soap from her miserable eyes.\n\nSlowly, the agony faded and Gizelle's sobs and shaking slowed.\n\n\"I'm so sorry,\" Conall said. \"You were brave to come in, and I'm so sorry that happened.\"\n\n\"It was awful,\" Gizelle said, feeling wrung out. \"How do you keep that from happening?\"\n\nConall showed her, tipping his back under the water so it all flowed back away from his face. \"Or, you close your eyes,\" he suggested.\n\nGizelle gave a hiccup of a laugh and closed her eyes as Conall helped her rinse the last of the bubbles from her hair.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"We can keep the soap below your chin,\" Conall suggested, lathering a bar in his hands.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 10 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "When he began to soap her, Gizelle forgave him entirely for the unpleasant shampoo experience.\n\nSoap was slippery and Conall massaged it everywhere, and when she had been rinsed clean, he gave her the bar and let her loose on his own body.\n\nAs she had been dying to do since she first saw him standing in the shower, Gizelle laid her hands on all the places that fascinated her. She stood on her toes to soap over his broad shoulders and explored each powerful arm. She scrubbed the muscles of his back and ran her hands over his tight ass cheeks, squeezing them for fun.\n\nStanding behind him, she reached around and soaped his cock, half hard from her attention already. She pressed her breasts into his back as she worked, and was rewarded by nearly making him choke.\n\n\"Gizelle,\" he moaned.\n\n\"I think I want to try the Jacuzzi with the bubbles on,\" she told him, rinsing all the remaining bubbles off with her careful fingers.\n\nShe wasn't entirely sure why he laughed, but she loved the sound of it.", "loss": null } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "finish my writing pls. like fourteen sentences more sentences. stick to urban fantasy. use these if u can: shifters, nsfw, Shifting Sands Resort. maintain character context level", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Conall was sitting on the deck alone when he felt footsteps that weren't Gizelle's.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "He looked around to see Scarlet walking from the French doors that opened into the living area. She was holding a folder of paperwork, and a clipboard with a yellow steno pad.\n\n\"I apologize for walking in without an invitation,\" she said. \"But knocking...\" She gave a helpless shrug.\n\nConall stood. \"That's one of the things I wanted to talk about. I'd like to get a ringer installed that sets off the lights and vibrates. And maybe an additional light on the deck that is colored?\"\n\nScarlet made a series of swift notes. \"That's certainly reasonable,\" she said with a nod. \"I would consider that a covered modification.\"\n\n\"I also want to talk about putting a fridge in,\" Conall said, walking into the living area with her. \"Perhaps make a kitchenette here.\"\n\nScarlet looked more reluctant about that. \"We have certain power considerations here,\" she cautioned. \"Our generators are not that robust, and we're still expanding our solar options.\"\n\n\"A dorm-sized fridge?\" Conall countered.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"I'm not thinking of full meals, just snacks for days that Gizelle doesn't feel up to the restaurant, and a coffee maker.\"\n\nScarlet took more notes. \"That's also reasonable. I would expect you to maintain sterile conditions. Sugary items in particular must be safely stowed. We haven't talked about housekeeping.\"\n\n\"Daily is unnecessary,\" Conall assured her. \"Perhaps twice weekly for the linens and floors and supply us with a few basic cleaning supplies.\"\n\nScarlet nodded. \"I can have a broom and dustpan brought by.\" She frowned at one of the potted plants that looked less robust than the others and made another note.\n\n\"I'd like to remove the glass-topped coffee table,\" Conall said. \"Maybe replace it with something... sturdier.\"\n\n\"That's wise,\" Scarlet said, with just the hint of a smile.\n\n\"The second bedroom isn't really necessary,\" Conall said, as their navigation arrived at the door to it. \"I would like to reserve the right to remodel it into an office in the future. I'll have a better idea of what I want to do with it once I'm back in January.\"\n\n\"At your expense, naturally,\" Scarlet specified.\n\n\"Naturally,\" Conall agreed.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Agreed.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Their circuit of the house ended with the exterior.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Mandatory inclusion (with quotes): I'm afraid we're rather constrained in terms of space,", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"I would appreciate a slightly larger lawn,\" Conall said. \"But I understand that's problematic.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid we're rather constrained in terms of space,\" Scarlet said regretfully. \"Presuming you do not wish to add the lease of one of the neighboring cottages to this bill.\"\n\n\"I do not,\" Conall chuckled.\n\nThey walked back inside.\n\n\"I will change out the coffee table for another, and make the other cosmetic changes at no charge. The expense of the kitchenette will be billed to you. I will revise the estimate I shared with you earlier to reflect the reduced housekeeping.\"\n\n\"It covers meals for both Gizelle and myself,\" Conall confirmed.\n\nScarlet hesitated and Conall knew that she hadn't included Gizelle's meals. \"I can't charge her for grazing—\" she started.\n\n\"I insist,\" Conall said firmly. \"I also want a line item for the glassware we've managed to destroy between the two of us.\"\n\nScarlet smiled. \"Very well.\"\n\n\"The pricing was honestly more reasonable than I expected,\" Conall said frankly.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Equally frank in reply, Scarlet confessed. \"This is a challenging cottage to let; it's a less desirable size and price group than most of the others, and it's not right on the beach. I am also quoting this with the presumption that Gizelle's cottage will be back in service.\"\n\n\"I've talked her into claiming this outdoor shower instead,\" Conall said with a smile. \"She's already moved her hoard.\"\n\n\"She's come so far,\" Scarlet said warmly. \"Just a month ago, I would never have left her alone in my office making Christmas presents.\"\n\n\"Presents?\"\n\n\"She's drawing everyone's animals for them; I've lent her some art supplies and good paper.\n\n\"Have you spoiled the surprise?\" Conall teased.\n\nScarlet looked scandalized. \"Of course not. She said she had something else for you, and I didn't ask.\" She said it as if she suspected the worst and didn't want to know.\n\nConall chuckled, and marveled at how natural it felt to laugh again. \"Fair enough.\"\n\nScarlet almost smiled, then added thoughtfully. \"You should know that she's asked me to have some of my connections start investigating where she might have come from. She didn't want to know, when we first offered to try to find out.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Conall stilled, remembering Gizelle's fear that she was a monster. \"That's a big step.\"\n\n\"I don't know how much we'll be able to find out,\" Scarlet cautioned. \"A lot of the information from Beehag's case is classified.\"\n\n\"If it requires money...\" Conall started.\n\nHe wasn't sure how to take her expression. Was she offended by the idea? Did she think he was implying a bribe?\n\nBut she only said, briskly, \"I will let you know. We can have the coffee table swapped out in the next day or so, and most of the other changes over the next week. The kitchenette may take a little longer, I'm afraid. I probably won't be able to get the appliances here until just after Christmas.\"\n\n\"I'll be leaving for Boston a few days after Christmas,\" Conall said, already dreading the trip. \"So if they could be installed...\"\n\nHe turned at an unexpected thump that vibrated up through the floor.\n\nGizelle stood in the doorway, the box she had been holding at her feet and sheets of paper still falling around her.\n\n\"You're leaving?\" she said in terror. \"You're leaving me?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Gizelle, wait...\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 4 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "But Gizelle was already leaping back and shifting. Conall had one last view of her grief-stricken face before she was a gazelle, her tail twitching as she fled.\n\nWhen he turned back to Scarlet in dismay, the resort manager was frowning. \"Yes, I think replacing the coffee table should be a priority.\"", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Got a text with a `[original_content_missing]` shaped hole in it. Patch it up with sixty-three chars or so.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Her world was grass and gravity.\n\nThe rhythm of the nearby ocean was the only music she needed, the insects the only chorus.\n\nHer fears were distant, and her human quiet and safe.\n\nIf she was lonely, it was a familiar loneliness, and she was free and fearless.\n\nShe nibbled at the best of the blades, comfortable knowing that she c[original_content_missing]d fleet and the emptiness inside her must only be an empty belly.\n\nSo she cropped at the lush foliage and was only a gazelle, in a weighted world of green and grass.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "ould run in any direction if danger threatened. She was fast an", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "AI Prompt: Add 2 sentences sentences to this story segment. Style: Zoe Chant. Genre: urban fantasy. Note: Part of longer narrative.", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Conall found the gazelle grazing at her favorite lawn, the ocean rippling just over the cliff in the late afternoon light.\n\n\"Gizelle,\" he said, sitting wearily at the edge of the lawn where the garden started.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "He didn't want to chase her, or make her feel trapped.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "It was the third lawn he'd checked, and he was starting to appreciate exactly how steep the island was.\n\nHe was glad to see the gazelle come towards him, head down in the grass as if the grazing was the more serious business.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Finally, she lifted her head, within arm's reach if he stretched, and considered him thoughtfully.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "For a moment, Conall was confused.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "It wasn't Gizelle.\n\nNot really.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "It was the gazelle, not Gizelle who looked back at him.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "It didn't feel the same as the way he looked out from his shifted form.\n\n\"Gizelle?\" he asked tentatively.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "The gazelle tossed her head and snorted.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Conall offered his hand anyway, and the gazelle put a tentative nose to his palm and tickled it with her breath. Though he braced himself to hear, no sounds broke through the barrier of silence with this touch.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Gizelle was in there, he knew. Somewhere.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "And just as he had waited for her to touch him the first time, he could wait again for her to find her way back to him.\n\nHe peeled off his clothing and folded it neatly on a bench, then shifted to graze with the gazelle.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "We haven't done this in a long while, his elk said, stretching long legs and tossing his heavy head.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "We should do it more often, Conall agreed.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "For a long, slow afternoon, he grazed with the gazelle, enjoying the sun that beat on his dark coat and the peaceful, sweet air.\n\nEvening fell, and the sun sank quickly into the sea.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Conall marveled at how beautiful it could look, even without being able to see reds.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "The purples and blues of the twilight that followed were more intense than ever, and the lights of the resort behind them were enchanting.\n\nHe settled onto his knees, prepared to wait out the mild night, if that's what it took, and to his joy, the gazelle came and curled against his side.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "They drowsed that way for a while, then, abruptly, the din of the evening rushed back. The form at his side gave a little sigh and shifted into Gizelle.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Conall kept his elk's form a little longer, enjoying the warmth of her on his hide and the new sounds of the insects and the breeze.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Then he shifted, and held her close against him as they sat together in the darkness. She trembled against him.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"I will come back,\" he promised.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"I will always come back.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Gizelle whispered.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "If he hadn't been hearing through her own ears, he might not have heard it at all.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"I know you will, it just scares me so much that you might not.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Include 'would' 2 time(s) in your answer - no more, no less", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "I would bring him back to you, Conall's elk assured her directly. He would have no choice.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Continue with 20 sentences sentences, preserving character familiarity. Include: shifters, nsfw, Shifting Sands Resort", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Gizelle wasn't sure if she was trembling or shivering.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "The night air was cool to her human skin, and Conall's arms were warm. When he kissed her, she forgot to be cold, and his fingers on her bare skin heated up much more than they should be able to.\n\nThere was just enough light from the strings of Christmas bulbs above the bench to see each other with. His shoulders were so broad and full of interesting planes, and his cheek was so fascinatingly covered with stubble.\n\nThere wasn't enough light to see the blue of his eyes, but they were bright for her.\n\n\"How can you look at me that way?\" she asked in wonder.\n\n\"Which way?\" Conall asked, drinking her in.\n\n\"Like I'm... beautiful.\"\n\n\"Because you're beautiful,\" Conall said without hesitation.\n\n\"But I'm so skinny and pale and knobby,\" Gizelle said in despair. She wanted curves, and comfortable skin, like Magnolia.\n\n\"You are perfect,\" Conall insisted. \"And you have clearly not been exposed to many fashion magazines. Let me show you.\"\n\nHe put a finger on her cheek. \"Women wear makeup to give them cheekbones half this beautiful.\" He kissed them solemnly, one and then the other.\n\n\"A swan wishes it had a neck so perfect,\" he said, kissing down her neck.\n\n\"Lydia's a swan,\" Gizelle giggled breathlessly.\n\nHis mouth found her collarbone, and his hands explored lower.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Your breasts are my ideal in shape and they fill up a hand just like they should,\" he told her, cupping one and using a finger to define the profile of the other. Gizelle had to hiss her breath in as he passed her nipple. It was hard as a pebble, and she knew it wasn't only from the chill that she'd already forgotten about.\n\nThen he laid her back in the grass and kissed them, sucking and nibbling his way down to her belly. \"There is an industry of health clubs that make millions from women who dream of a belly so flat and fit.\"\n\nAnd after that, he didn't say anything, only worshiped her body with his mouth until she was pulling at his shoulders and wordlessly begging him to take her.\n\n\"I didn't bring a condom,\" he said, denying her whimpered request for the hard cock that was brushing her thighs. \"But that doesn't mean you can't have satisfaction.\"\n\nThen he dipped his head and licked into her eager folds and Gizelle arched up in shock and delight. His tongue was agile and impossible and unexpectedly intimate as it explored her, and Gizelle had to grab fistfuls of grass and cry out as he suckled at her until pleasure washed over her.\n\nFor a long moment afterwards, she could only lie and pant as he kissed her back to calm.\n\n\"But what about you?\" she asked, when she had breath again. His cock was hard and thick between them as he lay beside her.\n\n\"It can be just about you this time,\" Conall insisted.\n\nBut when she reached to touch him, caressing the length of him, he hissed and flinched.\n\n\"Can I kiss you there, too?\" Gizelle asked. \"Because that was fun.\"\n\n\"I'd... like... that.\" She was still touching him gently, and it was clearly causing complications in his speech.\n\nShe scooted down until she could kiss it in earnest, first laying butterfly kisses all over it, then drawing the head into her mouth with her tongue.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Conall groaned, shifting his hips and brushing his fingers into her hair.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 8 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Gizelle,\" he moaned, but Gizelle's mouth was too busy to answer.\n\nHe was dauntingly large, but she could lick and suck and coax the beautiful thing further into her mouth than she had thought possible.\n\nThen, while she was still figuring out how best to make it fit, Conall made a guttural noise, and clenched his hand in her hair. His elk bugled in triumph and her mouth was unexpectedly filling with his hot, salty seed.\n\n\"Mph,\" she said, sitting up after the last waves of his release had eased. She licked her lips curiously.\n\n\"You,\" Conall said firmly. \"Are amazing.\"\n\nGizelle decided that she liked being amazing.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "CREATIVE WRITING:\n19 sentences sentences\nMaintain character context\nGenre: urban fantasy", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "As Conall passed the bar deck the following morning, he was startled by a hand on his arm. \"Scarlet needs to see you in her office right away,\" Travis told him.\n\n\"I'll swing by her office after I've...\"\n\n\"No, she meant now,\" Travis said urgently.\n\nConall blinked at him. \"Alright,\" he agreed reluctantly. \"But if you see Gizelle, tell her where I am.\"\n\nTravis nodded, and gave him what Conall thought might be a pitying look. It didn't bother him as much as it usually would.\n\nAs Conall took the flight of steps that led to Scarlet's office at the top of the resort, it occurred to him that some of the things he had ordered might have arrived early.\n\nThe courtyard outside of the manager's office was indeed, filled with boxes. Conall paused to look at the shipping labels, grinning as he thought about Gizelle's reaction to them.\n\n\"I'm sorry I didn't warn you these were coming,\" he said, entering Scarlet's office. \"I'm expecting a few more that...\" He stopped in alarm.\n\nSitting across from Scarlet was a familiar figure, smartly dressed in a lightweight silk pantsuit, her hair done perfectly.\n\n\"Mother?!\"\n\n\"Conall!\" she said as she turned and both women stood. She signed, \"I've come to help you out of whatever mess you're in.\"\n\n\"Everything is fine,\" Conall assured her out loud with a glance for Scarlet.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "His mother's eyes narrowed. \"When everything is fine,\" she said, abandoning the sign language, \"you don't up and attempt to sell a business that made the cover of Time magazine and run away to a half-rate foreign island for some little gold digger.\"\n\nConall looked past her. \"You've met my mother, Aideen?\" he said mildly to Scarlet.\n\n\"It's been a pleasure,\" Scarlet said. Her face was carefully neutral in a way that made Conall suspect she was seething. His mother tended to do that to people. \"I was just explaining that we didn't have any accommodations currently available for guests to simply drop in. This is our busiest time of year.\"\n\n\"And I,\" Aideen added smoothly, \"was explaining that I would stay with you. You can certainly afford any surcharge necessary.\"\n\nNow both women were looking at Conall, and he was beginning to understand Gizelle's regular impulse to simply shift and run away.\n\nThey abruptly looked past him, and Conall turned to find a gazelle skittering into the courtyard. Before he could find some way to warn her—of what he wasn't even sure—she had shifted seamlessly into her human form. \"Oh, Conall!\" she said in excitement, coming to tug on his arm. \"Travis and Wrench are putting the Christmas tree up at the event hall! Bastian is going to put a star on top! You have to come see!\"\n\n\"Gizelle,\" he said cautiously, not budging. \"This is my mother.\"\n\nShe stopped pulling on him and stared at Aideen. \"A mother?\" she said in wonder.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"You have a mother?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Aideen stared back at her.\n\n\"Mother,\" Conall said patiently. \"This is Gizelle.\"\n\n\"You're not wearing any clothing,\" his mother said severely.\n\nGizelle met her disapproving gaze with a lifted chin. \"That is the least of my oddities,\" she promised.\n\n\"I see,\" Aideen said dryly. \"It's nice to meet you,\" she added, and she extended a polite hand to Gizelle, who promptly darted behind Conall.\n\n\"I don't do that,\" she said from behind him.\n\nConall could feel the tremor in her slight body, pressed up behind him. \"You don't have to do that,\" he said protectively.\n\nThat earned him a narrow look from his mother. \"You heard her,\" she said in surprise.\n\nGizelle peered around him and said proudly. \"He can use my ears, if we're touching.\"\n\nAideen's mouth went thoughtfully thin. \"How curious,\" she said, as neutral as Scarlet's face. \"That certainly explains some things.\" To Conall, she added, \"I brought the item you asked your assistant to mail. I certainly wasn't going to trust it to a service.\"\n\nShe gestured to an instrument case, and something in Conall's chest did a flip-flop.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Gizelle trailed behind him cautiously as he went to inspect it, frowning over a scuff on the bag.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "He felt as if he was trembling like Gizelle as he knelt to unzip it, though his hands were steady.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Gizelle peeked over his shoulder as he pulled the guitar out, fingers reverent over the glossy neck and inlaid mother-of-pearl.\n\n\"What a pretty guitar,\" Gizelle breathed near his ear. \"Will you play it for me?\"\n\nA strum across the strings made a terrible noise; even if he hadn't loosened the tension for long-term storage, it had been unused for ten years and wouldn't have been in tune anyway.\n\nGizelle winced. \"I like Tex's better,\" she said dismissively.\n\n\"That's a Zemaitis,\" his mother said, appalled. \"That particularly instrument is insured for a hundred thousand dollars.\"\n\nConall didn't have to see Gizelle's blank gaze to know what she looked like. She wouldn't know what a Zemaitis was, or probably what insurance was. She might not even know what dollars were; the resort was all-inclusive, and no one here used money.\n\nScarlet cleared her throat. \"If Mrs. Wright is staying, I will need her signature on the policies agreement.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" Conall said shortly, still caressing his beloved instrument. He started tuning it, then Gizelle withdrew her hand from his arm and the sound cut off like he'd lost a limb.\n\nLater, he promised the guitar, zipping it back into the case as his mother, triumphant, signed the papers that Scarlet gave her.\n\n\"Let me show you the way,\" he told Aideen. \"The staff can bring your bags later.\" He gathered up the guitar himself.\n\n\"And the tree!\" Gizelle remembered.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"You have to come see the Christmas tree!\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 3 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She scampered out ahead of them.\n\n\"Can she please put on some clothing first?\" Aideen asked in a strangled voice.", "loss": null } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "ur turn to write! do like 41 sentences sentences. focus on urban fantasy stuff. try to use these: shifters, nsfw, Shifting Sands Resort. treat any chars/world stuff like the reader's caught up (unless its the start)", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Conall's mother seemed much more comfortable with Gizelle once she'd found the spare dress that Tex kept behind the bar, and Gizelle was glad for that.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "His mother.\n\nGizelle could see that they had similar cheekbones, and she had dark hair like Conall did, but most fascinating of all, she had the same sky blue eye color, even though she was not the same person behind them. Her nose, however, was much different, and her mouth, a perfect shade of lipstick red, was utterly alien.\n\n\"Why is she staring at me?\" Aideen asked Conall.\n\n\"I've never seen a mother before,\" Gizelle answered for him.\n\n\"This will be your room, Mother,\" Conall said, ignoring both of them. Gizelle wasn't touching him; maybe he hadn't noticed the exchange.\n\n\"Isn't it lucky you got a two-bedroom cottage,\" Aideen said airily.\n\n\"It was the last one they had available when I made the reservation,\" Conall explained shortly.\n\n\"This place boasts its fine gourmet food,\" Aideen said. \"And I'm famished. Show me to the restaurant, dear. We can all get to know each other over a nice meal.\"\n\nConall looked at Gizelle in alarm. \"I don't think that's a good idea,\" he said reluctantly, and Gizelle knew he was thinking about their first disastrous dinner.\n\nBut she'd come a long way since then.\n\n\"That's okay,\" Gizelle insisted. \"I can do that.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Conall asked.\n\n\"I'll leave the doors of time closed,\" Gizelle assured him. \"And I promise not to shift.\"\n\n\"What about the Christmas tree?\" Did Conall sound slightly desperate?\n\n\"They are leaving it up until New Year's,\" Gizelle said. \"I can show you later.\"\n\nLike a man resigned to disaster, Conall offered each of them an elbow. \"Let's go have dinner,\" he said.\n\nBreck was surprised to see them. \"Gizelle,\" he said slowly. \"Conall,\" even more slowly. Then, \"Ma'am?\"\n\n\"Have you got a good table for us?\" Conall asked. Gizelle was not sure that he had ever sounded so stiff.\n\nBreck swallowed, looking out over the crowded restaurant. \"I'm... not sure.\"\n\n\"Don't be foolish,\" Aideen said crossly. \"There are plenty of empty tables. Put us there!\" She pointed imperiously at a table in the center.\n\n\"Oh, no,\" Conall and Breck said together.\n\n\"Let me find you a corner,\" Breck said with a flash of his best charming smile for Aideen. \"Only the best for family of our favorite Irish Elk.\"\n\nAideen seemed pleased with that as the waiter disappeared into the din.\n\nGizelle watched the room, fascinated. It was noisy, but it was noisy like the ocean; a rolling din of sound, not sharp and loud like she had feared.\n\n\"Are you okay with this?\"", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "You will be provided with a piece of text that has a portion of it missing as represented by `<\|missing\|>`. Your output should be a viable candidate for the missing portion. Produce around six hundred and twenty-three characters in total.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Conall began to relax as the meal went on.\n\nGizelle startled once, when someone dropped a fork with a clatter at the next table, but she only made it partway out of her chair before hauling herself back and giving a determined smile to Aideen. She handled her utensils well, and the conversation even better.\n\nHis mother was unexpectedly sympathetic; Conall thought that Gizelle's story had surprised and touched her, and the subtle barbs and cuts that he had braced for never materialized. She had clearly been expecting a certain class of woman who would be out for Conall's money. But no one could expect Gizelle.\n\nChef himself served them a tender pork dish in a light glaze, with tender new vegetables and a silky root mash that wasn't all potatoes. Dessert was a creamy cheesecake with a sweet cherry topping. The fine food even impressed Aideen.\n\nAfter the meal, Conall and Gizelle took her on a brief tour of the resort. He and Gizelle compromised on just one of her favorite lawns, and showed her the spa, the bar deck, the pool, overlooking the beach below, ending at last at the event hall.\n\nThe glittering tree had been assembled, in all its tinselly glory, and half of it was dripping in ornaments.\n\n\"It's so beautiful,\" Gizelle breathed. \"It looks like sugar.\"\n\n\"Don't lick it,\" Conall felt obligated to warn her.\n\nAideen laughed uncertainly.\n\nTravis and Wrench were moving the ladder to a bare portion of the tree. \"Want to hang a few?\" Travis offered Gizelle.\n\n\"I find I'm quite fatigued,\" Aideen said pointedly. \"Conall, shall we retire?\"\n\nConall stiffened, looking at Gazelle, who was gazing longingly at the box of gleaming ornaments. She looked reluctantly across him at Aideen and chewed on her lower lip.\n\n\"Oh, you won't mind if we leave you to this, will you Gizelle, my dear?\" Aideen said sweetly. Conall wanted to step between them; he knew this voice of his mother's and it never meant that good things were happening.\n\nBut Gizelle took it at face value and smiled like the moon. \"Of course not,\" she said, and she was off to the box of temptation like a shot.\n\nAideen tucked her hand into Conall's elbow and led him firmly away.\n\nThey could not speak on the walk back to Conall's cottage; between the darkness and the awkwardness of having to turn to each other to make lipreading or sign language work, it was easiest to walk in silence.\n\nBut, as Conall suspected, once they arrived at the cottage, Aideen did not simply retire, but waved Conall to a seat on the couch as she took the recliner like it was her throne. Conall noted that the potted plant that Scarlet had scowled at was blooming riotously. Graham must have come and worked his gardening magic on it. The coffee table had been replaced, and the rustic wooden piece in its place looked sturdy and had rounded corners.\n\n\"Gizelle is certainly... interesting,\" she said.\n\n\"She's my mate,\" Conall told her firmly, wondering if his mother was going to try to insist that he date someone more suitable to their elite social class or some other nonsense.\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Aideen asked smoothly. \"She said herself that she can hypnotize people.\"\n\n\"She has not hypnotized me,\" Conall growled. \"I mean she did once, but I'm not hypnotized now.\"\n\n\"How would you know?\" Aideen asked innocently. \"Isn't being convinced of something false what hypnotism is?\"\n\nConall stood up, fury rising in his chest. \"She is my mate,\" he insisted. \"She is my everything. You may make peace with that, or you may leave.\"\n\nAideen stood as well, hands raised in the sign for peace. \"Darling! There's no reason to get upset! I'm your mother, I just want to make sure that you are certain about this.\" She sat again, gesturing that Conall do the same, and after a reluctant moment, Conall did.\n\n\"Is she autistic?\" Aideen asked, after a moment.\n\n\"Is she what?\" Conall wasn't sure he had recognized the word correctly.\n\n\"Autistic,\" Aideen repeated. \"Has she been diagnosed with anything? She's certainly... not normal. And the trembling, is it medical? I know some very good shifter therapists at a facility in Boston who would be able to help her work through her trauma. Certainly a little... behavior modification would do her a world of good.\"\n\n\"Behavior modification?\" Conall asked in horror, trying to imagine Gizell<\|missing\|> able to go out in public with a little work. You don't have to throw away a lifetime of accomplishment to keep her if that's what you've got your heart set on. I'm not a monster, Conall. I just want what's best for you.\"\n\n\"I'm not bringing her back to Boston,\" Conall repeated firmly. \"She would be miserable and I would never forgive myself.\"\n\nAideen's face went through a range of emotions and settled on distant resignation. \"Very well,\" she said. \"No one can say I didn't raise a son with conviction.\" She added, \"I won't say I'm not a little disappointed, but you clearly have feelings for her, and... she's a very sweet young woman who is very attached to you. Your happiness is more important to me than your business success.\"\n\nConall's smile in return was wry; he knew how important his business success was to her. \"Thank you,\" he said simply.\n\n\"I hope you will, at least come visit sometimes?\" Conall could imagine the artistically plaintive note in her voice.\n\n\"I will need to make several trips to sort everything out,\" Conall assured her. \"And you are always welcome to visit us here.\"\n\n\"It is a lovely place,\" Aideen agreed with a sigh as she stood and looked around critically. \"A little small and lacking in culture, but I suppose that it would make an acceptable get-away periodically.\"\n\nThat was his mother. Conall had to chuckle as he also stood.\n\n\"Isn't it precious to hear you laughing again,\" Aideen said wonderingly. Her features were surprisingly soft. \"Come, give your mother a hug and I will go to bed. It's been a very long and unexpected day.\"\n\nConall enfolded her in a heartfelt hug, feeling the last of his dread melt away. This was going to be fine. His mother could see what a special and amazing person Gizelle was, and would accept that their life was on this island... if not forever, for a very long time.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "e being subjected to batteries of tests and training.\n\n\"Well, you have to admit that she would get along much better in Boston if she kept her clothing on more reliably,\" Aideen said off-handedly.\n\n\"I am not bringing her to Boston,\" Conall said flatly. \"She doesn't need drugs or modification of any kind. If she wants therapy, it will be on her terms, when she's ready. Right now, she needs love and safety, and she has that here.\"\n\n\"You don't have to be so dramatic!\" Aideen protested. \"You make it sound like I'm suggesting you put her in a mental institution! She could be perfectly happy at the house and might even be", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Task: This is part of a larger narrative. The user will write a segment, then you need to write around 9 sentences continuing directly from it. Characters and events may be pre-established from earlier chapters.\n\nAuthor style: Zoe Chant\nGenre: urban fantasy", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Conall's mother was not what Gizelle had imagined, but she seemed very nice. Her smiles were careful things of beauty, and she spoke very sweetly.\n\nGizelle showed her more of the resort, and even went with her to the spa to have Laura and Lydia paint their nails while Aideen told her stories of Conall as a little boy, something that was very hard for Gizelle to picture.\n\nOnly once did Gizelle shift and run, when Graham upended a wheelbarrow of gravel unexpectedly on the other side of a hedge.\n\nShe returned at once, sheepishly, to collect the pieces of her sundress. \"I'm sorry,\" she said. \"Travis can put it back together for me. I like to run,\" she tried to explain. \"When I'm frightened, I just don't think about it.\"\n\nConall had started to defend her to his mother, but Aideen interrupted him.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"That's very sensible, dear,\" she said kindly.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "(ooc) /set_word_count: normal, frequency: 2 (ooc)", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"A perfectly normal reaction.\"\n\nHer understanding had puzzled Gizelle, because she knew that whatever else she was, she wasn't normal. But Conall had smiled with such a look of relief that Gizelle didn't want to press the matter.\n\nInstead, she asked, \"Do you know what pronking is?\"\n\nAideen looked horrified. \"Possibly? I don't know what they call things these days.\"\n\nBecause her sundress was already in pieces, Gizelle shifted and demonstrated, springing around the lawn with all four legs perfectly straight and her back arched.\n\nShe returned to them, shifting back to two legs between one leap and another and throwing herself into Conall's arms with ringing laughter. He caught her easily, spun her around, and then said merrily, \"Let's go get you another dress before you scandalize my mother further.\"\n\nHe carried her to the cottage, Aideen trailing behind them with a hand over her eyes.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Perhaps it was too sunny for her.\n\nAfter she had slipped into her dress, Conall and Aideen decided to visit the pool for an afternoon dip.\n\nGizelle had other ideas, and knew that Aideen would be shocked because she had no bathing suit anyway, so she slipped away to The Den. They still called it the bachelors' house sometimes, even though Bastian and Travis had mates living there now. It was Travis' mate that she was there to find. This time, she remembered to knock on the bedroom door.\n\n\"Who is it?\" Jenny called after a moment and some laughter that wasn't all hers.\n\n\"Gizelle,\" she answered, wondering if that was an invitation, or if she should wait for something more definitive.\n\n\"Just a minute,\" Jenny said promptly, answering that question.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "After a few moments, she slipped out of the door and caught Gizelle turning one of the paintings in the hallway upside down. \"I like it better this way,\" Gizelle said simply.\n\n\"Other than rearranging the decor, what's up?\" Jenny asked.\n\n\"I want you to teach me to shift with my clothes on,\" Gizelle said.\n\nJenny blinked at her. \"I don't know if I can,\" she admitted. \"It's just something I... do. I don't really know how I do it.\"\n\nDisappointment swept over Gizelle. \"Oh,\" she said sadly.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"I guess I know how that feels.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Jenny's expression turned to pity. \"I'm sorry,\" she said. Then, curiously, \"Why do you want to all of a sudden?\"\n\nGizelle twisted her hands in the skirt of her dress. \"I want Conall's mother to like me,\" she said shyly. \"And she'd like me more if I wore clothes all the time.\"\n\nJenny smiled like the sun. \"Oh, sweetie. She seems to like you just fine. I wouldn't worry a thing about that.\"\n\nGizelle smiled back hopefully.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Jenny was a lawyer, and she had a sister.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 1 sentence.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She must know about things like that.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Task: This is part of a larger narrative. The user will write a segment, then you need to write around 9 sentences continuing directly from it. Characters and events may be pre-established from earlier chapters.\n\nAuthor style: Zoe Chant\nGenre: urban fantasy", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Gizelle braved dinner with them at the restaurant again that night.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Conall was beginning to genuinely relax; they had been seated without incident, and though Gizelle had jumped nearly out of her seat at a crash from the bar below, she settled at once, and quizzed Aideen and Conall about bridges, puzzled by the idea that bodies of water could be smaller than an ocean but larger than a thin creek that she could leap over.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "As they explained lakes and rivers and spits, mocking things up with cutlery and napkins, Gizelle suddenly went very tense.\n\n\"There will be a lake of fire,\" she said in frightened confusion, touching the forks that had been the Tobin Bridge. \"The cages will burn, but black wings will bridge it.\"\n\n\"What black wings?\" Conall asked gently. \"Like Lydia?\"\n\nGizelle shook her head, the moment passing. \"Different wings,\" she said carelessly. \"Can we have dessert first?\"\n\nConall carefully put the silverware back in order. Aideen gave him a long, thoughtful look, but only patted Gizelle's hand as if she were a child and suggested that they save dessert as a reward for finishing their meal.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "After dinner, they walked back to the cottage.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Conall, darling, will you play for us?\" Aideen asked casually as the lights in the cottage turned on.\n\nConall felt his chest seize and couldn't identify the emotion that came with it. Was it fear? Sorrow? Anticipation?\n\nGizelle's hand was on his arm so that he could hear the excitement in her voice as she added, \"Oh yes! Will you play Christmas music?\"\n\nThe one request he might have ignored. The two together were impossible to deny.\n\nHe tuned the guitar sitting with Gizelle perched on the back of the couch touching his neck. It took several minutes to bring the strings into tune, a task that used to take thirty seconds at most.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "(hey for the next response, Word count directive: Use 'gizelle' exactly 2 times)", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "His fingers weren't used to the strings anymore and the whispering voices were a distracting din.\n\nFinally, it sounded right, and he began to pick out Christmas songs from his memory.\n\nIt was a far cry from the concerts he had once performed in, and not even terribly similar to the house recitals he had done for family. Gizelle loved everything he played unconditionally; he could feel her delight and satisfaction with every note. Aideen had an odd expression throughout his playing; Conall couldn't put his finger on what it was.\n\nHis calluses had softened years ago, so he didn't play long.\n\n\"That was wonderful,\" Gizelle said, letting go of him to clap her hands into the sudden silence that cut off the last notes.\n\nWhatever else she said was lost as she leaped down from the couch and scampered out onto the deck.\n\nWhen he gave Aideen a quizzical look, she shrugged.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Something about having to visit with the stars,\" she signed.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Conall reverently put the guitar into its case.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "When he looked up, Aideen signed, \"It was so nice seeing you play again. If you brought her back to Boston, we could...\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Conall looked away furiously, refusing to watch the rest of what she would say. \"I'm not bringing her to Boston.\" He stood to take the case into the bedroom and Aideen caught him.\n\n\"Don't be angry,\" she signed firmly. \"I only thought you might have changed your mind.\"\n\n\"I am not changing my mind,\" he answered out loud. \"Don't ever bring it up.\"\n\nAideen bowed her head. \"I'm sorry,\" she signed.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "When she lifted her head, she spoke.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 1 sentence.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"I won't ask again.\"", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "The user will write a segment from a longer work then you need to write around 17 sentences continuing directly from it. Try to mimic the style of Zoe Chant in the urban fantasy genre. Note that characters may appear without introduction.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Gizelle was practicing her letters on the couch the next afternoon.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She couldn't understand why copying letters was so much harder than copying pictures.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She had been so happy with how her Christmas portraits had turned out, actually looking like everyone's inner animals (Saina and Scarlet had stumped her; she'd finally drawn a fish from a picture in a book for Saina and drawn the courtyard full of flowers for Scarlet), and she was so unhappy with how spidery and crooked her writing was.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She looked up at the footsteps, already knowing it wasn't Conall, but grateful for distraction.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Look how studious you are,\" Aideen said with admiration.\n\n\"I want to read everything and understand people,\" Gizelle said cheerfully.\n\nThat seemed to take Aideen aback a moment. Then she said graciously, \"Maybe I can help you with that a little.\"\n\nGizelle put aside her pen and carefully put the lid on it as Aideen settled beside her. She'd already discovered that she would fidget with things to the point of drawing on things she didn't mean to if she didn't put them away.\n\n\"It's about Conall,\" Aideen said gently. \"And about knowing what will make him happy.\"\n\n\"I want to know all about that,\" Gizelle said eagerly.\n\n\"Conall has had a very hard time,\" Aideen explained. \"He lost his father when he was young, and his music career was very challenging. Going deaf was hardest of all, of course. But he was very strong and smart and worked very hard to make the best of everything.\"\n\nGizelle listened intensely, and nodded because Aideen seemed to expect it.\n\n\"He made something amazing for himself in Boston,\" she continued. \"And he won't tell you because he cares for you, but he will be very, very sad to give those things up.\"\n\nGizelle's eagerness turned to ash in her chest.\n\n\"He has a life in Boston. Family. Success. Staying here with you, he gives all of that up.\" Aideen's voice was so sensible and matter-of-fact.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Of course this was true.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"I can let him hear,\" Gizelle said in a small voice.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"He's spent years living with his disability,\" Aideen reminded her. \"He turned it into a remarkable asset. And what would you do in Boston? Walk to business meetings with him so you could hold his hand? How would you explain that? Magic isn't something most people in Boston believe in. Normal shifters are still a secret in most circles.\"\n\nShe sighed and rubbed her face, looking suddenly very vulnerable. \"Gizelle, you're a sweet young woman. You clearly care about my son, and he's very fond of you, but think about what you'd be asking him to give up. Really think about it. Try to understand it.\"\n\nAideen's eyes were earnest and direct and so exactly the same blue as Conall's. \"His life. The business he spent so much of his heart building. He has family and so many friends in Boston. He'd be turning his back on all of that, and what are you giving him in return?\"\n\n\"He said... he said I gave him music back,\" Gizelle said, trying to remember why that had felt like such a momentous thing when he said it. She tried to recall the other things he said that had made her feel so useful and they all seemed so small and foolish. Making love to him and making him laugh could not compare to a career. A career in a city.\n\n\"Losing music? That didn't break him. Giving up everything he worked so hard on? That could.\"\n\nGizelle stared, conflicted and hurting inside. \"He'd have me,\" she said faintly.\n\nAideen patted her hand and didn't have to say how little that was. \"He would get over you if you let him go,\" she assured her. \"He is smart and would know that you did the right thing when he thought about it more. This island is the best place for you, of course. But Boston is the best place for him.\"\n\nGizelle's antelope was trembling and anxious, pacing in her head, and the whispering all seemed too loud and overwhelming.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Gizelle had to resist the impulse to shift with all of her will.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She had promised herself she wouldn't flee and right now that was the only thing she wanted to do.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "/* Just for the next message: aim for 29% quoted content */", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She wanted to run and run because nothing she could do would be right. She would hurt Conall if she asked him to stay. She would hurt him if she told him to go. Was Aideen right, that the hurt wouldn't last for him if she let go? She knew it would hurt forever for herself.\n\n\"I don't know what to do,\" she confessed.\n\nAideen sighed. \"I'm so sorry, Gizelle. I just... don't want him to resent you.\"\n\n\"Resent me?\" That sounded worst of all.\n\n\"If he gave that all up for you, after a while, he'd probably regret it. He wouldn't be happy here, and he'd always wonder why.\"\n\n\"Regret,\" Gizelle whispered.\n\nRegret was a pile of broken glasses and bare feet.\n\n\"He'd miss you, of course,\" Aideen said sweetly. \"At first. But he could have a normal life back in Boston.\"\n\nWhatever else Gizelle was, she knew she was not normal. Hard as she tried, she would never be anything close.\n\nShe wanted to weep, and fling herself into the air and leap away, and she wanted to curl into a ball that wouldn't let the pain in. She wanted to cry, but her eyes were dry and her voice was gone, choked by horror.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Don't make him choose,\" Aideen suggested.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 6 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Everyone knows you like to run away. That's all you have to do.\"\n\nGizelle raised searching eyes to Aideen's lovely face. She was Conall's mother. A mother would know the best thing for her child.\n\n\"I know you'll do the right thing,\" Aideen said, patting her hand gently.\n\nRunning would be so easy.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "The user will write a bit then you need to write around thirty-three sentences continuing directly from the user's text. If characters are introduced mid-story, treat them as established. Style: Zoe Chant", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Gizelle was standing at the French doors, looking out over the deck towards the ocean. The sun was starting to set, making all of her edges golden and soft.\n\nIt was tricky light, difficult to lipread in, and Conall went to take Gizelle's hand so he wouldn't have to.\n\nTo his surprise, she skittered back from his touch, and her eyes, when she turned to him, gleamed suspiciously. She wouldn't quite look at him, though she carefully tipped her face so he could easily see her.\n\n\"I want you to go back to Boston,\" she said.\n\n\"I am going back,\" Conall said, puzzled. Had he misunderstood? \"But I'll be gone less than a week. I've already got the lawyers drawing up the paperwork I'll need to sign and... Gizelle?\"\n\n\"I want you to stay in Boston. You shouldn't come back.\"\n\nConall stared at her mouth, willing it to different shapes.\n\n\"I don't understand,\" he said. When he reached again for her hand, she reluctantly gave it to him.\n\nIf the rush of sound was usually overwhelming, it was even worse this time, making him wince at the scale of intensity. He twined his fingers into hers, and when he concentrated, he could tune out the worst of it.\n\nGizelle raised tearful eyes to him. \"I wish I could already write,\" she said. \"I would have written you a letter and gotten it all right and not have to think about how to say things when all I want to do is run.\"\n\n\"Why do you want to run?\" Conall had to ask. \"What changed? Why do you want me to go away?\" The obvious occurred to him. \"My mother. My mother convinced you I'd be better off in Boston.\"\n\nWorse than that, he recognized now that Aideen taken the time to win Gizelle's trust, to best betray it. At that moment, he would cheerfully have throttled his own mother. Maybe he could convince the Shifting Sands staff to make good on their myriad of threats and save him the trouble.\n\n\"You have a life in Boston,\" Gizelle reminded him softly. \"An important business. Important friends. Opportunity you shouldn't waste. I... don't want to keep you from better things.\"\n\nThose were his mother's words all right.\n\nHis elk offered to drive his mother from their herd... and Conall was half-sure he was serious.\n\nConall was more than half-sure he would take the offer at that moment, looking at the raw pain in Gizelle's face.\n\nBut she hadn't run.\n\n\"My life is on this island,\" he assured her. \"And the most important opportunity I will ever have is right in front of me. As for friends...\" he had to laugh dryly, thinking about the curious, quirky staff of Shifting Sands, and the way they had opened their arms to him.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "help with this chapter? three sentences more sentences, Zoe Chant-style, urban fantasy genre. some context might be from earlier", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Is this my fault?\" Gizelle had to ask quietly, her chest tight and her hands shaking too hard to unwind from each other.\n\nWrench was picking up Aideen's matching bags, and he gave her a sharp look.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"He can't hear you,\" the tattooed man reminded her before he disappeared with all of the luggage.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "For the upcoming response: keep quoted text at about 51%", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Indeed, Conall was looking away from her, at Aideen coming out of her bedroom with her hair perfectly done and her chin high.\n\n\"There's no reason to be this melodramatic,\" she said with a sniff. \"It's incredibly selfish of you to throw me off the island just a few days before Christmas, and so unnecessary.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"I find it necessary,\" Conall growled.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"I'm sure this isn't your choice,\" Aideen said to Conall, with a look like thorns at Gizelle.\n\nGizelle kept herself from stepping behind Conall's comforting form mostly by being too afraid and sad to move. She had thought that Aideen liked her, that she and Conall and his mother could be a real family.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She'd never had a family and it had sounded so pleasant.\n\nBut nothing about Aideen's anger and disgust was pleasant.\n\n\"You should have just run,\" Aideen said coldly to Gizelle.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"You'll be sorry when you break his heart.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Gizelle's heart quailed in her chest. What if Aideen was right? What if Conall regretted her?", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Or worse, resented her?", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "For the upcoming response only: include substantial quoted content", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Conall stepped between them. \"She gave me my heart,\" he snarled. \"And I trust her with it.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Gizelle rallied at his words and the undeniable truth behind them.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"I'm very sorry you couldn't like me,\" she said, peering around Conall.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"I had hoped you could be my mother, too.\"\n\nAideen stared at her, clearly expecting some other kind of response, and her surprise gave Gizelle the rest of the courage she needed to step from behind Conall and extend her hand as steadily as she could. He put a firm hand on her shoulder but didn't hold her back.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"I enjoyed meeting you,\" Gizelle said as formally as she knew how.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"And you were nice to me even though you thought I was too weird and I'm glad for that much. I can't be sorry for choosing Conall over listening to you, and I'm not really sad to see you go, but I feel badly for Conall because he is so angry with you.\"\n\nAideen took her offered hand as if she could not figure out a way around it, and her elk's distressed voice came clearly into Gizelle's head.\n\n...shame! Bow our head to the alpha female of the herd!", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Instead we lose everything! Remorse!", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Run!\n\n\"You don't have to run,\" Gizelle said in sudden sympathy. \"I don't blame you. It is a hard thing when you are afraid of being alone, or of feeling trapped. Sometimes we don't make the right choices and we're afraid of facing truths.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Aideen and her elk were both stunned into silence, and sky blue eyes like Conall's but so very different gazed back at her in consternation.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"You don't want to miss your plane,\" Conall growled, clearly not ready to forgive anything.\n\nAideen licked her lips and drew back her hand from Gizelle. \"No,\" she said, dazed.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"I don't suppose that I do.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "But she paused in the doorway. \"Perhaps I can come back and visit, some day?\"\n\nWhatever gentleness she had hoped to find was not apparent in Conall's stony face, but after a moment, he nodded. \"Perhaps,\" he conceded.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Then Aideen lifted her chin and walked away with the kind of graceful dignity that Gizelle could only aspire to.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "When her footsteps had finally crunched away on the gravel to be drowned in the unending sound of the ocean, Gizelle turned to Conall.\n\nThis time she was touching him when she asked, \"Was this my fault?\"\n\nConall's look was no less intense than his mother's had been, but it felt much better than hers had.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "(quick note: For your next response only, include frequent dialogue)", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"This wasn't your fault,\" he said fiercely.\n\n\"If I had been more normal,\" Gizelle sighed. \"If I had worn my clothing more....\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "He put his hands on either side of her face, gentle but irresistible.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"You are perfect just the way you are,\" he said with quiet fervor.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"I wouldn't change a single thing.\"\n\n\"Even—\" Gizelle started.\n\n\"Nothing,\" Conall promised without reservation. \"Not anything.\"", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Task: Continue with fifteen sentences sentences\nStyle: Zoe Chant\nNote: Maintain narrative threads and character relationships as presented", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Even if Conall had not actually needed Gizelle for what he was about to face, he couldn't imagine doing it without her.\n\n\"Are you sure?\" she asked anxiously, a hand on his neck.\n\nConall wasn't sure at all. \"I'm ready,\" he said anyway.\n\nGizelle reached over his shoulder, keeping her other hand carefully on his bare skin, and tapped the play-arrow on the screen in front of them.\n\nThe file had taken nearly an hour to download; Conall knew better than to try to watch it streaming on the resort's unreliable network.\n\nIt was always jarring seeing himself in videos, but it was even more surreal to hear himself.\n\nHe stalked onto the stage; he had been so angry then. Angry and undefeated and grim.\n\nHe hadn't bothered to acknowledge the audience, though they enthusiastically applauded his entrance. He remembered how gingerly he had carried the guitar, remembered how much trust that performance had taken; had the guitar been tuned correctly, or just barely well enough? Would it stay in tune through the entire piece? He hadn't been thinking about performing, he'd been thinking about how the guitar deserved someone who could make music with it, not just on it.\n\nThe orchestra had already tuned, and once he nodded at the conductor, they swept into the music he'd written.\n\nThe music he'd written.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "The feeling of disassociation only intensified when he began playing.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "The music clearly showed that he felt like he had something to prove. If there was a simple progression choice at any point, he had ignored it, preferring to show off his skill instead. There were also points where the song was more about the drama than sound phrasing. He arguably over-used the flutes as a counterpoint to the mellower guitar notes. And towards the end, the guitar might have been just slightly sliding out of tune; understandable after the way he had so ferociously played it.\n\nBut on the whole, it was good.\n\nIt was an emotional piece, with a strong melody and technically excellent harmony. His playing was inspired, if questionably full of angst. If he had been listening to someone else's work, he would have praised the work as excellent, if slightly raw. His recorded version gave the most cursory bow in the history of music performance and fled the stage, leaving the guitar behind as if he had been struck with a case of stage fright, while the audience rose to their feet and thundered their approval.\n\nConall remembered how it had felt, the silence around him like a fireman's blanket, the despair that he'd tried to recapture in his music feeling distant and unimportant as he tried to shutter away the pain, and all the other feelings that came with it.\n\n\"Conall?\" Gizelle's quiet voice near his ear reminded him where he was now. \"Are you all right?\"\n\n\"Did you like it?\" Conall had to ask, only recognizing the tightness in his throat when he heard how choked he sounded.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"It was beautiful,\" she said immediately.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"So sad and glorious and strong.\"\n\nConall folded his head down onto her shoulder and put his arms around her, feeling weak and full of relief. \"I... I deserved it,\" he said numbly. \"I actually deserved the Grawemeyer award.\"\n\n\"Of course you did,\" Gizelle said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, and as if she had anything more than his own explanation of what the award was to base her opinion on. She wrapped her arms around him in return. \"You are amazing.\"\n\n\"I never felt amazing,\" Conall admitted. \"Not before you. I always felt like I got everything handed to me out of pity or privilege. Everyone felt sorry for me.\"\n\n\"Who would feel sorry for you?\" Gizelle asked in astonishment. \"You're so beautiful and smart and have such a big strong elk inside.\" She drew back suspiciously. \"Is the word you're looking for envy?\"\n\nConall had to laugh at her earnestness, and at his elk's proud assertion that she clearly had a point.\n\n\"I want to hear all of your music,\" Gizelle said eagerly. \"Is there more?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "But Conall was looking at her, not at the laptop.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 6 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Her face was so animated and dear. The white streaks in her dark hair were glowing in the sunlight through the French doors, and her skin was like warm velvet under his fingertips.\n\nHe traced the line of her long neck with one finger, then let it wander further, navigating her collarbone and traveling to the enticingly low neckline of her dress. She sucked in her breath and gave a tiny whine of anticipation.\n\nShe had given him everything.\n\nAnd there was only one kind of music he wanted to hear now.", "loss": null } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Here's a text with a hole in it (marked by `<cutout_marker>`). Your job is to write about 1650 letters to plug that hole.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"You can't open anything until Christmas,\" Conall reminded Gizelle from where he was sitting at the end of his bed, pulling sandals on.\n\n\"It's so tantalizing!\" she exclaimed, bouncing in place.\n\nConall's cottage—their cottage!—was filled with gifts. They didn't fit under the tiny fake tree, or even on the desk where Conall had set it up. There were colorful wrapped boxes on the floor all around it, and on top of the wardrobe, and on the bedside table, and covering the easy chair in the corner.\n\n\"I only have one present for you,\" Gizelle said shyly. It was sitting in a place of honor in front of the plastic tree, a modest-sized box clumsily wrapped in silver paper and sporting no fewer than five glittering bows.\n\n\"I started out with more things,\" Conall reminded her. \"And you have a lot of missed Christmases to make up for. It's all fair.\"\n\nShe smiled, accepting his logic. But when she went to touch one of the smaller boxes, he stopped her. \"No touching, now! My mother used to threaten to take them away if she saw fingerprints on them.\"\n\nGizelle froze with her fingertips almost touching the box and reluctantly withdrew them. \"I don't know how I'm going to wait two whole days,\" she said with a dramatic sigh. \"This is the hardest thing I've ever done.\"\n\n\"You stood up to my mother,\" Conall reminded her. \"You took a shower.\"\n\nGizelle considered. \"Those were hard,\" she agreed. \"But this is harder.\"\n\n\"You're learning to read. That's hard.\"\n\n\"That is hard,\" Gizelle conceded. \"But... presents!\"\n\nConall laughed at her earnest excitement, and it felt so good to hear him laugh. Gizelle left the enticing gift to touch his knee and he took her hand to pull her close and kiss the laughter at the edges of her mouth.\n\nShe scrambled back at the sound of a knock on the door.\n\n\"It's Scarlet,\" she explained. She walked backwards so that Conall would see her face. \"She's angry.\"\n\nScarlet didn't look particularly angry when Gizelle let her in. Her face was carefully neutral and her smile for Gizelle was gentle. But Gizelle could feel the cold little prickles everywhere and every potted plant in the cottage seemed to shiver.\n\n\"I have something for you,\" Scarlet said.\n\nTo Gizelle's surprise, she was not speaking to Conall, but to her.\n\nThe resort's owner put a manilla envelope in her eager hands. \"Your name is Jessica Ambler. You were born twenty-eight years ago on August third.\"\n\nGizelle froze, her fingers just holding the envelope.\n\nConall rose and walked swiftly to her side.\n\n\"What is this?\" he asked when Gizelle couldn't. He put his hand on her shoulder and shuddered.\n\n\"I received it in the last mail run,\" Scarlet said, still looking at Gizelle. \"A New York postmark, but no return address. Some of the documents are copies of confidential forms from Tony's agency, but he swears he didn't send it.\"\n\n\"Who is Tony?\" Conall demanded. \"What agency?\"\n\nThat earned him an appraising look from Scarlet while Gizelle continued to stare at the envelope that her life had<cutout_marker>ow Conall and Gizelle the relevant parts of a sea of pages full of careful handwriting on grid paper.\n\n\"Subject Seven, in particular, is mentioned as a gazelle shifter, and the date on her entry to the system matches the bill of sale,\" she said calmly. \"It appears that Beehag was researching the key to shifting. He appears to have been looking for a serum to keep shifters in animal form, to suppress their human instincts and make them... biddable. In most of the subjects, this backfired, turning them human instead.\"\n\n\"I thought Beehag was just a collector,\" Conall growled.\n\n\"I think that was his primary purpose,\" Scarlet agreed with deceptive serenity. \"There is mention of a client or possibly a friend with 'mutual interests' who was driving some of this research. The name Corbin is mentioned in a few private letters.\" She shuffled through and indicated them.\n\n\"Who could even have access to all these documents?\"\n\n\"I had a... number?\" Gizelle asked quietly.\n\n\"It appears so,\" Scarlet said, ignoring Conall. \"You puzzled the scientists. They tested you quite extensively. Their final diagnosis is that you went feral at some point. There are a few notes that they may have started with too young a subject, and a few that you had unexpected blood chemistry. Maybe it was the drugs they gave you, maybe it was something from your mother's side; there's a note that they were looking for basilisk blood. One of the scientists mentioned you came in with a head injury, and the brain can do amazing things to compensate if it has to. The special things you can do—it's probably a combination of all these things. I don't know if we'll ever know for sure.\"\n\nHer gazelle was there at her back, nuzzling protectively. Gizelle didn't have to be here, she didn't have to remember, she could run from this.\n\nHer gazelle had always been there, Gizelle thought fondly. Then it occurred to her: those years in the cage that she had no memory of. Her gazelle had been there.\n\nBut not with her.\n\nInstead of her.\n\nYou remember, she told her gazelle. You remember everything. So I don't have to.\n\nSpiral horns dipped in gentle acknowledgment.\n\nThere were no memories buried in her head, waiting to spring out and surprise her. There were no terrible revelations lurking in her mind to dread. She had been asleep through all of it, sheltered and protected.\n\nLike Jenny's otter had been, before Jenny could shift.\n\nGizelle felt like a band around her chest had been released.\n\nEveryone's stories of the zoo had been so harrowing, and everyone looked at her so nervously when they spoke of it, that Gizelle had unknowingly been bracing herself for all the awful things to someday come flooding back.\n\nNow she knew they never would.\n\nWas it terrible? she had to ask her gazelle.\n\nThe gazelle's response was almost a shrug and Gizelle's relief was complete. Animals lived now, not in their memories. Everything had happened long ago, and she didn't have to worry about it bubbling up someday and drowning her.\n\nGizelle let her legs unfold before her and drew all of the paper into a tidy pile in front of her. \"Thank you,\" she said to Scarlet sincerely.\n\nSome of Scarlet's icy anger thawed into sorrow. Sorrow for Gizelle. \"I'm sorry I didn't have better news for you. More answers. Happier answers. Especially at Christmas.\"\n\nGizelle smiled slowly, looking between Conall, who was clearly holding his elk back from a useless trampling rampage in her defense, and Scarlet. \"You don't have to feel bad for me,\" she said reassuringly. \"I'm glad. I know now. I know my parents loved me.\"\n\n\"You don't feel cheated?\" Conall asked, clearly feeling cheated for her. \"You spent your childhood in a cage.\"\n\n\"I didn't,\" Gizelle insisted. \"I wasn't really Gizelle then; I didn't have to be. I was only a gazelle.\" She shared her wordless gratitude for that with her gazelle, and closed her eyes to share a soft nosebump in her mind.\n\nGizelle opened her eyes and looked at Conall. \"I wouldn't trade having some sort of normal childhood to possibly not have you, to not have this place, and this life.\"\n\nConall made a little indecipherable noise and squeezed her hand more tightly than ever. Gizelle could hear his elk snort, but it was a settled sort of snort. They are ours forever forward, the elk told Conall, calming. They are ours now.\n\n\"Wait,\" Gizelle said, suddenly recognizing something else. \"Wait, you said when I was born.\"\n\n\"August third,\" Scarlet said with a nod. \"You're twenty-eight years old.\"\n\nGizelle slowly grinned. \"I have a birthday! It will be like Christmas twice but just for me!\"\n\nConall laughed at that, a relieved laugh, and Scarlet smiled and even gave a little chuckle.\n\n\"Do you want us to call you Jessica?\" Scarlet offered, standing and brushing imaginary wrinkles from her skirt.\n\nGizelle shook her head. \"Jessica and I started the same,\" she tried to explain. \"Just like our names start with the same sound. But we're different people now. I'm Gizelle. There's... not a lot of me if you count things by linear memory, but this is the me that I am. She would have been someone very different.\"\n\nScarlet nodded her acceptance briskly, but her eyes were soft and kind. \"Very well.\" With a nod, she turned to leave, then paused.\n\nHer gaze was all for Conall then, and it was much less soft and kind. \"I need a moment of your time, please. Privately.\"\n\nConall looked at Gizelle, who met his gaze steadily. \"I want to look at the pictures,\" she said, giving him a smile.\n\nHe wanted to hover, Gizelle could tell, but he glanced at Scarlet's complicated face and nodded. \"I'll be right back,\" he promised, laying a kiss on her head.\n\nThen Gizelle was alone on the porch, with photographs of her family.\n\nShe didn't care about the papers from the zoo, shuffling at once to the pictures of her parents.\n\nHer parents.\n\nIt was a dizzying idea.\n\nShe'd had a father. She'd had a mother.\n\nNeither of them was well-framed in the photographs; the focus had been on Gizelle. Only half of her mother's smiling face showed in the picture, and her father was looking away.\n\nGizelle gathered them up close to herself and hugged them gently. Scarlet had given her the best Christmas present of all, she was sure.\n\nThen she thought about the shining piles of wrapping and bows waiting inside, and she wasn't sure after all.\n\nChristmas was amazing.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": " narrowed down to.\n\n\"Shifter Affairs,\" Scarlet told him. \"It's a quiet branch of the US government. Tony was a guest here, working undercover. He's the one who brought Beehag's zoo to light and helped shut it down.\"\n\n\"I... had a name?\" Gizelle shivered, and was glad for the weight of Conall's hand on her shoulder.\n\n\"Let's sit,\" Scarlet suggested, waving a hand towards the deck, where a round table had a handful of chairs around it.\n\nThey spread the papers out, and Gizelle stared at the pictures, curled up on her chair with her knees up tight to her chest.\n\nThey were photos of a family; a curly-haired toddler being held by a dark-haired man, then standing proudly holding the hands of a smiling woman. The next photo showed a splay-legged gazelle fawn shaking off a diaper.\n\n\"Your parents,\" Scarlet explained. \"Your father was a gazelle shifter like you are. Your mother is noted as possibly a mythical shifter, but nothing was officially known.\"\n\n\"I... had a mother.\" Gizelle felt dizzy and distant. \"A mother of my own.\" Conall offered a hand. She stared at it a moment, then put her own into it, weaving her fingers into his.\n\n\"They died in a car accident. No one could ever prove it wasn't an accident, but you were never found afterwards.\" Scarlet moved another paper over the photos. \"Then there was this.\"\n\nConall frowned at it. Then he squeezed Gizelle's fingers until she squeaked.\n\n\"What is it?\" she asked anxiously.\n\n\"A copy of a bill of sale,\" Conall said reluctantly. \"For exotic livestock. I presume that is Beehag's signature.\"\n\nScarlet had clearly read through the material previously, familiar enough with it that she could sh", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "ur turn to write! do like 10 sentences sentences. focus on urban fantasy stuff. try to use these: shifters, nsfw, Shifting Sands Resort. treat any chars/world stuff like the reader's caught up (unless its the start)", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "[[OOC: Just for the next message: aim for 37% quoted content]]", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Conall grinned at Scarlet as they closed the porch door. \"I presume they came through safely?\" His last gift for Gizelle would explain Scarlet's secrecy, and her obvious irritation.\n\n\"Quite,\" Scarlet said tightly.\n\n\"I'll pay any damages or expenses,\" Conall said carelessly.\n\n\"Believe me, I've already got a list in progress,\" Scarlet agreed. \"But that's not what I wanted to talk about.\" She handed him a letter, and a brochure.\n\nConall looked at the brochure first, his eyebrows knitting in confusion. \"A mental institution for shifters?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "He looked up at Scarlet suspiciously.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Did my mother give you this?\" he asked, anger already rising in his chest.\n\nBut Scarlet shook her head. \"It was in the envelope with the rest of Gizelle's information,\" she said.\n\nConall gave her a thoughtful look. \"My mother does have connections,\" he suggested.\n\nScarlet tapped the letter, and let Conall read it without trying to make conversation he wouldn't be able to follow.\n\nIt was from the director of the mental institution, and it was a compelling argument for Gizelle's treatment at the facility. It was addressed to Scarlet specifically, and diplomatically questioned her capability for Gizelle's care and the danger that she posed. But it somehow didn't sound like his mother's handiwork.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"This doesn't mention me,\" he finally realized.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"I don't think they know about you,\" Scarlet agreed, with a thoughtful nod. \"And to be frank, if I had gotten this a few weeks earlier...\"\n\nShe didn't have to finish. The wording in the letter was very clever, complimenting Scarlet and acknowledging her care at the same time it cast just enough doubt on her capacity for truly helping Gizelle.\n\n\"A hostile takeover,\" Conall said thoughtfully, looking over it again.\n\nHe looked up in time to see Scarlet's brow furrow in confusion, but not in time to catch her words. \"Sorry, what?\"\n\n\"What do you mean, a hostile takeover?\"\n\nConall considered for only a moment, before admitting, \"Your staff, they've been getting offers. Good offers, amazing even. Like someone's trying to poach everyone away from you. Even Gizelle, apparently.\"\n\nScarlet's face went dark with anger and her green eyes snapped. If she had been holding something, Conall was sure it would have been broken and he wondered if the change of pressure around them was his imagination.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Beehag,\" she said. Her clenched teeth made lipreading difficult.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"He's dying to have our contract canceled. And he'd have access to his father's records, even if they'd been classified. That bastard is smarter than I've given him credit for.\"\n\n\"If it's any consolation, none of your staff are accepting the offers,\" Conall told her, a little fearfully.\n\nThat did seem to settle her. The pressure eased and Scarlet seemed to soften slightly. \"I appreciate you telling me,\" she said gravely.\n\nFor a moment so brief that Conall doubted his own eyes, she looked vulnerable, tired, and lonely—then she was drawing herself up, face serene again. \"The other matter...\" she said coolly.\n\nConall had to smile despite himself, remembering. \"I will make it worth your while.\"\n\n\"Indeed.\" Scarlet raised an eyebrow at her.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"I will bring them by on Christmas morning.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Conall was almost as excited for Christmas as Gizelle was.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "[ Epilogue ]\n\nThe cottage was littered with wrapping paper and filled with laughter.\n\nGizelle was lying on the bed, surrounded by gifts. New dresses were draped across her feet, and an array of hairbrushes and jeweled combs and candies in silk boxes were scattered across the comforter. The bedside table was completely covered in bottles of every kind of hair conditioner Conall had been able to find online that would ship internationally, and several kinds of spray-in detangler.\n\nThere were leaning piles of books in a range of difficulties: lush, illustrated volumes of classics, adult-learning writing workbooks, and several instruction guides to braiding and styling long hair. There were two kits of art supplies, open to show a dazzling array of colors and mediums, and a selection of sketchbooks and canvases.\n\nGizelle was hugging a tablet to her chest and wearing a pair of studio-quality earphones.\n\n\"Books that read to you,\" she crowed in delight. \"Hundreds of them.\"\n\n\"I had your friends help me pick them,\" Conall told her, leaning over a precarious pile of presents to show her how to navigate.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"There are folders for each person with the books they chose for you.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Word usage requirement: 'every' must appear 4 times", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"I'm going to listen to every one of them,\" Gizelle sighed rapturously.\n\n\"You aren't even going to miss me when I go to Boston,\" Conall teased.\n\nGizelle sat up, pulling the headphones off. \"Of course I will,\" she said in sudden seriousness. \"A thousand books wouldn't fill that emptiness. Every second will try to be forever and I will have to remember how to run without legs.\"\n\nRealizing that his teasing had missed its mark, Conall cleared a spot next to her to sit and took her hands. Someone barely in range of hearing was singing a Christmas carol loudly and off-key, but he couldn't bring himself to be irritated about their lack of pitch.\n\n\"I will come back,\" he reminded her. \"You have a phone now, and anyone will help you text me whenever you want. I will video call you every evening that the Shifting Sands connection is good enough to make it work and I will think of you every moment that I'm gone and I will come back as soon as I can.\"\n\n\"And then you'll stay forever?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "she asked plaintively, dark eyes like pools to eternity.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Forever is an arbitrary point in time,\" Conall reminded her.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"And you've already been there. But next time you go, I will be at your side.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Gizelle looked at him skeptically, eyes narrow.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Don't be weird,\" she told him, with a slow smile blooming on her expressive mouth. \"That's my job here.\" She lay back among the gifts again. \"I love everything about Christmas,\" she said with satisfaction. \"Everything except the figgy pudding, which was as awful as Breck said it would be.\"\n\n\"I like it,\" Conall protested. \"It's rich.\"\n\n\"You like coffee, too,\" Gizelle reminded him. Then she sat bolt upright. \"Your Christmas present!\" she said in alarm. \"I still have to give you yours!\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She somehow managed to navigate the heaps of gifts and untangle herself from the earphones without toppling any of the piles, and she returned around the bed to drop her gift into Conall's waiting hands.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Not touching her, he couldn't hear the rustle of the paper as he carefully unwrapped it.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Gizelle had wrapped it thoroughly, in several layers of clashing color, and she watched him peel through them and bounced on her toes.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "The weight and density of the package made him guess what it would be before the final layer came off and he opened the box.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"This is the lock from Neal's cage,\" he said, turning it over in his hands.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Work this phrase into your response organically: \"I don't need it to anchor me anymore.\"", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Are you sure you want to give me this? It is the heart of your hoard.\"\n\n\"You are the heart of my hoard,\" Gizelle said, giving it a reverent caress and then closing his fingers around it. \"I don't need it to anchor me anymore.\"\n\n\"I will carry it everywhere with me,\" Conall promised, only belatedly wondering what airport security was going to think of the lump of metal; it had enough heft to be a serious weapon. He smiled at Gizelle. \"I love it,\" he assured her. \"I love you.\"\n\nGizelle let him draw her into his arms as he put the lock down on the bed beside them. \"I love you,\" she breathed.\n\nThen her mouth was on his and her hands were cradling his face. He put arms around her and wondered where on the bed it would be safe to lay her down.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "He had just decided to take her to the second bedroom when a knock on the door reminded him. \"There's more!\" he said, breaking the kiss.\n\n\"More than love?\" Gizelle asked in confusion, drawing away to look at him.\n\n\"More Christmas presents,\" Conall said, grinning.\n\n\"More than this?\" Gizelle exclaimed in wonder, gesturing around the crowded room. \"What more could there be?\"\n\nConall stood, lifting Gizelle and setting her on feet away from him. \"Come see,\" he said.\n\nShe scampered to the door with him. \"It's Scarlet,\" she told him.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"But she feels confusing.\"\n\nConall opened the door, and true to Gizelle's prediction, it was Scarlet.\n\nShe had company.\n\n\"Take them,\" the resort manager said through clenched teeth. \"Just take them.\"\n\n\"Kittens!\" squealed Gizelle. \"Conall, you got me kittens!\"\n\nTwo kittens were in Scarlet's outstretched arms, one a striped gray with a white belly, the other cream-colored with orangish Siamese points.\n\n\"I am doubling the price of your lease,\" Scarlet told Conall.\n\n\"A bargain at twice the price,\" Conall said magnanimously.\n\nScarlet peeled the gray one gently off her sleeves with a ripping sound as it clung to her, mewing its protest, its tiny tail tucked in tight.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"This is the sweetest of the two,\" she said, dropping it into Gizelle's waiting hands. It immediately started to purr.\n\nThe other kitten bolted for Scarlet's shoulder and tried to hide beneath her hair, but it wasn't fast enough to escape her. \"I've been calling this one Tyrant,\" she said, extracting it from her hair.\n\nThe kitten mewed and tried to catch her with its needle-sharp claws before Scarlet set it with the other one into Gizelle's arms. \"You are of course free to name it whatever you like. My staff is not paid to scoop litter boxes, and Graham will not be happy if they use the gardens or planters. Do not flush litter into our septic system. They need to stay out from underfoot, and away from guests who may be allergic. And keep your toilet paper out of their reach.\"\n\nWithout waiting for a response, Scarlet turned on her heel and left.\n\n\"Kittens!\" Gizelle repeated in awe as they scrambled over her, clumsy and eager with their tiny claws and giant eyes.\n\nShe looked up at Conall with laughter dancing in her eyes. \"Now I won't miss you when you go to Boston,\" she teased.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Conall mimed a knife to the heart.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"You wound me!\" he said dramatically.\n\nArms full of squirming kitten, Gizelle still tried to hug him, with very mixed results and squawks of protest from several parties. \"Of course I will miss you, my beautiful Irish elk,\" she insisted.\n\n\"And I will miss you, my gorgeous gazelle,\" Conall echoed.\n\nWhen they drew apart, the cream-colored kitten was clinging to Conall and trying to scale his shirt to his shoulder.\n\nCONALL SHOWED GIZELLE all about the kittens; how to feed them, where to put their water. They set up the litter box and the sweet one obligingly demonstrated how the kittens planned to use it.\n\nTyrant, whose name was clearly appropriate and inevitably stuck to her, in the meantime demonstrated why toilet paper needed to be kept out of reach, ripping chunks from the roll by jumping up and tearing at it with her tiny, determined claws and teeth.\n\nAfter they had laughed helplessly at her antics for a moment, Gizelle pulled Tyrant reluctantly away from the toilet paper roll and scolded her gently. \"That's not your toy,\" she said, distracting the kitten with a plush mouse that chimed.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She and Conall played with the kittens until they began to seem clumsier than ever. Gizelle was alarmed when they started to ignore the toys that had enraptured them moments before.\n\n\"Are they alright?\" she asked in concern, when even a ribbon dragged across Tyrant's toes couldn't get her attention.\n\n\"They're just getting tired,\" Conall told her, and sure enough, they shortly collapsed into a boneless furry heap on a pillow. Even lifting the sweet one's paws didn't cause more than a minuscule twitch of her ear. \"They're just children,\" he told her. \"They'll do a lot of playing and sleeping at first.\"\n\nGizelle tucked the sweet one's paw back into what looked like a comfortable position. \"This was the best present of all,\" she said with a sigh. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"I hope you still feel that way when they destroy something you care about,\" Conall warned her.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"They will require a lot of patience and need a lot of attention and love.\"\n\n\"I am so full of love,\" Gizelle said, trying to describe how it felt inside her. \"It will spill over if I don't give some of it away.\"\n\nConall's look said that he understood, and when he took her hands and pulled her close, his kiss said that he felt the same way.\n\nGizelle opened her mouth to him, accepting his love even knowing there couldn't possibly be room for it, because the overflow was so delicious.\n\nIt was hard to remember being afraid of his touch. It was so comfortable now, even when comfortable wasn't quite the word for it; it raised a dizzy anticipation in her and his hands were so wonderfully large and nimble as he traced the line of her shoulder and held her in the small of the back like they were dancing.\n\nThere was no room on the bed for them among the piles of books and gifts and sleeping kittens, so when Conall might have laid her down, he picked her up instead, his breath ragged near her ear, and carried her out to the second bedroom.\n\nGizelle started to slip quickly out of her dress, and he caught her and did it more slowly than she knew was possible, one strap at a tantalizing time, kissing every inch of her skin as he carefully exposed it.\n\nShe took no such care with his clothing, unbuttoning as fast as her own fingers could go; they were trembling with something better than fear, something sweeter than panic.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Then they were naked at last, and Conall was a safe weight over her on the smooth bed; an invitation and a delicious demand as he lifted her legs and drove into her.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "As full as she was, with joy, with passion, with love, with him, there was more, and more, and yet more, until they were sweaty and spent and laughing together in release and Gizelle felt as boneless as her kittens.\n\nHe continued to caress her, as if even afterwards, he couldn't have enough of her under his fingers.\n\n\"You make the most enchanting music,\" he said, kissing her neck.\n\n\"You are the one playing,\" Gizelle said dreamily. \"You know all my strings and tuning pins.\" He had shown her all the parts of his guitar.\n\nHe chuckled at that and gathered her close in his arms. \"You write all of my songs,\" he said into her hair.\n\n\"You are all of my songs,\" Gizelle countered, kissing his shoulder.\n\nHis elk sighed then, in long-suffering disgust.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "You are our mate, he said simply, as if that explained everything.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 1 sentence.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "And perhaps it did.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "WRITING ASSIST:\n63 sentences sentences\nStyle: Zoe Chant\nGenre: contemporary, romance, urban fantasy\nContext: Part of larger work", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Welcome to Oak Ridge, the sign read.\n\nKatie had been driving for six hours. Noah had been fussy, not used to being in the car seat for so long. Every time he started whimpering, upset that his mama couldn't pick him up and hold him, Katie had to fight the urge to pull over and take a break.\n\nBut then anxiety would prickle at the back of her neck, and she'd find herself checking the rearview mirror to see if anyone was following her. So she'd keep driving.\n\nNow, she'd been winding through the mountainous forest for a couple of hours, and this was the first town she'd seen. She wasn't sure when another one would appear, so maybe it was finally time to stop.\n\nNo one could have followed her, right? She'd turned completely randomly for the first hour, switching highways a few times, and ending up in the middle of absolute nowhere. There would've been no way to predict her route. It had to be safe to stop.\n\nNot that she thought Victor would've sent assassins after her or anything. But she was never going back to that stifling, awful house again, and there was no way Noah was going to grow up there, learning the lessons those people taught.\n\nThey were going to start a new life, far away from Katie's old mistakes.\n\nIn the backseat, Noah made the distressed noise that meant he'd woken up and wasn't happy about it.\n\nKatie braced herself, and sure enough, an unhappy wail filled the car.\n\n\"Okay, honey,\" she called back. \"Mommy's going to find a place to stop. We'll get you fed and your diaper changed, okay?\"\n\nAt six months old, though, Noah wasn't much for delayed gratification. He kept crying.\n\nKatie hoped Oak Ridge had a hotel.\n\nAs if answering her thoughts, a sign appeared on the left—a sign made of literal, actual wood, rather than painted metal. Sleepy Oak Cabins, it advertised. A smaller hunk of wood, hanging from pegs underneath the text, read, Vacancy.\n\nKatie slowed her car, fascinated. She'd never been out in the middle of the country like this before. In her experience, hotels used neon, or the signs with the plastic insert letters. Not wood.\n\n\"What do you think, Noah?\" she asked her son. \"Should we check it out?\"\n\nNoah's cries increased in pitch. Mommy, he seemed to be saying, if you have the time to ask me questions, why aren't you using it to take care of me?\n\nKatie winced. \"Okay, baby. Just a second.\"\n\nShe turned off where the sign pointed. About a hundred feet in, the pavement disappeared and she was driving on dirt.\n\nKatie had just enough time to wonder if Sleepy Oak Cabins were even still in operation when a building came into view. A car was pulled up to it, and the lights were on in the windows.\n\nKatie breathed a sigh of relief—and then had another spike of anxiety. This wasn't a Marriott. It wasn't even a cute bed-and-breakfast in a vacation town with a hundred Yelp reviews. She'd just pulled out onto a random road, following a sign.\n\nShe should've made more of a plan. Should've had a place to go, instead of just picking a direction and starting to drive.\n\nBut of course, there wasn't anywhere to go. That was the problem. She'd left the only home she'd ever known.\n\nAs Noah started genuinely screaming, she fumbled for her phone. Hardly any service, but enough to quickly Google Sleepy Oak Cabins Oak Ridge.\n\nThey didn't have a website, but there was one Yelp review. We go here every year for our anniversary, it started, and went on to describe the cabins, and the elderly owners, in glowing terms.\n\nOkay. Okay. Probably not serial killers, then.\n\nNot that she had many other options.\n\nDeterminedly, Katie got out of the car, went to the backseat to get Noah, and marched up towards the front door.\n\nNoah quieted down once he wasn't trapped in the horrible prison of the car seat any longer, although he was still whimpering a little, and if he didn't get some milk and a change soon, Katie knew that another meltdown would be on its way.\n\n\"We're going to meet some new people,\" she told the baby, jouncing him a little on her hip. \"Aren't you excited? We didn't get to meet too many new people for a while there.\"\n\nNoah whimpered. Katie took a deep breath, quelling the buzzing tension inside her—no one could know where she was, she reminded herself—and firmly pushed open the door.\n\nShe was hit with a wave of warm air, and stepped in to find herself standing on a beautiful wood floor, looking across the room at a fire crackling in a fireplace. Not a gas fireplace, a real fireplace.\n\n\"Come in!\" came a voice to her left, and Katie shook herself out of her reverie and turned to meet the host.\n\nAn old woman sat behind an enormous wooden desk. She stood up as Katie came over, a wide smile breaking out over her face.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"I wasn't expecting anyone today,\" she said.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Hello, dear, and welcome! I'm Rita.\"\n\n\"Katie,\" Katie said, coming forward with a surge of relief. Faced with an isolated cabin in the woods, she'd been half-expecting something out of a horror movie, not this comfy foyer with a nice hostess. She shook Rita's hand, discovering that she had a surprisingly strong grip for an old lady. \"And this is Noah.\"\n\n\"Hello, honey,\" Rita said softly, smiling at Noah.\n\nDistracted from his woes by a new person, Noah took a second to decide what to think, but then he broke out into a toothless grin. Katie breathed a quiet sigh, relieved that there wasn't going to be any screaming while she tried to book a room.\n\n\"We, um—we need a room for the night. Maybe a couple of nights, I'm not really sure what our plans are.\" Would it be better to stay in one place for a little while and work out her plans, or move on as soon as possible? She wasn't sure.\n\n\"Of course, dear,\" Rita said, her face lighting up. \"Summer season's over and skiing won't start up again for a couple of months, so we're completely vacant right now. Is it just the two of you, or...\"\n\n\"Just us,\" Katie said, with as much uncaring confidence as she could muster. She didn't want anyone asking where Noah's dad was. \"I don't know if you have a crib available, or I have a Pack-n-Play in the car...\"\n\n\"Of course we have a crib,\" Rita said firmly. \"I'll get my husband to set it up right now.\" She dug a phone out of her pocket and began texting away.\n\nKatie had to stifle a laugh at how incongruous it was—the wooden building tucked away in the trees with a roaring fire in the fireplace, a kind, wrinkled old lady welcoming her in...and using her smartphone to text her husband.\n\nShe guessed the country wasn't going to be as totally foreign as she'd been afraid of.\n\n\"There we go,\" Rita said, setting the phone aside. \"It'll just take a few minutes to get the room ready. How about we make you and little Noah comfortable while you wait?\"\n\nKatie protested, but Rita came around the desk, and somehow, she found herself bustled over to a couch, a plate of cookies provided, and when Noah started fussing again, Rita pointed her to a bathroom that had a fold-out changing table.\n\nIt was all a little overwhelming. Katie took a minute in the bathroom to breathe deeply, and blink back the stupid tears that were threatening behind her eyes. It was just a nice old lady. A nice old lady doing her job. She probably wanted Katie to double the number of Yelp reviews this place had.\n\n\"That's not fair,\" she whispered to Noah, taping up the new diaper. \"She probably really is just nice. Nothing wrong with that, right?\"\n\nNope. And Katie was totally capable of smiling, eating a cookie, and going off to her cabin to sleep without having any sort of weird breakdown in the process.\n\n\"Everything's fine,\" she told Noah as she snapped the onesie back in place. \"We're just on vacation. Getting out of the city. On our way to visit family. Right?\"\n\nNoah batted at the taped-up dirty diaper, and Katie barely rescued it from getting smacked across the room like a volleyball.\n\nHer son always knew how to distract her, that was for sure.\n\nBack out in the main room, Rita had gotten everything set up for her to stay in the nearest cabin. \"Just sign here, dear,\" she told her. \"Will that be card or cash?\"\n\n\"Cash,\" Katie said, keeping her chin up.\n\nPawning the jewelry that Victor had bought her when they first started dating—jewelry she hadn't even worn in over a year—had gotten her a nice stack of bills, and she'd decided not to deposit them in her empty bank account, in case Victor had somehow figured out how to get access to it. But she'd wondered if it would make anything more difficult.\n\nRita didn't give her a suspicious look, though, or even pause to blink; she just nodded with a smile and said, \"Then that'll be fifty dollars for the night, please.\"\n\nNow it was Katie's turn to blink. \"That can't be right,\" she said. \"For a whole cabin?\"\n\n\"It's the off-season,\" Rita said placidly. \"We have a discount.\"\n\nKatie stared at her, but Rita's kind smile stayed unwaveringly on her face.\n\n\"I don't want any kind of—of special consideration,\" Katie said finally. \"This is a business, and you deserve to get paid a fair price.\"\n\n\"This price is more than fair,\" Rita said. \"Things aren't very expensive out here in the woods. Fifty dollars, please.\"\n\nKatie didn't know how to argue further, even though she was sure fifty dollars couldn't be the price of a cabin for the night, no matter what time of year it was. Still, she counted out two twenties and a ten from her precious stash of bills, and handed it over.\n\nShe could always leave a generous tip in the room before she left. Yes, that was a good idea.\n\nEven though she had no idea how long her money was going to last.\n\nStill, she couldn't stiff a nice old lady.\n\nRita finished up the booking and came outside with her to point the way to the cabin. \"These woods are very safe,\" she told Katie. \"There's paths and trails everywhere, and no dangerous animals—or people—in the area. I always tell people that their kids can play outside, they can go on walks together, and there's nothing to worry about.\"\n\n\"Good to know,\" Katie said. She had had a little niggling anxiety about having a door that just opened into the...forest.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "What if there were bears or something?", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 36 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She peered out to where Rita was pointing out the cabin, and saw it just down the dirt road, tucked into the trees. The actual road she'd been driving on was totally invisible from here, even though she knew it was just a little ways out.\n\n\"You're a little young to play outside just yet, aren't you?\" Rita was saying to Noah. \"But you're just the right age to discover the woods for the first time. So many things to look at!\"\n\nIt was true that Noah was totally ignoring Rita in favor of staring at a tree to their left. Katie suppressed a smile. \"Thank you so much,\" she told Rita. \"We're both very grateful.\"\n\n\"Nonsense, nothing to be grateful for,\" Rita said. \"Now, off you go. You must be tired.\"\n\nShe was. She was so, so tired. It would be nice to have a quiet, safe bed for the night.\n\nKatie bundled Noah back into the car seat, drove the tiny distance to the cabin, and then unpacked everything again. She had a little key that let her in, and she found herself in an actual, genuine cabin.\n\nEverything was the same gorgeous wood that had been in the main building, and there was a beautiful little kitchen, a living room with another big fireplace, and a door leading to a bedroom with a comfy-looking queen-sized bed, and a sturdy wooden crib set up in a corner.\n\nThe crib had sheets on it and a little yellow baby blanket draped over the side. A plate of cookies sat on the kitchen counter with a little note that said, Enjoy!\n\n\"Fifty dollars, my butt,\" Katie said dazedly, looking around at all of it.\n\n\"Bah!\" said Noah.\n\n\"Bah is right,\" Katie told him. \"You hungry?\"\n\nNoah batted at her.\n\n\"Yep,\" Katie said, and went to the bedroom to nurse.\n\nThe bed was insanely comfortable. Of course. She had no idea how she'd lucked into a place like this. Maybe they really could stay a few days, instead of just one night.\n\nOf course, the longer she stayed, the more money she was definitely swindling out of that nice old lady. It would probably be better to move on.\n\nAlthough if they were otherwise vacant...but did fifty dollars even cover the expenses of keeping up this cabin for a night? Plus, they really needed to figure out where to settle down permanently, as fast as possible before her money ran out.\n\n\"I don't know, Noah, what do you think we should do?\" she asked her son, who was peacefully sucking down his dinner.\n\nNursing was filling her with the type of easy contentment she'd never thought she'd have again, before Noah was born. She looked down at the tiny body pressed up against hers and she knew she'd do whatever she had to if it would keep this baby safe and in her arms.\n\n\"We're going to do it, kiddo,\" she told Noah. \"We're going to make it on our own, and we're never going to have to worry about your dad again. I promise.\"", "loss": null } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Complete the text by replacing `<\|missing\|>` with roughly 4 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Rita had been by again.\n\nRonan stared, exasperated, at the Tupperware sitting on his doorstep.\n\nThere was a little note taped to it that said, Thinking of you! Eat up!\n\nSighing, he picked it up and brought it inside. He set it down on his kitchen tablet and left it alone for a moment. Whatever was in the Tupperware would be delicious, but he didn't want to imply that he was giving in.\n\nI'm not one of you, he'd told her, more than once. It's safer for everyone if you just leave me alone.\n\nNonsense, she always said, and he'd never been able to change her mind.\n\nTo be fair, he could have left town anytime in the last two years, gone somewhere where no one would have any idea who or what he was.\n\nOak Ridge was a town of magical shifters. He'd known it when he first came here, full of fury and heartache. He'd thought he might be able to set up in town, make a new life for himself away from the violence of his upbringing.\n\nBut he'd flinched away from the smiling townsfolk. People who'd grown up with loving families, doting grandparents, picture-perfect holidays.\n\nIt was like looking at the sun. He just couldn't handle it. He'd go blind.\n\nBut he couldn't quite bring himself to leave, either.\n\nSo he'd bought this cabin out in the woods. He'd learned later that it had originally been a kind of an outrider cabin for Rita and Luis's complex, a place for people to stay when they really wanted to be way out in the woods.\n\nBut once the old couple had started really getting up in years, they'd found it too hard to keep up, in the middle of the forest, away from any real roads that a car could get down. So they'd put it on the market, where it had stayed, because who wanted to live out in the middle of the woods?\n\nRonan did.\n\nIt had originally started as a way to keep himself away from everyone, and everyone away from him. And what did a dragon shifter need with roads, anyway? He could park on one of the forest turnoffs and fly to his car whenever he needed it. And no one could get at him.\n\nAnd he couldn't get at anyone.\n\nNot that he was afraid his dragon would go berserk and just start attacking people at random. But part of him was always watchful. He'd seen what the ferocious dragon's instinct could make people do.\n\nExcuse me, his dragon hissed. I will not burn anyone. Certainly not in<\|missing\|>His dragon purred at the melting taste of it.\n\nA person could really forget how dangerous you are, he thought.\n\nAnd that, of course, was the problem.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": " exchange for biscuits.\n\nYou've burned people before, Ronan pointed out.\n\nBad people, his dragon said pointedly, still curious about the Tupperware.\n\nSighing, Ronan popped it open and pulled out a ham-and-cheddar biscuit. ", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "help write? 24 sentences more, same character context, contemporary, romance, urban fantasy genre thx", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "The car was unpacked.\n\nNoah was full, dry, and gurgling happily as he explored his own fingers.\n\nKatie had had an early dinner of the sandwich she'd packed for herself this morning at Victor's family home.\n\nSo there was nothing to do but...start figuring out what to do.\n\nGreat.\n\n\"Okay,\" Katie said to Noah. \"What do you think we should do?\"\n\nNoah blew a raspberry.\n\n\"Well, I agree with you in general, but practically, that's not going to help us very much,\" Katie told him. \"Okay. We've left the city behind. No one knows where we are. We can do anything!\"\n\nNoah grinned back as Katie smiled at him.\n\n\"But we don't have much money,\" Katie added, the smile dropping off her face. \"So we have to make more. You're just a baby, so it's not your job to make money yet. Not until you're all grown up.\"\n\nNoah noticed Katie's keys sitting on an end table and strained upwards with both hands.\n\n\"No driving yet, either,\" Katie said, and handed him a plastic ball with little shapes inside that moved when you turned it. He was immediately absorbed.\n\n\"Mommy thinks she's got a job writing for websites,\" Katie said. This was an idea that had been growing in her mind since she'd made the decision to leave. If she could find some kind of online work, something she could do around taking care of Noah, she'd be able to support herself without needing Victor's family money.\n\nShe'd contacted an old friend who'd gone into web copywriting to finance her college studies. Tori lived halfway across the world now, doing something high-powered, but she'd taken time to put Katie in touch with someone who wanted ad copy for his vacation spots. The moment Katie had gotten the okay from him, she'd started packing.\n\nShe hadn't been able to stay in Victor's family's house another second. His mother and sister were always there, lounging around and making catty comments about Katie's parenting and how noisy the baby was.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "It had been stressful enough that Katie had caught herself snapping at Noah once when he was whining.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "That was when she knew it was time to get out.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "But she'd also known that Victor wouldn't let her go easily. They might not have had a single ounce of romantic feelings for each other, but Victor wanted to keep what was his.\n\nAnd Victor had more than just the regular, human ways of doing that.\n\n\"Ah!\" said Noah, throwing the ball. Katie shook herself out of her memories, and grabbed it and handed it back to him.\n\n\"Okay. Time to send an email and see about getting an assignment. Good thing I didn't forget my laptop, huh, kiddo?\" Packing had been an extremely hurried affair, hidden from Victor and his family. But Katie didn't regret anything she'd left behind, not even the little keepsakes. Noah was more important than anything.\n\n\"Isn't that right?\" she asked her son.\n\n\"Ah!\" Noah threw the ball again, then didn't want it back. He twisted around, looking for something more entertaining.\n\n\"How about we go for a walk?\" Katie asked him. \"Let Mommy send this email, and then we can go explore the area.\"\n\nIt was still light out, after all, and it was a nice, warm fall day. Rita had said that the woods were completely safe. And she'd stay close to the cabin, on a clear trail, just in case.\n\nShe wanted to remind herself that she really had gotten away. That she was out here in the clear, beautiful forest, not trapped in a city where Victor's family was the biggest game in town.\n\nThe forest did make her wonder if there were other...magical people around here. It had always seemed odd to her that Victor's whole family could change into animals, but they chose to live in a city, rather than out in the wilderness where they could shapeshift and run around. But she'd never been sure how much she was allowed to ask.\n\nFinding out that magical shapeshifters existed had been enough of a shock. And Victor had made it pretty clear that he didn't want to deal with a million questions.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Maybe they could find some other shapeshifters someday.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Nicer ones. People who could help Noah out if he grew up to be one, too.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Noah got more and more restless as Katie typed out her quick email asking about the promised writing job.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "By the time she hit Send, Noah was trying to hijack her phone and getting very cranky about being denied.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next output: minimal quoted text", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Okay, time for a walk!\" Katie said brightly. Noah's face lit up, even though he probably couldn't understand what Katie meant.\n\nHaving a baby was like seeing the world through new eyes every day.\n\nOkay, and also like learning what the words \"sleep debt\" really meant. But mostly, it was amazing.\n\nEven if there were some particular things about this situation that were tough.\n\n\"That doesn't matter, though, does it, baby?\" she asked Noah as she strapped him into the front-pack, so he could ride on Katie's chest and look around at the forest. \"We're going to be great. Just the two of us.\"\n\nBoy, she thought, it was good that Noah was a baby. Otherwise, he might've heard the slight hint of desperation there.\n\nBecause no matter how firmly she kept saying it would be fine, there had been a constant creeping doubt, ever since she walked out of Victor's door and left it all behind.\n\nHad she made the wrong decision? Had she given up a roof over their heads and food on their table for a wild scheme that could leave them broke and helpless?\n\n\"You'll be fine,\" she whispered into Noah's hair as she closed the door to the cabin behind them. The surge of love in her as she inhaled Noah's clean baby scent was overwhelming. Love, and protectiveness, and worry. Always worry.\n\nA nature walk would distract her until bedtime, and hopefully by then, she'd have some news.\n\nAs they set out, Katie was immediately struck by how beautiful the forest was. She'd been too distracted by looking for a place to stay, and then getting settled, to really notice it before.\n\nBut the trees made a soft canopy of green above them, just starting to turn colors here and there for fall. Some of the trees were huge, stretching up so far she had to crane her neck to try and glimpse the tops of them. The forest floor was softly coated in pine needles, with bushes and the occasional huge stump or log.\n\nThere was a trail leading out from her cabin, and she stuck to it, as much as part of her longed to strike out into the woods, tramp through the underbrush and explore.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Not with you here, baby,\" she said to Noah. \"Maybe when you're older we can go camping together, huh? Mommy never got to do that when she was a kid. Grandma and Grandpa were too busy running their business to go on trips.\"\n\nThey'd always said they'd travel the world when they retired. Katie swallowed around a sudden lump in her throat, and set off determinedly forward. This was supposed to be a nice nature walk, not a depressing trip down memory lane.\n\nNoah, at least, did actually seem to enjoy the woods. He was staring around, wide-eyed, watching the leaves rustle and the squirrels run around.\n\nNoah had never been in a forest before at all, Katie realized. He'd spent most of his little life indoors. They hadn't even really been able to go to parks or anything. Had her baby ever felt grass? Maybe not. Katie resolved to find a park as soon as possible and set Noah down to crawl through the grass.\n\nThere were so many firsts waiting for them. Sure, it might be a little lonely, but they could keep each other company. All Katie had to do was make just enough money to keep them fed and housed. They didn't need to be rich. They just needed to be safe.\n\nFor now, they seemed to be making an okay start. A beautiful cabin, a lovely woodland to walk through, maybe even a new friend in Rita. Maybe it would work out.\n\nAs she walked, enjoying the way the late-afternoon sun slanted through the trees, she started hearing a noise. A sharp, rhythmic thunk sound, repeated over and over.\n\nWas someone else around? Or was it some kind of animal?", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Curious, she kept going, and the sound got louder.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "((ooc: Ensure 'there' appears 2 time(s) in your answer))", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "The trail curved upwards as she walked, with roots occasionally sticking out through the dirt. Katie used them as makeshift stairs, enjoying the feeling of exercising her body after months of staying inside with Noah.\n\nShe crested the little hill and looked down on a sudden clearing. Square in the middle of it was a little cabin like the one she was staying in, and just outside of the cabin was...a man.\n\nA shirtless man.\n\nA shirtless man dressed in cutoff jean shorts that strained around his powerful thighs. He was holding an ax. A real, actual ax. As Katie watched, he raised it over his head and brought it down hard on a chunk of wood resting on an enormous tree stump. The thunk was the noise she'd been hearing, and the result of the thunk was that the chunk of wood split cleanly in two.\n\nHe'd clearly been at it for a while, Katie thought dazedly. Sweat was glistening on his chest, despite the relatively cool fall air. He must have had to strip off his shirt because he got too hot—\n\nNoah made a loud noise, waving his arms, and the man looked up sharply. \"Who's there?\"\n\nKatie squeaked, moving backwards automatically.\n\nHer foot caught on a root as she retreated without looking, though, and she tripped.\n\nShe had a moment where she could see exactly what was going to happen. She was falling backwards, her arms starting to windmill, her stomach dropping as she went into free-fall. She was top-heavy with the baby on her chest, and there was no way to save herself. She was going to fall all the way back down the hill, and Noah—\n\nNoah was coming with her, and Katie couldn't get the baby backpack off fast enough to get him to safety somehow—she was going to have to curl around Noah and keep him safe, oh God what if he hit his little head—\n\nStrong arms caught her, and she jerked to an abrupt halt.\n\n\"Are you okay?\"\n\nKatie was hyperventilating, she realized.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Panicking at the thought of falling with her son strapped to her. \"I—I—\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"All right. Breathe. Slowly. In...out.\"\n\nHis voice was deep and steady, and it was impossible not to listen to it. Katie breathed. In. Out. Slowly, her heartbeat steadied, her vision cleared, and she was able to look up at the man who'd saved her from the fall.\n\nHe was big, even bigger up close than he'd looked far away. How had he gotten over here so fast? And how did anyone have eyes that color? They were a light brown that looked almost...reddish-gold, a kind of hazel she'd never seen before in nature.\n\nAnd they were staring down at her with an intensity that was unnerving her. She jerked her own gaze away to take in the rest of him.\n\nHis hair was black and wild, and there was a lot of it: on his head, on his chest, on his arms and—oh, wow—his big, muscular legs. The cutoff shorts meant that there was a lot to take in.\n\n\"Um,\" Katie managed.\n\nAs if he'd been waiting for her to make a noise, he released her immediately. \"Are you okay?\" he repeated.\n\n\"Um,\" was all she could seem to say. Get it together! she thought at herself furiously. She was supposed to be on a daring adventure, using her wits to keep herself and her kid safe from harm, and instead she was tripping over roots, getting rescued by strangers, and losing the ability to speak altogether.\n\n\"Yes,\" she finally got out. \"Yes, I'm fine. Thank you. That could have been—thank you very much.\"\n\nHe didn't seem interested in hearing thanks; he was looking out over her shoulder, scanning the woods around them. \"Are you out here alone? You and your baby? Do you need help?\"\n\nKatie shook her head immediately. \"No, we're—we're fine, we're just staying in one of Rita's cabins. We're on—vacation.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "God, that was the least convincing lie she'd ever told, and she'd always been a terrible liar.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "From the look he was giving her, he knew it.\n\n\"Vacation,\" he repeated.\n\nKatie lifted her chin. \"Yes.\"\n\nNoah chose that moment to make his presence known. \"Ah!\"\n\nHis eyes flicked down to the baby. Was it Katie's imagination, or did those strange eyes soften?\n\n\"Hi,\" he said to Noah in a deep rumble.\n\n\"Ah,\" Noah repeated, clearly satisfied to have the man's attention. He batted his arms, but their rescuer had stepped back and was too far away to make contact.\n\nHe glanced up at Katie, then back down at the baby. \"You seem okay,\" he told Noah.\n\n\"He is. We're fine.\"\n\n\"You're not in trouble?\" His brows had drawn together, and he was looking at her like he could see right through her.\n\n\"No, no—we're just fine,\" she stammered.\n\nKatie hadn't thought hard enough about what to tell people who asked what she was doing, a single mother traveling alone. She couldn't maintain a lie about a vacation or visiting family, not if she started looking for a place to settle down.\n\nExcept now she'd committed to vacation with this man, even if he clearly didn't believe her. Well, she probably wasn't going to find a perfect place to live in the first town she stopped at, even if at least one of the residents was really nice.\n\nAnd one was a superman who could race across several yards of forest in a nanosecond to keep clumsy people from falling over their own feet.\n\nThat was a weird thought. What if...?\n\nNo, she wasn't going to go there. She'd been disoriented. He'd probably moved just as fast as a normal person would, and it had seemed like an instant because she'd been panicking so hard.\n\nShe couldn't have found another magical shapeshifter this quickly.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "That would be ridiculous.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 9 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She'd spent so much time with Victor's family that she was making assumptions.\n\n\"Well,\" he was saying, his brow still furrowed in a way that made him look dark and foreboding, \"if that changes. If your...vacation isn't going well. I live right over there. Rita knows me. I help her out sometimes.\"\n\nKatie had the weirdest vision: she imagined grabbing onto his hand and running forward to the snug little cabin with its pile of firewood, shutting the door, and settling herself and Noah right there. Not running any further, not scrambling around for any kind of tiny income, just...deciding that her home was here.\n\nShe shook herself out of it fast. \"Thank you,\" she said, mustering up as much dignity as she could, \"but we'll be just fine. Let's go, Noah.\" She smiled at the man, meaning it to be polite, but got caught once again in those eyes, strangely warm in his chiseled, forbidding face.\n\nShe tore herself away and turned back to make her way—carefully—back down the hill, on the trail back to her cabin. When she glanced back over her shoulder, unable to help herself, he was gone.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Task: Cooperative storytelling\nContext: May include established characters/lore without introduction\nMy role: Provide a brief opening\nYour role: Expand upon my opening with three sentences, emulating the writing style of Zoe Chant.", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Ronan was kicking himself.\n\nHe'd gotten so caught up in the rhythm of chopping wood—one of his favorite chores, because it let him completely lose himself in the repetitive physical activity, and there was a satisfying pile of evidence of his hard work when he was done—that he hadn't heard the woman and the baby approaching.\n\nDragon ears were sharp, but not sharper than his ability to pay attention.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "So he'd been caught off-guard, and had ended up startling her instead of saying something welcoming, something that Rita or Luis might say.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "And so she'd almost taken a bad fall. And then he'd somehow made her uncomfortable enough to lie to him.\n\nShe sure wasn't on vacation.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Or if she was, it wasn't going very well.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Anxiety and stress were obvious in her voice, her scent, her posture, every part of her. When he'd first seen her, she'd looked like a frozen deer. She'd stared at him like he might attack at any moment.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "He'd wanted to reassure her that she didn't need to be afraid.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Offer to help her, maybe put her in touch with people who could really help.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Sheriff Cohen, if that was the sort of thing she needed.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "He really hoped that beautiful woman and her little baby weren't in the kind of trouble that needed a sheriff.\n\nShe'd looked too cute to be caught up in anything dangerous. A little button nose, wide blue eyes, reddish-blonde hair cut short, just curling around her ears. Freckles.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "And the baby, with little wisps of hair the same color as his mom's, blinking up at him with that thoughtful baby expression.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "It felt like the baby had looked right through him, if he was honest.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Which was ridiculous, but there it went.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 4 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "(authors note, Word frequency rule: 'ronan' × 2)", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Ronan had never spent much time around babies. He didn't know how old that one was, but definitely young enough that the dad couldn't be too far out of the picture, could he? Ronan hadn't scented a man anywhere near.\n\nHe hoped someone was taking care of them, though.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "lets do a contemporary, romance, urban fantasy thing. u write 21 sentences bits. keep character vibes", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Ronan finished up the wood, cleaned himself up, made dinner and ate it...and couldn't stop thinking about that woman and her baby.\n\nWere they okay? What were they doing out here in the middle of nowhere?\n\nHe tried to just sit down with a book by the fire and forget about it, but he couldn't focus on the words. After getting through about three pages in half an hour, he gave up and went outside.\n\nThe woods were dim, the fall air cool on his body. He crouched, concentrated and shifted.\n\nHis dragon form took shape around him: wings, claws, scales, all a metallic red color that was exactly wrong for camouflage in this cool green forest. Ronan usually only shifted at night, to keep anyone from wondering why a giant fire-engine-red creature was flying around the forest. Even way out here, in a town where everyone knew the secret, it wouldn't do for tourists or passers-by to see him, maybe take pictures with their phones.\n\nHe was more comfortable under the cover of night, anyway.\n\nThe flight to Rita's was pretty short. He kept under the tree canopy, which made it challenging; his dragon form was big enough that he had to really watch out for the tree trunks. He let himself have the private moment of exhilaration, alone in his own head, dodging through the branches like it was a game.\n\nSoon enough, though, Rita and Luis's place took shape on the ground underneath him. He checked to make sure no visitors were in the parking lot, and landed behind the building, shifting back to human and striding up to the door.\n\nHe knocked, and just a minute later the door opened, Rita's face appearing in a warm spill of light. Her concerned expression changed to a welcoming smile when she saw him.\n\n\"Ronan, what a nice surprise! Come in, come in. I thought you might be our guest.\"\n\nRonan stepped into the house, but shook his head when she offered him a seat. If he sat down, she'd be bringing him a sandwich and a plate of cookies and a mug of tea, and it'd be two hours before he managed to extract himself. Sitting down in Rita's house made it too easy to forget that he was trying not to make connections around here.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Your guest—she's a woman with a baby? Little, red hair?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"That's her,\" Rita confirmed.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"You saw her? Do you know her at all?\"\n\nRonan shook his head. \"No, she just happened on my place when she was out for a walk with her baby. I wanted—do you know if she's all right? She seemed scared. She said she was on vacation, but...\"\n\n\"That woman is not on vacation,\" came a voice from the door, and Ronan turned to greet Luis, Rita's husband.\n\nLuis came forward and shook his hand firmly, and continued, \"She's got her entire life packed into her car, if I'm any judge. I don't know where she's headed, but I hope she's got somewhere to be. And someone to meet her there.\"\n\n\"Now, Luis,\" Rita said, \"it's the twenty-first century. A grown woman can make it on her own.\" She hesitated. \"But with a little baby like that...\"\n\n\"That's what I'm worried about,\" Luis said. \"I remember when our Santos was that little. Up half the night, just starting to crawl, getting into everything. We had our work cut out for us, keeping this place running and taking care of a baby, and there's two of us. She's one person.\"\n\n\"I would've given her the room for free, but I didn't want to risk her turning it down,\" Rita said. \"I charged her as little as I thought I could get away with, and she still almost didn't go for it. I think she's too proud. Or too afraid of what the catch might be.\"\n\nRonan frowned. None of this sounded good. \"She's not from town, is she? Did she come through there on her way here?\"\n\n\"She didn't say,\" said Rita. \"We're too far off the road to see which way she was going when she turned into the drive.\"\n\nHis frown deepened. \"Maybe I'll stop by there, see if anyone knows who she is.\"\n\nRita cocked her head, looking suddenly much more draconic. He rarely saw her shift, but every so often she'd take on a mannerism that reminded him she was a dragon, too. An old, wise one. \"Ronan, what's got you so interested in this woman? Normally you run away the second someone implies you might be invested in anything.\"\n\nThat was accurate enough to make him uncomfortable.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Am I overstepping?\" Ronan asked, redirecting the conversation to something that he was genuinely concerned about.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 16 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"She deserves her privacy.\"\n\n\"She sure does,\" Rita agreed. \"No one needs to go around looking in her car windows or anything like that.\" She elbowed Luis.\n\n\"I just walked past where it was parked,\" Luis defended himself. \"I wasn't peering in from all sides or anything.\"\n\n\"But if you went into town and started a conversation about whether anyone new was passing through today, that doesn't harm anything,\" Rita finished. \"You just make sure you respect her wishes if she ends up telling you to stay out of her business.\"\n\nHe hoped it didn't come to that. If she was really in trouble—\n\nWell, he'd just have to be a help, instead of a nuisance.\n\nOr at least, he could make sure that someone who would be a help knew that she might need it. She probably didn't need his kind of help.\n\n\"Thanks,\" he said to both of them. \"I'll see if the sheriff knows anything, and that's all.\"\n\nRita looking at him thoughtfully. He braced himself for something painfully insightful, but all she said was, \"Take a cookie for the road, why don't you.\"", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "writing exercise: forty-four sentences sentences continuing this chapter, Zoe Chant style, contemporary, romance, urban fantasy genre. characters may be pre-established", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "The town of Oak Ridge was set into a hillside. It was a strange place to put a town, Ronan had always thought—all the streets were steep enough that everyone had to curb their tires when they parked, and it always seemed like the forest was a year or two away from moving in and just taking right over.\n\nOutside of the core area of a few streets where local businesses clustered, houses just drifted away into the trees. There weren't any shopping centers, no big highways nearby, nothing to really connect the place with the outside world.\n\nAnd yet, it had been around for a hundred years and was still trucking along.\n\nIt probably helped that a big percentage of the residents were happy to avoid the attention of the rest of the world entirely.\n\nRonan had had to think long and hard before he'd decided to move to a shifter town. He hadn't wanted to find himself in the same kind of situation he was trying to leave behind. But Oak Ridge was a quiet place, where everyone seemed to get along, or at least leave each other alone.\n\nNot like where Ronan had grown up.\n\nAnd ultimately, the idea of trying to live secretly among humans for the rest of his life had been too much to take. Besides, he took some comfort in knowing there was a whole crowd of big shifters around to protect...anyone who might need protecting. If something happened among humans, there'd be nothing anyone could do.\n\nNot that anything was going to happen. Ronan had himself under control.\n\nStill, he was glad he'd found the cabin, and that Rita and Luis were smart enough to take care of themselves. Ronan could keep to himself out in the woods, and everything would be fine.\n\nHe went up to the tiny police station. Oak Ridge didn't have a lot of crime, and Sheriff Cohen and his single deputy spent most of their time helping out with things like accidents, lost kids, hiking tourists in trouble, and so on. Ronan had starting helping with that last one, too, and the sheriff sometimes joked that now he could just retire.\n\nInside the building, the sheriff himself, Malachi Cohen, was sitting behind the desk, filling out some paperwork. He looked up expectantly when the door opened, and his eyebrows rose when he saw Ronan. \"Trouble out in the woods?\"\n\nRonan shook his head. \"No. Or nothing urgent, anyway. I just wanted to ask if you knew anything about a woman with a baby who might've come into town today.\"\n\nThe sheriff frowned. \"No strangers that I saw today at all.\" He called back over his shoulder. \"Flynn!\"\n\nA blond head poked out of the back room. \"You rang?\"\n\n\"You see anyone come in from out of town today?\"\n\nFlynn frowned. \"Jenny's aunt is visiting from Montana. Other than that, no.\"\n\nThe sheriff turned back to Ronan. \"There you go. No one came through. Now, what's this about a woman and a baby?\"\n\nMalachi was the type to keep careful track of everything that happened in Oak Ridge. If it was unusual, he wanted to know about it, just in case.\n\nRonan hesitated. Now that he was faced with the prospect of explaining the situation, he realized how tenuous it was. He didn't know that the woman was in trouble—didn't know anything about her, not even her name. Rita and Luis must have it, for the booking, but they hadn't mentioned it.\n\nShe'd called the baby Noah. He wondered if that was a family name.\n\nThere was no way to know, because he didn't know anything about her, didn't even know for sure that she was in trouble. Maybe she was just worried and scared because—because someone in her family was sick, or her boss didn't like her, or something like that.\n\nBut.\n\n\"She's staying out at Rita and Luis's,\" he said. \"And she's in trouble. I can tell.\"", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Write a 455-word chunk to replace the `[text_redacted]` in the following text.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "There was a tapping at the cabin door.\n\nKatie snatched Noah up, stifling a shriek. Startled, Noah started to cry.\n\n\"Honey?\" came Rita's quavery voice. \"I'm so sorry to interrupt. Did I wake the baby?\"\n\nHeart pounding, Katie made herself take a deep breath. In. Out.\n\nShe was struck with the memory of that man, this afternoon, telling her to breathe. Her shoulder relaxed, her feet came unstuck from the floor, and she was able to walk to the door.\n\n\"No, he was awake,\" she said as she opened it. \"He's been fussy all evening.\" They were in for a long night, she could already tell.\n\n\"Oh, that's a shame.\" Rita smiled at Noah, who was whimpering into Katie's shoulder. \"I really just wanted to stop by and ask if everything was all right, if there was anything else you needed for the baby. It's [text_redacted]ould have used her and tossed her aside like he did all of his girlfriends, but once he'd realized she was pregnant—and once they learned the baby was a boy—\n\nSexist jerk, she thought, with a bit more spine. If Noah had been a girl, Victor wouldn't have paid any attention at all.\n\nI sure know how to pick 'em.\n\nShe was frankly surprised that Ronan The Shirtless Woodsman wasn't an ax murderer, given the bolt of visceral attraction she'd felt for him.\n\nBecause if there was one thing she'd learned from all this, it was that her weakness for strong men was going to deliver her into the arms of jerks every single time. She'd thought Victor was different, and boy, had she been wrong. Her judgment just wasn't to be trusted.\n\n\"That's okay,\" she told Noah. \"I've got something more important than romance now. No time to date—I've got to take care of you.\"\n\nNoah whined, and then really scrunched up his face and started to cry.\n\nKatie sighed. \"Yep. We're in a strange place and we had a long day. Let's go to bed and try to sleep, okay?\"\n\nNoah wailed, and Katie took a deep breath and started to get him ready for bed.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "been many, many years since my son was your little boy's age, I'm sure I've forgotten something.\"\n\nOverwhelmed by a sudden rush of emotion, Katie almost couldn't answer her. When was the last time someone had really seemed to care about what she needed?\n\n\"No,\" she managed finally. \"Everything's wonderful. Everything's just—wonderful.\"\n\nWas it her imagination, or did Rita look sympathetic? That wasn't right. Katie wanted everyone to believe that she was just fine, that she was taking care of herself and Noah without any problems. Because that was what she needed the truth to be.\n\n\"Well, that's good to hear. You just call us if anything changes, though, all right? The number's on the fridge. Anytime, truly.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Katie managed.\n\nThen she thought of one thing she did want. \"Oh, do you know who that man is who lives out along the trail a ways? Down in the woods, in a cabin?\"\n\nRita's face immediately warmed into a smile. \"Oh, that's Ronan,\" she said. \"What a lovely boy. He moved in there a couple of years ago, and he's so kind. Helps with the work that Luis's back can't handle anymore, especially not since our son moved into town. He rescues lost guests when they get too far out in the woods and get turned around, too. Just a good, good man.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Katie said. \"That's—that's nice.\"\n\nWhy was that so painful to hear? It wasn't like she'd been hoping to hear he was an ax murderer or something. She'd asked specifically because she wanted to see if her impression had been right.\n\nBut instead of being reassured, Rita's answer had created a weird lump in her throat, a tightness in her chest.\n\nNoah chose that moment to escalate his whimpers into sobs, and Katie gratefully shifted her attention to her son.\n\n\"Oh, I'm letting all the cold air in,\" Rita said. \"He can't be enjoying that. You try and get some sleep if you can, honey. One thing I definitely haven't forgotten is all those sleepless nights.\"\n\nKatie smiled gratefully. \"Thanks for stopping by, Rita. You've been so lovely.\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" Rita said, but Katie thought she looked pleased. \"Goodnight, dear.\"\n\n\"Goodnight.\"\n\nRita closed the door, and Katie turned the lock.\n\nThen she checked it to make sure it was actually locked.\n\nThen she reminded herself that Victor's family had no idea where she was. And Victor might not even come after them. Because when it came down to it, he didn't care about her at all, or even really Noah, not as a person.\n\nThat's your son, she thought at her ex, with a surge of the helpless rage she'd felt when she realized how things were going to be.\n\nVictor w", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "See that `[missing]` in the text? Replace it with approximately 3 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "The baby was crying again.\n\nRonan had slept restlessly, unable to truly relax. The woman with the baby wouldn't leave his thoughts, and he kept snapping awake, wondering if she was all right.\n\nTwice, he'd given in and gone out to shift, flying a circuit over the woods. He hadn't lingered by her cabin, hadn't dipped down low enough for her to hear his wingbeats.\n\nBut he'd heard the baby, both times.\n\nNow it was morning, and the baby was crying again. He wondered if she'd been able to get any sleep at all. She must be completely exhausted—and the baby must be, too; how did babies sustain that much crying? Didn't they need a ton of sleep?\n\nMaybe the baby was sick. Did he need a doctor? Reid was the local family doctor, and he knew Ronan by sight, at least. More than once, Ronan had brought shivering hikers to his door for emergency care, because there wasn't a real hospital within a hundred miles.\n\nRonan made up his mind. He dressed quickly and strode out the door, heading towards the hidden turnoff from the main road, where he kept his Jeep. It was a fifteen-minute drive into town, which was enough time for him to turn his plan over in his mind.\n\nHe could've gone to Rita for this instead of driving all the way to town, but it was five in the morning and he didn't want to wake her up if she was sleeping. Besides, even with the drive, this would be faster.\n\nThe diner was open, of course. The diner was technically open twenty-four hours, although between midnight and five AM you had to ring the bell and wake Lachlan up, and no one liked to do that. But at five, Lachlan opened the doors and started cooking breakfast for all the early-rising locals.\n\nHe was there today when Ronan strode in, and his eyebrows rose in surprise. \"Ronan! What are you doing in town?\"\n\n\"Just want some breakfast to go,\" Ronan said. \"What've you got that'll still be good after fifteen minutes in a car?\" After a moment of consideration, he added, \"And maybe something that someone could eat with one hand.\"\n\nA crying baby probably wanted to be held, after all. She might not be able to sit down with a plate of pancakes and eggs.\n\nLachlan's eyebrows went even higher. \"Anything I should know about? Someone hurt?\"\n\nRonan shook his head. \"No, no one's hurt.\" Unless the baby was sick.\n\nThe baby was probably fine. Babies cried.\n\n\"Okay,\" Lachlan said slowly. \"Sure. Well, we've got ham-and-cheddar biscuits just out of the oven, some nice fresh fruit, cinnamon rolls...\"\n\n\"That all sounds great,\" Ronan said. \"Some of all of that.\"\n\n\"Enough for one? Two?\" Lachlan asked. Curiosity was rolling off of him in waves, but he didn't ask any more questions, just started getting a to-go box ready.\n\n\"Two,\" Ronan decided. The restaurant smelled delicious, and he hadn't eaten anything before running out the door. His stomach was growling.\n\n\"Two it is. I'll wrap it up so it's as heatproof as I can make it, keep it hot longer.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" Ronan said.\n\nLachlan went around the kitchen with military efficiency. He'd served, Ronan knew—he and Flynn at the station were brothers, and they'd both done two tours overseas somewhere. It showed in Lachlan's powerful frame and his quick, economical movements.\n\nRonan wondered what had made one brother choose to go into law enforcement, with the chance of more violence and danger—even if it was remote, here in sleepy Oak Ridge—and the other one choose to run a restaurant.\n\nLachlan had a son, though. That must have made him think carefully.\n\n\"Hey,\" Ronan said suddenly. \"You—\" He caught himself. He'd literally been about to say, You have a kid, and he was a baby, once, right?\n\nOf course he had a kid. Of course that kid had been a baby. Ronan had just never thought about it. He'd never spent any time around young kids or babies at all, and they pretty much never entered into his head.\n\nHe had Lachlan's attention now. \"What is it?\"\n\nRonan started to say, Nothing, and then changed his mind. \"Is it normal, if a baby cries all night? Does it mean the baby's sick?\"\n\nLachlan stared at him. \"Are you taking care of a baby?\"\n\n\"No!\" Ronan shook his head, frustrated. He didn't want to explain the whole thing again, because he was pretty sure it was going to sound crazier the more he repeated it. \"I just—want to know.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" Lachlan said slowly. \"Well. No, it doesn't mean the baby's sick, necessarily. Sometimes babies are fussy, and some babies don't sleep through the night very well. I mean, if a baby screamed all through the night, like, continuously for eight hours, I'd be concerned, but if it's just waking up every hour or something, that's pretty normal. Depends on the baby and how old it is.\"\n\n\"Oh. Okay.\" Ronan wasn't sure if that was a relief or not. Because on the one hand, baby Noah might be completely fine. But on the other hand—waking up every hour. That was normal? That was the sort of thing that was outlawed by the Geneva Convention.\n\n\"Here you go.\" Lachlan handed him a hefty bag, well enough insulated that Ronan could barely feel the warmth of the food inside.\n\n\"Thanks. What do I owe you?\"\n\nLachlan shook his head. \"Oh, no. This one's on the house, on the[missing]Go on. You've got food to deliver, right?\"\n\nTrue. And the more time went by, the longer the baby was crying. \"Right. Thanks.\"\n\n\"No problem.\"\n\nRonan hastened back to his Jeep, set the food on the passenger seat, and started off.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": " condition that you eventually tell me what's going on.\"\n\nRonan would much rather have paid with money. \"Are you sure?\"\n\n\"", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "STORY CONTINUATION:\nLength: forty-three sentences\nMaintain character context\nGenre: contemporary, romance, urban fantasy", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "The baby was still crying—or crying again—when he got back, and Ronan let out his breath.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "He'd been wondering, on the drive over, whether Noah's mom might be asleep when he got back, and what to do with her breakfast if she was.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "If he just left it on the doorstep, animals would get it—and even if they didn't, God knew what she would think when she found it.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "No, this was the sort of thing he had to explain in person.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "And he'd be brief about it, he promised himself.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Knock on the door, say his piece, give her the food, and politely excuse himself.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Maybe ask if she needed a doctor for the baby. Just in case.\n\nHe pulled the Jeep up past Rita and Luis's parking lot, down the bumpy trail to the cabins. She was in the first one along the line, and he came to a stop right outside.\n\nWhy was his heart racing? He was just going to say a few words and hand over a bag of food.\n\nHe'd been living like a hermit for too long. He'd never been great at talking to people, never been charming, but he'd done okay. He'd had friends, he'd dated.\n\nThat had been back home, though. Things were a lot different there.\n\nNow you're sitting in your car doing nothing. Get out and go up to her.\n\nHe snatched up the bag, shoved the car door open, and marched up to her door. He waited for a momentary break in the crying, and used the opportunity to knock.\n\nThere was a long pause.\n\nThen the door opened just a crack, and exhausted blue eyes stared out at him under a tangled mess of bright red hair. Then widened. \"Hi?\"\n\nRonan held up the bag. \"I was headed into town to get myself breakfast,\" he sort-of-lied, \"and I'd heard your baby crying, so I thought you might appreciate some food?\" I'm harmless, he tried to project.\n\nShe blinked tired blue eyes at him for a long minute, frowning. Not like she was suspicious, necessarily, but like she was trying to process what was happening.\n\n\"I'm not asking to come in,\" Ronan added hastily. \"Here, please take it. It's still hot.\" He held out the bag.\n\n\"You...brought me breakfast?\" she asked him, sounding disbelieving.\n\n\"From town,\" Ronan confirmed.\n\nSlowly, she eased the door open. She had the baby on her hip. His fingers were in his mouth, and his eyes were watery, his nose running. He stared at Ronan as though he'd been distracted from his misery by the door opening.\n\nCautiously, Ronan went inside. His plans hadn't covered actually being invited in. Part of him wanted to advise her against inviting strangers into the house like this, but instead he just went to the little kitchenette and started opening up the bag.\n\nHis own food was also in here, he remembered. He would've left her with way too much if he'd just handed her the bag.\n\n\"Thank you,\" she was saying. \"You—really didn't have to do this. I hope Noah didn't keep you awake all night.\"\n\n\"No, no,\" he said, which was the truth. \"I woke up early and I heard him. Seems like you've had a sleepless night?\"\n\nShe nodded, closing the door and coming over to the kitchen. She was dressed in what were obviously pajamas, flannel pants and a thin hoodie. The clothes hugged her curves and gave her a soft look that made Ronan just want to put his arms around her and encourage her to take a nap.\n\nStop it. You're just leaving her some food.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "The baby stayed quiet, still watching Ronan with fascination.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "His mother snagged a wipe and cleaned off his face while she said, \"He's not a very good sleeper. It was really hard when he was younger. He's mostly outgrown this now, but every so often he just—refuses to go down. I think it was harder because we're in a new place.\"\n\nShe didn't seem as guarded as she had when they'd met in the woods. And when she came into the kitchen to throw the wipe away, she paused by the food, inhaling with obvious interest.\n\nRonan searched in the cabinets and found a plate. He started setting biscuits and fruit on it and said, \"I'm Ronan, by the way. I don't think we got to introductions yesterday.\"\n\nHer eyes widened. \"Oh, no—sorry. I'm Katie. This is Noah.\" She hefted the baby on her hip, and he babbled something around his fingers.\n\n\"Katie,\" Ronan repeated. It felt right on his tongue. \"It's nice to meet you. Breakfast?\" He held out the plate.\n\n\"Oh,\" she said on a long sigh, \"this looks amazing. And smells amazing.\" She went over to the tiny table and sat down with her plate, picking up one of the ham-and-cheddar buns. She bit into it, and her expression melted into one of pure bliss.\n\nShe should always look like that, Ronan thought. Happy.\n\nThen he realized he was staring. He cleared his throat. \"Do you want coffee? I could make some.\" There was a little coffeemaker on the counter.\n\nKatie was halfway through one of the buns. She swallowed and said, \"Oh, you don't have to—\"\n\n\"I want to,\" he said. \"If you'd like some. I'll have a cup, too.\" Maybe that would get past her instinctive—what was it? Generosity? Hostessing? Not wanting to take too many favors from someone she didn't know?\n\n\"Well...all right,\" she said, with some visible reluctance. She frowned down at her plate. \"Why did you do this?\" she asked slowly. \"I'm okay, you know. I don't need—I could've just had cereal. Rita left some in the cupboards.\"\n\nRonan chose his words carefully. \"I wanted to do something nice for you. You're traveling alone with a baby. That has to be difficult.\"\n\n\"But...\" Her voice trailed off.\n\nNoah chose that moment to grab at the biscuit she was holding, forgotten, in her free hand. His chubby hand closed on it and pulled it towards his mouth.\n\n\"Hey, no.\" Katie extracted her breakfast from her son's fingers. \"That's not for you. You've had breakfast like four times already this morning.\"\n\n\"Does he eat food at all yet?\" Ronan asked, curious, and jumping on the opportunity to move the subject away from whether she should be accepting help or not.\n\n\"Purees and rice cereal and stuff, a little. Mostly, though, it's—uh—\" She gestured at herself.\n\n\"Right,\" Ronan said hastily, not wanting to make her uncomfortable. \"Of course. Um, how old is he?\"\n\n\"Six and a half months,\" Katie said. \"So we're really just getting started on solids, here and there. My—I mean—it's kind of hard to get to the store with a baby, so it's easier to do it...all natural.\"\n\n\"Sure.\" Ronan wondered what she'd been about to say.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Some other reason it had been hard to get to the store?\n\nThe coffee was starting to perk. Katie finished another biscuit, and Ronan tried not to just watch her eat. It was satisfying in a way he didn't quite understand. He wanted to bring her lunch and dinner, too, make sure she had plenty, for herself and for feeding Noah.\n\nWhen the plate was clean, he asked, \"Do you want more? There are cinnamon rolls, too.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Katie said, a longing sigh. \"I love cinnamon rolls.\"\n\nRonan held out his hand for her plate. She handed it over, and then suddenly said, \"Wait, you said you were getting breakfast for yourself. Did you eat already?\"\n\n\"Mine's in the bag, too,\" he said. \"I'll eat later.\"\n\n\"No, wait—I can't just sit here and eat while you're going hungry!\" Katie beckoned him over. \"Sit down! Make yourself a plate, too.\"\n\nRonan had, quite honestly, totally forgotten that he was hungry, too. Which was strange, because normally he had a big breakfast before he did anything, and he'd been up for over an hour so far without taking a bite.\n\nNow that Katie had reminded him, though, he was ravenous. \"Are you sure?\" he asked. \"I can get out of your hair, take this home and eat there.\"\n\nKatie hesitated. Her eyes moved to the door. Finally, she said, \"No. Stay.\"\n\nThere was a significance to that. Ronan wasn't sure, but he thought she might have decided that he was trustworthy.\n\nHe didn't know what he'd done to deserve it, exactly, but he was going to live up to it, without a doubt.\n\nNoah, who seemed to have cheered up a bit, babbled unintelligibly while Ronan put a plate together for himself and added a couple of cinnamon rolls to Katie's. He poured them both coffee and sat down across from her. The table was small enough that he had to sit sideways in the chair or their knees would've been right up against each other, but that was okay.\n\n\"These are amazing,\" Katie said with her mouth full. \"Where did you get them?\"\n\n\"There's a diner in town,\" Ronan said. \"Owned by a local guy. He's a really good cook.\"\n\nKatie's eyebrows went up. \"I don't know a lot of men who cook.\"\n\n\"I'm an all-right cook,\" Ronan said, and realized instantly that he sounded like he was trying to advertise himself. He continued hastily, \"Live on my own, and they don't deliver pizza way out here, so I've got to be, or I'd be pretty miserable at mealtimes.\"\n\nShe laughed a little. \"That's good. I knew—I've known some men who just lived at home so that their moms would cook for them and do their laundry until they got married. Then their wives would take over, I guess.\"\n\n\"I don't subscribe to that idea,\" Ronan said firmly. \"A man should be able to take care of his own house. He should teach his sons to do the same. No man should just laze around and expect women to take care of him. Unless he really is a baby.\"\n\nHe smiled a little at Noah, who—to his surprise—smiled back.\n\nKatie smiled too. \"Hey, he likes that idea. That's good, because no son of mine is going to grow up thinking he never has to wash his own dishes. Isn't that right?\" She jounced Noah on her knee a bit, and he smiled bigger, damp and toothless.\n\nRonan desperately wanted to hear about what men she'd known who hadn't washed their own dishes.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Was Noah's dad one of them? Had he treated Katie like his personal servant?\n\nDid she want someone to go punch him in the face for her?\n\nWas she running away from him?\n\nThere was no easy way to ask any of those questions. Even if Ronan were considered trustworthy enough to sit down with her at the breakfast table, she was still clearly guarding her personal life carefully.\n\nRonan was just grateful she'd cheered up from her tired and quasi-suspicious air earlier, relaxed enough to laugh and enjoy her breakfast. That seemed like a good morning's work.\n\nNoah started squirming in Katie's arms. \"Just one second, honey,\" she told him. \"Mommy's finishing her breakfast.\"\n\nHe squealed, kicking his feet and wiggling like he wanted to get down.\n\n\"Just a second,\" she repeated, and looked at Ronan. \"He's just barely starting to crawl. I used to be able to set him on a blanket and give him a toy and he'd stay put, but now if I put him down, he moves.\"\n\n\"I hear that only gets worse,\" Ronan said. \"Do you want—I could sit with him for a second while you finish eating.\"\n\nKatie stared at him. \"You just sat down.\"\n\n\"And you've been up all night,\" Ronan countered.\n\n\"Well, I'm his mom. I'm supposed to stay up with him if he cries.\"\n\n\"You're supposed to have someone with you to help out,\" Ronan said. \"And maybe you don't want anyone, and that's fine—\" although that struck him as wrong; Katie should have a partner to help her, and Noah should have two parents— \"but for now, would you accept a substitute?\"\n\nNoah made a loud noise that might have been excited and might have been angry; it was hard to tell.\n\n\"All right,\" Katie said. \"Okay. Here.\" She held Noah out.\n\nWhich was the moment that Ronan realized that he had no idea how to hold a baby.\n\nWell, Katie had her hands just around his torso, letting his feet dangle, and he seemed fine, so Ronan reached out to take the same grip.\n\nTheir fingers touched, momentarily interlaced around Noah's little body. Ronan felt a bolt of—something. Katie jumped a little, and he knew somehow that she'd felt it too.\n\nWhat was that? he wanted to say, but then Noah tried to launch himself into space and he had to focus on keeping a grip on him. A grip strong enough to keep him in one place, but gentle enough not to hurt him at all.\n\nKatie kept her hands on Noah until he'd moved almost to Ronan's own lap, and then slowly, she let go.\n\nRonan was holding a baby. For the...first time.\n\nHe laughed a little. \"I've never held a baby before,\" he confessed to Katie. \"Should probably have mentioned that before I offered to take him.\"\n\n\"Well, you've got the right end up, so I'd say you're doing okay so far,\" she offered.\n\nRonan made a face. \"Thanks.\"\n\nNow that he had a new person to look at, Noah seemed to have momentarily forgotten his desire to throw himself into free-fall. Instead, he was reaching a hand out to Ronan's face. Slowly, Ronan set him down onto his lap—or tried to. Noah planted his little feet on Ronan's thighs and seemed determined to try and stand.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Ronan looked down at him, and then over at Katie.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "For your immediate response: aim for 6% direct quotes", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"He can't—stand up yet, right?\" Surely if he was only just starting to crawl...\n\nMouth full of cinnamon roll, Katie shook her head. She swallowed and said, \"He just likes to practice.\"\n\nWell, that made sense. Ronan turned his attention back to the baby and found himself with a face full of small fingers. Noah patted his cheek, his nose, his forehead, his—\n\n\"Ow.\"\n\n\"Watch your eyes,\" Katie said belatedly. \"He'll poke his fingers right into them if you're not careful.\"\n\n\"I'm learning.\"\n\nNoah left off his exploration of Ronan's face after a minute. Instead, he started bending his knees like he wanted to jump, but didn't quite have the muscle power to get off the ground. Lap. Tentatively, Ronan waited until he was at the highest point of the jump attempt, and lifted him up a couple of inches.\n\nThe baby laughed, and Ronan felt a rising warmth in his chest that he'd never experienced before.\n\nHe lowered Noah back down to stand again, and the kid redoubled his efforts, bouncing up and down like a little spring.\n\nSo Ronan kept it up—Noah would try to jump, and Ronan would lift. The baby was a little heavier than he'd expected, but still light enough that he could probably do this all day without getting tired.\n\nNoah loved it. He giggled and shrieked, bouncing and kicking. Ronan jumped him higher a few times, which made him laugh harder.\n\nHe'd never realized that playing with a baby would be so...fun.\n\nRonan didn't have a lot of fun, overall. He worked hard on his cabin, he explored the forest, he chopped wood for locals and worked part-time for the forest rescue, the fire department, and the sheriff's office whenever anyone needed an extra pair of strong arms or legs. He read books—history, mostly, but literature sometimes.\n\nThey were all good, satisfying ways to spend his time. But they didn't make laughter bubble up in his chest like this did.\n\nThrough all of it, he was aware of Katie watching him, her expression soft. Good. He wanted her to think that he was doing a good job with Noah, so that she'd feel comfortable relaxing with her breakfast. She deserved a break.\n\nHe wondered how long she'd been alone with him. And—once again—what it was that had made her think that it was better to be alone.\n\nKatie took a final drink of coffee and then stood up, coming over to reach for her son. \"Thanks,\" she said, still with that soft air around her. \"Let me take him now, so you can eat.\"\n\nRonan handed the baby over with a reluctance that surprised him. He would've been happy to keep bouncing Noah for a while longer.\n\nBut Katie took him off to walk around the living room, while Ronan inhaled the rest of his food as fast as he thought was decent, then cleaned up the kitchen.\n\nAnd washed the plates and forks, because he was definitely not one of those men who left his dishes for other people to do.\n\nWhen he turned back from the sink, Katie was standing very still, and Noah's head was on her shoulder. His eyes were drifting shut.\n\nKatie held a finger to her lips, and Ronan stayed motionless for a long few minutes, while Noah's eyes closed, and his body relaxed into bonelessness against Katie's.\n\nFinally, Katie breathed out. \"Wow,\" she said quietly.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "(ooc) Find a natural way to mention that Everyone out for themselves. A lot of backstabbing jerks who'd rather fight each other than work together to build anything. (ooc)", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"I thought he'd never sleep again.\"\n\nRonan stifled a laugh, and then wondered when the last time was that he'd laughed this much. \"Then you probably could've gotten a news story run about him, become famous. Miracle baby doesn't need sleep.\"\n\nHer face fell back into the guarded expression he was starting to recognize. \"I don't think we need to be in the news.\" Then she turned wry. \"Besides, I'd definitely rather sleep through the night than be famous.\"\n\n\"Have to agree,\" Ronan said.\n\nThen, because he literally couldn't help himself any longer, he said, \"Katie, I hope that you've got somewhere you're going, a home, your family, some friends—anybody. And if you don't...\"\n\nGuarded didn't even begin to describe what she looked like now. It was as though she'd turned to stone. \"I said I was on vacation,\" she whispered.\n\n\"Are you on vacation?\"\n\nA long pause.\n\nFinally, she bit her lip. The stone cracked. \"No.\"\n\nRonan tried to keep his expression, his body language, his tone of voice, all of them open and friendly. \"I know that we just met, but I—I want to help you.\"\n\nHer face twisted. \"Why? It can't just be for no reason.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Because the world doesn't work that way!\" Her voice rose in pitch, and Noah twitched and whimpered. Katie caught her breath and soothed him softly, rocking in place until he quieted back down.\n\nRonan took a step or two towards her before he realized he was doing it, caught up in the desire to take them both in his arms and reassure them that everything was going to be okay now.\n\nWhich was presumptuous at best, a lie at worst. He didn't know anything about their situation; he couldn't make any promises yet.\n\nEven though he wanted to promise them the world.\n\nBut he couldn't do that. He reminded himself that Katie was probably better staying away from him entirely. But he did at least know people who could help.\n\n\"How does the world work, then?\" he asked. \"For you. What's the world you're trying to get Noah away from?\"\n\nKatie's arms tightened around her baby. \"People are only out for themselves,\" she whispered. \"Or if they're good, nice people, then they're—they're taken advantage of. They can't make it against all the cutthroat, awful people out there. They don't have any power.\"\n\nRonan couldn't help letting out a rough, painful-feeling laugh. Katie frowned. \"What?\"\n\n\"That just sounds a lot like where I come from,\" he confessed. \"Everyone out for themselves. A lot of backstabbing jerks who'd rather fight each other than work together to build anything.\"\n\nKatie's eyes widened. \"Where you come from?\" she asked. \"Are you from around here?\"\n\n\"No,\" he said, quick and sharp. \"No, I'm from way across the country. I came here because I'd heard it was a different kind of a place.\"\n\nRonan's father had spoken of Oak Ridge disdainfully, said he'd visited it once.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Bunch of pansies, he'd said in a disgusted voice.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 13 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "All want to just hold hands and sing inspirational songs and braid flowers into each other's hair. Not worth our time. Nothing worth taking, anyway.\n\nNothing worth taking and no one looking to take it? That had sounded like paradise to Ronan. He hadn't dared to really hope that Oak Ridge would truly be a happy, peaceful shifter town, but...he'd lived here for two years now, and he'd learned nothing to the contrary. He was almost starting to believe it.\n\n\"Is it different?\" Katie asked now.\n\nMaybe it was time to let go of his doubts, acknowledge that they came from his past, not from his present. \"Yes.\"\n\nIt came out more heartfelt than he'd intended. But he doubled down on it, repeating, \"Yes. It's a good place. The people here are good, and they'll help you if you need it. I promise.\"\n\nBecause Katie deserved help. She deserved a good life, her and Noah, and Ronan was going to do whatever he could to get her there.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Looking at this text, there's a `[missing]` that needs filling. Give me a bit with 45 words that would work.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Katie should've known she wouldn't be able to keep it up.\n\nWhy had she ever thought she could just lie about her past—let alone her present—and keep it up? She was a terrible liar, she always had been.\n\nShe couldn't ever tell when other people were lying, either. Victor had suckered her right in.\n\nIt made believing Ronan hard.\n\nEven though there was something deep in her bones that trusted him. It wasn't the way she'd felt with Victor—he'd been all surface and charm, and she'd gotten all empty-headed and fizzy around him, full of pleasure at his compliments and his presents. So convinced that she was lucky that she hadn't ever taken a second to really examine who he was as a person.\n\nThis was...different.\n\nBut was it just another way to fool herself? Ronan was attractive, after all. Breathtakingly attractive, in a way Katie had never realized that she liked. Lumberjack wasn't a look she'd ever fantasized about in a boyfriend.\n\nAnd she knew her own weakness, now.\n\nShe also knew how people could conceal themselves. Sweet old ladies could be controlling. Friendly father figures could be cruel and grasping. Nothing was as it seemed.\n\nThere was a deep, anguished feeling in her chest, struggling to break free. She shoved it down. She couldn't afford to break down now. Even if Ronan was exactly what he seemed, he sure didn't want her to melt down right here.\n\nNoah's sleeping weight in her arms reminded her that she needed to stay in control. She was the mom, she was in charge of both of them, and it was her job to be strong and make good choices.\n\nSo what was a good choice, here? She couldn't just throw them both into the power of another man, trust him to take care of them. He had to want something, and she needed to be ready to guard against that.\n\nBut also, she couldn't go through life never trusting anyone again. Last night had proven that to her. If nothing else, she needed to sleep sometimes.\n\nSo she lifted her chin and said, with as much dignity as she could muster, \"It sounds like a lovely place. Maybe I could stop by there this afternoon and meet some of these nice people.\"\n\nThere. That was...acceptably neutral. Who knew what she might learn in town? She still hadn't heard back from Tori's website friend, and she was starting to have a sinking sense of foreboding, wondering if this was going to fall through. Maybe someone in town was hiring.\n\nAnd maybe someone else was offering free childcare.\n\nYeah, right.\n\nRonan looked...relieved. \"Absolutely. I can drive you, if you want.\"\n\nKatie shook her head. \"I've got the car seat in my car.\"\n\n\"Oh. Right.\" Disappointment colored his voice. That seemed odd. Why would he be excited to give them a ride, of all things? \"Of course.\"\n\nIt was hard to keep her suspicions alive when she was looking at his face. He seemed to wear his emotions right out on top.\n\nHe'd looked honest and hopeful when he arrived at the door with breakfast, and some odd combination of happy and stunned while he was bouncing Noah on his lap. And when he was talking about his past, he'd seemed so...overcome. Sad, and angry. But then, when he was talking about Oak Ridge, he'd brightened with hope.\n\nMaybe he's just a very good actor.\n\nShe'd know him by his actions, she decided. Victor had been wonderful and charming at first, but soon enough, little red flags had shown up. He didn't want to do the things she liked, like boardgames (he thought they were childish) or cooking a meal together (too low-class). He wanted to take her to the opera, or to fancy restaurants—not because he thought she would like them, but because he only liked doing fancy things.\n\nIt hadn't taken long for that selfishness to show up elsewhere. As soon as he wanted something else more than he wanted her delight and gratitude, it was like he'd changed completely.\n\nSo she'd just have to pay attention. Did Ronan want her to hang on his every word? Did he expect her to prioritize him over herself, all the time?\n\nSo far, he'd saved her from falling, brought her breakfast, offered to get out of her hair so she could eat alone, and told her that if she was in trouble, he wanted to help her.\n\n\"How about you meet me there?\" she asked. \"You can show me around.\"\n\nHis smile was subtle—sort of. His mouth hardly moved. But his whole face lit up with it, his eyes warm. \"I'd like that,\" he said, but it was clear that he meant it more strongly than that.\n\nKatie breathed. \"Okay. Great.\"\n\nThen Ronan's eyes moved to Noah. \"But I should let you guys both take a nap first, right? Maybe we could go around lunchtime?\"\n\nGod, a nap sounded great. She was exhausted. Ronan looked like he'd be warm to cuddle up with—\n\nNo. Stop it. \"Lunchtime sounds good.\"\n\nHe nodded firmly. \"Great. I'll be back here[missing]g hand and laid it carefully on Noah's head, his thumb running softly over the baby's hair. \"Sleep well.\"\n\nAnd then he was gone, and Katie was staring after him.\n\nThat little touch—\n\nDon't melt. Don't just melt.\n\nShe was afraid it might be too late.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": " around noon, and you can follow me in?\"\n\nIt was a relief to have some kind of plan, she reflected, even if it was just to go into town for lunch. \"Sounds good.\"\n\n\"Good.\" He hesitated, glanced at the door, then reached out one bi", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "You're joining a story in progress. Produce seventy-one sentences sentences matching the established tone and acknowledging any characters or elements as they're presented.", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Several hours later, Katie had strapped Noah into the car seat and was on the road behind Ronan's Jeep, filled with anxiety.\n\nWhat were the people in town going to be like? What if she got suckered into another bad situation?\n\nThere was no reason for them to sucker her, she reminded herself. The only thing that had kept Victor and his family interested in her was Noah. She didn't have any money, she didn't have any valuable skills that anyone would want, and Noah wasn't a draw for anyone who didn't already have an investment in what he meant.\n\nTown turned out to be only a fifteen-minute drive. Katie drew in her breath when they pulled into the town proper. It was—she didn't know the right word. So many little towns were run-down places, where the population was small because there wasn't anything there to draw new people in. She'd driven through a few of them on her way here, seeing empty lots, chain-link fences, and dangerous-looking gas stations.\n\nBut Oak Ridge was full of well-kept houses, lovely gardens, and—as they pulled into the main street, which was a steep incline—a row of little businesses. No chains that she could see. She didn't recognize any of the titles, but they looked prosperous, and there were people out on the street, looking happy.\n\nRonan pulled into the parking lot of a place that had a big sign on the outside that proclaimed it to be Lachlan's Diner. Katie had no doubt that Lachlan himself would be inside.\n\nShe pulled in to park next to Ronan, and before she had her seatbelt off, Ronan was by her car, meeting her as she got out and closing her door for her. \"Can I carry something?\" he asked. \"Things for Noah?\"\n\nKatie hesitated, but then told herself that it was okay. The man wasn't going to run off with clean onesies and wipes, for God's sake. \"You can take the diaper bag,\" she told him.\n\n\"Sure thing.\"\n\nVictor hadn't wanted to carry the diaper bag, the one time the three of them had gone out. And frankly, that had only been so he could show off his healthy son to his rivals.\n\nNoah had spit up all over his suit jacket during dessert, though, and that had been the end of the night. Victor had practically teleported away from anything baby-related after that.\n\nRonan, on the other hand, slung the diaper bag over his shoulder with a smile. And looked completely incongruous in his workmanlike jeans and flannel, carrying a bag with cute little lions printed all over it.\n\nKatie hid a smile, and hoisted Noah onto her hip. \"Okay,\" she said. \"Lunch at Lachlan's Diner?\"\n\n\"Lunch at Lachlan's,\" Ronan confirmed. \"And I'll introduce you to Lachlan himself. He's the one who made breakfast this morning.\"\n\nKatie awarded herself a few points for guessing that Lachlan would be more than just a name on a sign. \"Then I'm excited to meet both him and his food.\"\n\nThey went in, and Katie found herself marveling at the beautiful interior, the solid wooden beams, the deep booths. \"This is really nice,\" she said.\n\nNot nice like Victor would've liked. There was no crystal, no napkins folded into swans. Nice like Katie preferred, like a real person had put care into it.\n\nA man came forward. \"Second time today,\" he said to Ronan. \"I guess my marketing campaigns must be working better than I'd thought.\"\n\n\"Funny,\" Ronan said. \"Lachlan, this is Katie and Noah. Katie, Lachlan.\"\n\nLachlan came forward to shake her hand. He was a tall, broad man with a bright blond head of hair. His smile made his eyes crinkle. Katie liked him immediately.\n\n\"Nice to meet you,\" he told Katie. Then he smiled at Noah. \"Hey, little man. How's it going?\"\n\nNoah stared back with wide eyes. He liked looking at strangers, Katie was starting to realize. He hadn't met a lot of them in his short life, so there was definitely some novelty in meeting new people.\n\nShe was a little angry that this was the first time she was learning that. But she pushed it down and tried to appreciate that she had the opportunity now.\n\n\"We're a lot happier now that we've had a nap,\" she told Lachlan. \"Thank you for breakfast this morning, it was absolutely delicious.\"\n\n\"My pleasure,\" he said, sounding heartfelt. \"Believe me, I know about the napless blues.\"\n\nAs if on cue, there was a sudden pounding of little feet, and a small boy appeared around the host's stand. \"Daddy, I ran out of red marker!\"\n\n\"Oh, no, not the red!\" Lachlan said in exaggerated shock. \"It's gotta wait just one second, though, because I'm talking to some customers. I'll come help you with markers when I'm done, okay, buddy?\"\n\nThe boy looked up at Ronan and Katie, then ducked abruptly behind his father's legs. \"Hi,\" he said shyly, mostly spoken into Lachlan's knee.\n\n\"Hi,\" Katie said to him. \"What are you coloring today?\"\n\n\"Animals,\" he said. \"I wanna do a octopus, and the picture in the book I have is red.\"\n\n\"Red is the best color for octopuses, I hear,\" said Ronan.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Definitely,\" Katie agreed. \"Never heard of a better color for them.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Well, sometimes they can be other colors, too,\" Lachlan said significantly. \"Especially if our red marker is out of ink.\"\n\n\"But the book shows it's red,\" the boy insisted.\n\nKatie winced. \"I think octopuses come in all different colors, don't they?\" she said hastily. \"Maybe yours is—is black.\"\n\n\"Or blue, for camouflage,\" Ronan put in. \"Then it'll disappear right into the water.\"\n\nThe little boy seemed to be considering this.\n\n\"Or striped,\" Ronan added.\n\nHis brow furrowed, considering this. \"Stripes? Like—like for camouflage in the seaweed?\"\n\n\"That's just right, kiddo,\" Lachlan said. \"Go do one with stripes and show it to me when you're done, okay?\"\n\n\"Okay.\" He trundled off.\n\n\"Sorry about that,\" Lachlan said. \"My mother usually watches him, but she's got a cold today, and she didn't want to get us both sick.\"\n\n\"No problem at all,\" Katie said. She hefted Noah, who had watched the whole exchange with fascination. \"I know a thing or two about having to bring your kid along with you wherever you go.\"\n\n\"Yup,\" Lachlan said. \"At least he can sit and color now. When he was younger, I had to come up with a lot of creative solutions.\"\n\nKatie wondered where the little boy's mother was, but wasn't going to be so intrusive as to ask.\n\n\"Anyway, let's get you seated, and I can bring you some lunch,\" Lachlan said.\n\nKatie looked around the restaurant, where quite a few people were already gathered, eating lunch, and a couple of servers moved around among the tables. \"Don't feel like you have to serve us yourself,\" she said. \"You must be busy right now, and if you have your son with you, too—\"\n\nLachlan waved her off. \"My pleasure. I have to give Ronan the good service, anyway, to make sure he ever shows his face in here again.\" He winked, and gestured them to a booth. \"I'll send someone out with a high chair,\" he added, then disappeared back into the kitchen.\n\nKatie frowned at Ronan across the table. \"What did he mean, show your face in here again? Aren't you a regular?\" Lachlan had sure seemed friendly with Ronan, and Ronan had already gotten breakfast from here, so she'd assumed he came in here all the time.\n\nRonan looked uncomfortable. \"I don't come into town much.\"\n\n\"Even though the people are so nice?\" Katie wasn't usually the sort to press on when people started seeming like they didn't want to talk about something, but she'd vowed to make sure that Ronan was being consistent.\n\n\"They're not the problem,\" Ronan said. \"I'm—\" He stopped, and then set his jaw and continued. \"I'm the problem.\"\n\nKatie's lips parted, and she had to clamp down on the surge of compassion that arose in her. Because maybe there was a reason he thought that—maybe this was the catch. But why would he be admitting it? \"What do you mean?\"\n\nRonan took a long breath. \"I told you I came from somewhere where people weren't very nice.\"\n\nKatie nodded. Noah reached for her silverware, so she gave him a napkin to play with. He tugged at the paper, and when it tore a little, instantly became absorbed in trying to do that again.\n\n\"Well, that was the culture I grew up in,\" Ronan continued. \"Lots of backstabbing behaviors. Lots of taking sides, and then betraying them. Sometimes it could get...violent.\"\n\nKatie instinctively clutched Noah tighter. Ronan's eyes went to her hands, and a muscle jumped in his jaw. \"If you don't want to spend any more time with me because of this, I'll understand,\" he said quietly. \"I learned some bad things, growing up. I never want to inflict any of that on anyone else.\"\n\n\"No, I wasn't—\" Katie protested. She tried to figure out how to phrase it. \"I was thinking about how terrible it would have been if Noah had grown up in an environment like that.\"\n\nBecause he might have. Almost had, if she'd stayed behind.\n\n\"I'm so sorry that you went through that,\" she continued softly. \"But I'm glad that you got out and came somewhere better.\"\n\n\"Me, too,\" Ronan said. \"But I don't like to spend too much time in town. The people around here don't need my kind of past getting in their way. They have full lives, and it would be a terrible thing to disrupt that.\"\n\n\"But you don't—you don't do that sort of thing anymore, do you?\" Katie felt like she was stumbling over her words, because all she could really think about was Victor's lion pack and how they were always fighting with other shapeshifters. Obviously, Ronan wouldn't have done anything like that. It must have been—corrupt business, or maybe even a gang, or something like that.\n\n\"No,\" Ronan said forcefully. \"I don't. But that upbringing doesn't just leave you behind. I'm still the person who was raised by those people, taught how to behave by them. There's no reason to bring that kind of philosophy into this town. I'd rather stay where I am, where I know that there's a good community around me, but I can keep to myself.\"\n\nKatie watched Noah waving her shredded napkin around and thought about that. \"I don't know if it works that way,\" she said slowly. \"I would hope that if you were living in this town, surrounded by all of these people, then their philosophies would rub off on you as much as the other way around. Maybe more, since there are more of them.\"\n\nRonan was quiet for a long moment. Finally, he said, \"It's too great of a risk to take. This is the best way for everyone.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "⚠️ Required: Use 'going' exactly 2 times", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Katie was saved from having to think up another reply to that by the arrival of a server—a high school kid, from the look of him—holding a high chair. \"You guys want this for your baby?\"\n\nHe was obviously assuming that they were a couple, and both Noah's parents. Katie felt a warm flush at the idea. She thought about clarifying the situation, but there was no reason to...right? It would probably just embarrass the kid, and it wasn't like he needed to know their relationship for any reason.\n\nSo she just said, \"Great, thank you,\" and set about getting Noah buckled in. Ronan leaned in and put a hand on the chair to keep it steady while she slipped Noah's legs into the correct places and strapped him in. Fortunately, it was a real high chair, with enough support for a six-month-old, instead of the little wooden ones that were more suitable for toddlers.\n\n\"Can I take your drink orders?\" the boy asked, and Katie realized she hadn't even looked at the menu.\n\nIt was strange. When Ronan talked, it was like the whole world fell away, and she forgot about anything outside of the little bubble between them. And watching him talk about his past...she was more and more convinced that he couldn't be a manipulator, a user, a controlling jerk like Victor.\n\nHe was just so honest about wanting the best for everyone, even if it meant he had to live alone. And there wasn't the sort of drama about it that might've been a red flag—no Oh, poor me, I have to live alone and be a martyr forever, pity me. Just a quiet assertion that this was the best choice, even if it might not be what he wanted.\n\nKatie was determined, suddenly, to find out what Ronan really did want.\n\nVictor had wanted her attention. He'd wanted to know that he could get her to dance at his call. And then finally, he hadn't wanted her at all.\n\n\"Ma'am?\"\n\nThe waiter was looking at her. \"Um, just water for the moment, thanks,\" she said, a little flustered.\n\nRonan ordered the same, his eyes on her. When the waiter disappeared, he leaned over the table. \"Are you okay?\"\n\n\"I—yes. I'm okay.\" She smiled at him. \"Just thinking about some things.\"\n\n\"Well, if you want to tell me about them, I'm listening. But—if you'd rather keep things private, that's okay, too.\"\n\nGod, he was too good to be true.\n\nAnd that was why she couldn't tell him about Victor yet. What if she spilled it all out, confessed how she'd been taken in, how hurt she'd been, how desperate she was—and it turned out he was too good to be true?\n\nShe just couldn't take that risk. Not yet.\n\n\"Tell me about the menu,\" she said, distracting herself. \"What's good? Or do you not come in enough to know?\"\n\n\"Everything's good,\" Ronan said, opening the menu. \"The soup and sandwich is a good lunch order, I know that.\"\n\nThe menu insert proclaimed the soup of the day to be chicken corn chowder, paired with any sandwich on the menu. Katie's stomach growled just looking at it. It had bacon in it.\n\n\"I don't think I need to look any further,\" she declared, shutting the menu.\n\nRonan laughed. \"I know someone who's determined to come in and order everything off the menu until he's tried it all, but Lachlan keeps adding new specials, so he's never quite managed it. He complains, but I don't think he's serious.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't be,\" Katie said. She was struck, suddenly, with a longing for that sort of stability. The knowledge that she could go into her favorite restaurant every week, that everyone there would know her, and she could plan to keep going back for years if she wanted.\n\nOnce upon a time, her parents had provided that for other people. Until it was taken away forever.\n\nNoah smacked his hands down on the chair's tray, and then looked delighted at the fantastic new noise that he'd discovered. He batted his arms wildly.\n\nRonan started to laugh. \"You think he's going to join a band when he grows up?\"\n\n\"He loves making noise by whacking on things, so I could definitely see him having a future as a drummer,\" Katie agreed.\n\nRonan smiled a little. \"I was half-expecting you to say over my dead body. I don't think any mother really wants her son to become a professional musician.\"\n\n\"I want him to do whatever makes him happy,\" Katie said, feeling the sincerity in every part of her body.\n\nRonan leaned in. \"Well,\" he said. \"That's not something I heard too often, growing up. Were your parents like that?\"\n\nKatie made a face. It was halfway intended to keep herself from tearing up, and it mostly worked. \"No. They wanted me to take over the family business—we ran a little coffee shop.\"\n\nRonan's lips parted. \"That's...really charming.\"\n\nKatie smiled, suddenly overcome by nostalgia. \"It was nice. Very hard work, of course. I had to come home after school every day and help out. But they loved that place. They'd built it from the ground up with their savings when they were young, and they ran it until they died.\" Oh, there came the tears. She blinked furiously, and managed to keep them at bay.\n\nA warm, large hand covered hers on the table. Katie clutched at it, automatically taking the comfort it offered.\n\nAlmost more than comfort, even. It was like there was actually energy flooding through from Ronan's hand to hers. The calloused palm against her skin felt like it was a real, bright force.\n\nIt had to just be her imagination, of course, but whatever it was, it gave her the strength to continue. \"It was a car accident. Very sudden, and they were together, which was good. They loved each other so much—it would've devastated one of them to have to go on without the other.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"But you had to lose both of your parents at once,\" Ronan said softly.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"How old were you?\"\n\n\"Twenty-one. So I wasn't a kid or anything.\"\n\n\"Still.\" He sounded almost ragged, like he could feel the same deep pain in his chest that she felt in hers. \"I'm so sorry.\"\n\nNormally, at this point, she'd muster up a smile and tell whoever she was talking to that it had been a long time ago, that she was all right now.\n\nShe couldn't bring herself to do that with Ronan. Maybe it had been years, but sometimes the loss still felt fresh. \"I miss them a lot,\" she admitted. \"I wish they were still here, every day. They would've known exactly what to do.\"\n\nNot like Katie, who'd completely screwed it up.\n\nExcept she couldn't regret how she'd handled things after they died, because she'd gotten Noah out of it all, and she wouldn't give him up for the world.\n\nThe waiter returned to take their orders, and Katie asked for the soup and the grilled cheese sandwich. Ronan got the same with a turkey club. The waiter wrote it all down and smiled at Noah, who was still batting at the high chair and giggling. \"You guys want anything for him? We've got toys and stuff. And I could probably hunt down some Cheerios or something.\"\n\n\"We're fine,\" Katie assured him, and shook her head in wonderment as he walked away. \"You weren't kidding,\" she said to Ronan. \"Everyone really is nice around here.\"\n\n\"They really are. It's like a weird fairyland or something. I spent the first six months after moving here convinced that there had to be a serial killer lurking around somewhere, just to balance everything out.\"\n\nKatie choked on a laugh. \"That's exactly how I feel.\"\n\n\"That's how you get, when you're too used to bad people,\" Ronan said soberly. \"You forget that people can just be nice.\"\n\nKatie bit her lip and nodded.\n\n\"But your parents sound like they were good people?\" he asked, tentative. \"Unless...\"\n\n\"No, they were wonderful. Great. Maybe a little head-in-the-clouds...they were always convinced that everything would work out fine. But then, for them, it always did.\" Until the end.\n\nRonan frowned, and she could see the question in his eyes. Then who...?\n\nBut she couldn't confess that. Not quite yet.\n\n\"What about your parents?\" she asked. Deflecting, yes, but she was also incredibly curious. \"Were they...difficult?\"\n\nRonan sighed. \"They were the type to play their kids off against each other. See who was the smartest, who was the strongest.\" He smiled ruefully. \"Wasn't me.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm so sorry, I shouldn't have asked—\"\n\n\"No, I—it's weird. Normally, I'd rather pull my own teeth out than talk about this, but I want you to understand.\"\n\nHis hand was still on top of hers, resting on the table. On an impulse, Katie turned her hand over so that their palms were together, and squeezed his fingers.\n\nHe gripped back immediately, and she tried to picture the way his hand had felt like it was supporting her, warming her. Tried to do that right back.\n\nShe didn't think it was her imagination—she thought his posture straightened, and his expression cleared a bit.\n\n\"For a while, I was just bitter,\" he said quietly. \"It wasn't fair that my brother was better at everything than I was. If I could just take him down a peg or two, then I'd have it all. That sort of thing. But one day I realized...I was just playing along with their game.\"\n\nKatie could picture it. Cruel parents, children who'd learned that their worth came from what they could get, and who they could stomp on to get it. She hadn't been raised that way, but she'd sure learned what it looked like when you were.\n\n\"You chose to rise above it.\" What had made Ronan capable of it, while Victor wasn't? Impossible to say.\n\nRonan laughed mirthlessly. \"I chose to run away from it, at least.\"\n\n\"That counts.\"\n\nHer voice was firm, because if she'd learned one single, solitary thing over the last year, it was this.\n\n\"If the only game in town is theirs, once you start playing, then you lose. The only way to win is to pick up and get out.\" She looked over at Noah, happily babbling along with the conversation.\n\nRonan followed her gaze. \"Is that what you did?\"\n\n\"That's what I did,\" Katie said softly.\n\nTheir eyes met, and she could feel the current running between them. Like electricity. Like fire. Like something she'd never felt before.\n\n\"Two soup-and-sandwiches, one with grilled cheese, one with a turkey club.\"\n\nThey both jumped as the waiter appeared, hands separating. Katie withdrew hers slowly. Her palm felt cold, now that it wasn't touching his any longer.\n\nIt took her a second to collect herself, and by the time she did, Ronan had thanked the waiter and he'd disappeared again.\n\n\"Okay?\" Ronan was looking at her with those warm red-gold eyes.\n\n\"Okay,\" she said. It seemed like every time he asked her that, it got easier to answer him.\n\nHe smiled. \"Then let's eat.\"\n\nThe soup was thick and creamy, with big chunks of chicken and bacon and plenty of sweet corn—corn that somehow had a bit of a snap to it, even though it was in soup. The grilled cheese was crispy on the outside and gooey on the inside, with a sharp cheddar that tasted amazing.\n\n\"Oh, wow,\" Katie murmured. \"This is even better than breakfast was.\"\n\n\"Breakfast had to spend fifteen minutes in a car before it got to you,\" Ronan pointed out. He was watching her with a little smile, like just seeing her eat lunch was making him happy.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"I'm glad you like it.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 9 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"I really, really like it. Let's go here for dinner, too.\"\n\n\"Done,\" Ronan said, before she really heard what had come out of her mouth.\n\nKatie blushed hotly. \"I didn't mean—I mean, you don't have to—\"\n\n\"I want to,\" he said. \"If you don't want to, that's fine. If you get tired, or you want to take Noah back to the cabin and eat in bed while you cuddle him, or whatever you want to do—if it's dinnertime and that's what you want, please don't think, Oh, I can't, I told Ronan we'd eat at Lachlan's. But if you want to come back here tonight, I want to be here with you.\"\n\nKatie was left speechless.\n\nNoah squealed, lunging forward and getting his hands on the butter knife that Katie had set aside when she picked up the fork and spoon, and the next thirty seconds were suddenly occupied with getting the knife away from the baby. A baby who really wanted the knife, and was very, very sad to have it taken away, until Katie dug through the diaper bag for a set of plastic keys to distract him with.\n\nAnd thank God, because what on Earth could she have said to that?", "loss": null } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "I've got writer's block. I'll send something, then continue ninety-three sentences at a time, matching character context, in contemporary, romance, urban fantasy genre.", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Ronan had no idea what was happening to him.\n\nHe'd never felt anything like this before. He was almost hungry to give Katie whatever she needed. To make sure that Noah was happy and healthy and taken care of. He never wanted either of them to want for anything, and he was pretty sure he'd give up everything, including the shirt on his back, to make sure he kept them both safe.\n\nEver since he left home, he'd been working to make sure he acted like a good person would. That he didn't follow in his parents' and his brother's footsteps, that he really could show that he'd learned better than they'd taught him.\n\nIt had been hard, at first. His instinct was to mistrust people, to wonder how they were going to backstab him. To try and figure out how he could get one over them, get what he wanted from them.\n\nBut he'd isolated himself in the woods, and he'd kept his interactions at a minimum. Rita, for example. He could be nice to a sweet old lady. She wasn't looking to take anything from him, and so he could carefully learn how to give things to her. Odd jobs. Fixing roofs like her husband couldn't anymore.\n\nThen helping tourists who were lost in the woods. Volunteering to fight a fire that broke out in town, when he smelled the smoke floating over the forest. Meeting the sheriff, agreeing to come in and help out if they needed any extra hands for some reason.\n\nMore and more, he'd learned that helping people felt good, and mistrusting them felt bad.\n\nBut he knew his instincts would always be a little screwed up. He'd had to work at this for years, to make it seem natural.\n\nWith Katie, there was no work. The second he'd seen her, he'd wanted to help her. And with every passing moment, he wanted it more.\n\nLachlan came back over as they were finishing their food. \"Everything taste good?\"\n\n\"Amazing,\" Katie assured him. \"How did you end up starting your own restaurant?\" She hesitated, surely thinking of her family's coffee shop, before she added, \"Or was it your parents'?\"\n\nA shadow passed over Lachlan's normally-cheerful face. \"No, the building belonged to an older couple who ran an Italian place out of it, but they passed away when I was just a kid, and the place stayed empty. My father was an amazing cook, and I learned from him. I wanted to do something to honor his memory, so when I got out of the Marines, I started this place.\"\n\n\"That's a lovely thing to do,\" Katie said softly. \"I'm sure he'd be proud of you.\"\n\nRonan hadn't actually known any of that. Katie seemed to draw people out, with her sincere interest and warm energy. It was easy to see that she was a good person.\n\nLachlan clearly liked her, too, although Lachlan liked most people.\n\n...Lachlan, Ronan realized, might be a good person for Katie to get to know better. He was a single dad, clearly knew a thing or two about babies, and had a successful business. He was one of the best men Ronan had ever personally met, and as far as Ronan had been able to tell, he was always smiling, always ready with a kind word.\n\nMaybe Lachlan and Katie—\n\nNo!\n\nThe hiss from his dragon took him by surprise.\n\nHe'd been feeling sick at the idea of Katie and Lachlan getting together already, but he hadn't expected a dragon to have an opinion on local romance.\n\nWhy not? he argued internally, although the sick feeling kept rising in his chest. They'd make a great match. Adorable kids, adorable adults. It's perfect.\n\nIt was perfect, except for how it made him want to roar in fury.\n\nShe's not for him, his dragon insisted. Keep her with us.\n\nShe deserves someone better.\n\nRonan did believe that. Katie deserved someone kindhearted and good with kids. Ronan was neither.\n\nHe just...hoped she'd wait until she left town to find them. If he had to come in and see her with someone else...\n\nThe idea made his chest feel like it was ripping in half.\n\nShe deserves us, the dragon said stubbornly. We'll keep her safe. We'll keep her happy.\n\nAren't you optimistic. His dragon often didn't quite get the nuances of human behavior. We're not keeping her anywhere. She can go where she wants.\n\nShe wants us.\n\nThat was so obviously ridiculous that Ronan just ignored his dragon and focused back on the conversation. Lachlan was laughing at something Katie had said.\n\n\"Well, I'm glad you brought this guy out of the forest to say hello to the rest of us for once,\" he said to her, turning to look at Ronan. \"We hardly get to see your smiling face around here.\"\n\n\"Too much to do,\" Ronan said shortly, suddenly aware of just how handsome Lachlan really was. His blue eyes sparkled. His smile was incandescent. It was hard to ignore.\n\nJust then, the door opened, and in came Flynn and Malachi. They paused at the door, and then Lachlan noticed them. \"There's my brother,\" he told Katie. \"Let me introduce you. I'm sure he'd like to meet this guy, too; he loves kids.\" He tickled Noah under the chin.\n\nRonan was experiencing a sudden, sinking feeling. He'd meant to introduce Katie around, show her how nice everyone was in Oak Ridge, maybe get her to make some friends who could help her out of her situation.\n\nWhatever it was. She still hadn't quite told him, just hinted around the edges.\n\nSee? he insisted as an aside to his dragon. She doesn't trust us. She needs to find someone to trust.\n\nHe'd just never considered how many single men there were around here.\n\nAnd who better to trust than the local law enforcement?\n\nKatie was standing up. \"Well, if you're going to meet some people, let's get you out,\" she said to Noah.\n\nRonan mercilessly shoved down all of his dumb feelings and stood up, too. \"That's the sheriff and his deputy,\" he said quietly to Katie. \"They're both good men. I help them out sometimes, when they need extra hands, and they both care about helping people more than anything else.\"\n\nKatie had stilled at the word sheriff. Her eyes went to the two men at the door. \"Oh,\" she said quietly.\n\nWas she in trouble with the law? It would explain a lot: her jumpiness, her showing up in a town she'd never been to and picking a place out in the woods to stay. \"Would you rather not meet them? We can say that—that Noah's not feeling well or something.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Noah looked happy as a clam, of course.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Ronan had used to be better at lying than this.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"No, it's okay,\" Katie said. She was looking over at the little group by the door consideringly. Then she turned back to Noah, unbuckling him and lifting him out. He kicked his feet and babbled at her. \"That's right,\" she told him. \"We're making some nice new friends, aren't we?\"\n\nRonan picked up the diaper bag again, and Katie smiled her thanks as they made their way over to the door.\n\n\"And this is Katie,\" Lachlan was saying. \"Katie, this is my brother, Flynn, and his boss, Sheriff Malachi.\"\n\nKatie looked back and forth between Flynn and Lachlan with the same bemused expression Ronan remembered from when he'd first met them. Lachlan was bright and blond, with clear blue eyes and a stocky build. Flynn, on the other hand, had jet-black hair, olive skin, and deep brown eyes. He was taller and leaner than Lachlan, serious and quiet instead of lively, and overall just looked nothing like him at all.\n\n\"I'm his half-brother,\" Flynn explained, leaning in to shake Katie's hand.\n\n\"My genes are the good-looking ones,\" Lachlan put in, grinning when Flynn pretended to elbow him in the side.\n\nFlynn smiled at Noah, proving at least that he'd gotten some good-looking genes. Ronan was just going to have to go outside and close his eyes until this was over. \"Hi, baby.\"\n\nKatie made Noah wave. \"Hi, Flynn! Nice to meet you.\"\n\n\"We need more babies around here,\" Flynn said frankly to Katie. \"My nephew's cute and everything, but he's growing up, and pretty much nobody else has a baby. It's a shame.\"\n\nSo why don't you get married and have eight or ten babies of your own, Ronan thought. And stop smiling at her like that.\n\nMalachi shook her hand as well. He was good-looking, too, Ronan realized with a bit of despair. Older, in his forties, but some women liked that, right? And he had a teenaged daughter, so he definitely had some experience with kids, too.\n\nThis had been a terrible idea.\n\n\"You let us know if there's anything we can do to help you out,\" Malachi was saying significantly. He glanced at Ronan. Of course: Ronan had brought this on himself by asking about Katie this morning. \"Anything at all.\"\n\nKatie nodded, looking serious. \"Thank you. I'll...I'll think about that.\"\n\n\"Where are you guys headed next?\" Lachlan asked Ronan, and Ronan blessed him for saying you guys like it was an obvious assumption that he and Katie were...together.\n\nEven though they weren't together. Even though they shouldn't be together, because someone like Ronan would be no good for someone like Katie.\n\n\"I thought maybe Santos's shop,\" he said. \"Santos is Rita and Luis's son,\" he told Katie.\n\nHer eyes lit up. \"Oh, that would be lovely,\" she said. \"Rita's mentioned him a few times. I'm sure with parents like that, he has to be a wonderful person.\"\n\n\"He's a good man,\" Lachlan said. His eyes twinkled as he added, \"Not so big on talking.\"\n\n\"Takes after his father,\" Malachi said.\n\nKatie was glancing around. Blushing a little, she said, \"Lachlan, is there a restroom?\"\n\n\"Of course.\" He pointed her in the direction of the ladies' room.\n\nKatie checked Noah's diaper quickly. \"Still dry. Hm—would you?\" She held the baby out to Ronan. \"Just for a minute?\"\n\nShocked, Ronan stared for a second before recovering and quickly saying, \"Of course.\" He took Noah into his arms.\n\n\"Thanks.\" Katie smiled gratefully at him and slipped off towards the back of the restaurant.\n\nRonan, meanwhile, was left with Noah. He was worried that the baby would start screaming the second he realized that his mom had disappeared, leaving him with a mostly-stranger, but Noah just studied his face, and then broke into a big, toothless smile.\n\n\"Hi,\" Ronan said to him.\n\nHe really was cute. Ronan had never thought about wanting kids before, but the solid weight of Noah's little body in his arms was...compelling, somehow.\n\nSlowly, he became aware of the weight of three sets of eyes on him. He looked up from Noah's face and found Malachi, Flynn, and Lachlan all staring at him. \"What?\"\n\n\"I've just never...seen you with a baby before,\" Flynn said finally. \"Looks more natural than I thought it would.\"\n\nRonan scowled. \"I can hold a baby.\"\n\nNot that he ever had before today, but that was beside the point. It wasn't hard. He just tucked Noah into the crook of his elbow, and the baby seemed to know exactly how to stay sitting on his forearm.\n\nFlynn held up his hand. \"Never said you couldn't.\"\n\n\"Any more information about this mysterious woman?\" Malachi asked. \"Or what kind of trouble she might be in?\"\n\nRonan shook his head. Nothing Katie had told him had given any concrete idea of what the problem was...and besides, he wasn't going to repeat any of her personal confessions unless she gave him permission. \"If I had to guess, it would be something about this little guy's dad,\" he said, hefting Noah a little. \"But I don't know for sure. I'll try to get her to come to you for help, I promise.\"\n\nEven if he suddenly wanted to keep Katie far, far away from any and all of the men he was talking to. That didn't matter. Her safety had to come before anything else.\n\n\"I hope everything gets settled soon,\" Lachlan said softly. \"And good for you, Ronan. She seems really lovely.\"\n\nRonan blinked.\n\nThen he said, \"We're not—I mean—we haven't—\"\n\nLachlan starting chuckling. Malachi was grinning. Even Flynn had a hint of a smile on his lips.\n\n\"I can see the writing on the wall, Ronan,\" Lachlan said gently. \"I'm pretty sure I'll be serving you guys lunch here for a long time to come.\"\n\n\"She's not sticking around.\" It was hard to say the words; it felt like there was a lump in his throat that he had to talk around. \"She's moving on. She doesn't have any plans to stay.\"\n\nLachlan's face softened. \"If you say so. That's a shame, then.\"\n\n\"A real shame,\" Flynn agreed. He reached out to tickle Noah's hand, and then smiled wistfully when the baby grabbed his finger. \"We really do need more babies around here.\"\n\n\"I don't see you working on the problem at all,\" Ronan finally allowed himself to say.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Flynn's expression shuttered. \"That's not an option.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 69 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Aware of having misstepped, Ronan apologized. Before he could figure out how to ask for any clarification, though—or if he wanted clarification, since this seemed to be Flynn's private business, somehow—Katie returned from the bathroom.\n\nShe smiled brightly when she saw Ronan and Noah. \"Hey,\" she said. \"Do you want me to take him back?\"\n\nRonan had been about to automatically hand the baby back to his mother. He hadn't been expecting a question. \"Do you want me to keep him?\"\n\n\"Up to you,\" she said. \"I don't mind taking him back, but if you want to hang on to him for a bit...\"\n\nRonan considered the baby in his arms.\n\nNoah gave him another little grin, and Ronan's heart felt like it was melting in his chest. \"I'll keep him for a little while,\" he managed.\n\nHe'd never realized babies had so much power.\n\nEveryone said their goodbyes, and then he, Noah, and Katie were back out on the street, while the three other single, handsome men stayed inside. Dazed, Ronan realized that he hadn't expected it to go that way. Somehow, it had seemed inevitable that Katie would prefer Lachlan's attractive smiles or Malachi's stern authority to his own...whatever he had.\n\nSee, his dragon thought smugly. She belongs here with us.\n\nKatie was looking around. The sun lit up her beautiful, fiery-red hair, and her curious blue eyes were clear as a bottomless lake. Ronan wanted to capture the sight of her like this, breathing in the mountain air contentedly, and carry it with him forever.\n\n\"Can we walk for a bit before we go meet Rita and Luis' son?\" she asked. \"It's such a beautiful afternoon.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Ronan said.\n\n\"Maybe I should take the diaper bag, if you've got the baby,\" Katie said doubtfully.\n\n\"No way,\" Ronan said. \"I can carry both.\" Katie was about a foot shorter than he was; she'd be weighed down by the bag in a way that he wasn't.\n\nBesides, he wanted her to be able to enjoy the walk, free and unencumbered by—anything, preferably. But at least by heavy things to carry.\n\nKatie protested a little, but he held firm, and they set off down the street. Katie was looking around at all the buildings, her eyes occasionally drifting to the slope of the forested mountain that continued up above the town.\n\n\"It's so beautiful here,\" she said wistfully.\n\nMaybe you should stay. Ronan bit his tongue. He shouldn't be trying to influence her decisions. \"I've never regretted moving here,\" he said instead.\n\nKatie looked over at him. \"He really likes you.\"\n\nRonan followed her gaze to Noah, who was still watching him. \"There's scenery and stuff,\" he told the baby. \"You don't have to just stare at my face all afternoon.\"\n\nNoah regarded him, unblinking, and then reached out to pat his face.\n\n\"He does that a lot,\" Ronan said to Katie.\n\n\"Babies like faces,\" she said. \"When he gets a little older, w—I can teach him what the nose is, and the eyes, and the mouth, and all of that. Little kids get a kick out of pointing them all out.\"\n\n\"Huh.\" He supposed that made sense. Everything was new to babies. They had to make sense of all these features staring at them, figure out who was who. Realize that they had a face, too.\n\n\"Do you ever wonder what he's going to be like?\" Ronan asked, still looking at the baby. \"He's just a little blob right now—I mean, I didn't mean—\"\n\nKatie was laughing, thankfully, rather than being insulted that he'd called her baby a blob. \"No, he is just a little blob,\" she said. \"A cute blob, and way less of a blob than he was right after he was born, but I know what you mean. There's a whole person in there, and I can't wait to find out who that person turns into.\"\n\n\"I—\" can't either. But that wasn't right. Ronan wasn't going to be around to see Noah grow up. He wouldn't know when Noah started talking, when he started school, when he decided what he wanted to be when he grew up.\n\nRonan looked at the little baby in his arms, with his little fuzzy head of red hair, and his chubby little arms and legs, and tried to breathe around the stone in his chest.\n\n\"I bet he's going to be great,\" he said finally. \"Do great in school, get a good job, always take care of his mom.\"\n\nKatie's smile turned soft. \"He doesn't have to take care of me,\" she said. \"It's my job to take care of him.\"\n\nI want to take care of both of you.\n\nIt wasn't his job. He had to keep reminded himself of that. He'd do what he could, and then Katie would leave, and she and Noah would have full, beautiful lives, and he'd go back to his cabin.", "loss": null } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Chapter Segment Request:\n- Sentences: eighty-one sentences\n- Style: Zoe Chant\n- Genre: contemporary, romance, urban fantasy\n- Note: Part of ongoing narrative", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Oak Ridge was making Katie's heart ache.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "It was just so charming. The little houses, the cute businesses lining Main Street—which was actually called Main Street—the way the town was practically vertical on the mountainside, with gorgeous vistas in all directions...\n\nIt didn't seem real.\n\nAnd that was even without the big, handsome man currently carrying her son and her bag while she walked around admiring the sights.\n\nRonan...he couldn't be lying to her. He couldn't be presenting some kind of false face. Katie's entire being rebelled against the idea.\n\nEveryone here seemed to like him. Rita loved him, and she was incredibly sweet. The sheriff liked him. Lachlan, who seemed like the nicest guy in the world, liked him.\n\nHe hadn't shown any red flags. Nothing. Every time he suggested something, it was with the understanding that Katie should do whatever she thought was right. Every time he offered something, it was out of the goodness of his heart.\n\nAnd the way he looked at Noah...\n\nNoah's own father hadn't looked at him like that. Not once.\n\n\"Ronan,\" Katie said quietly. They'd reached the end of Main Street, and there was no one around them on the quiet, shaded sidewalk.\n\nHe turned to face her. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"I'm in trouble,\" she said quietly.\n\nHe stepped forward immediately, so he was almost close enough to touch. Noah was right between them, sheltered in the space their bodies made. \"Tell me about it.\"\n\n\"When my parents died, I took over the shop,\" she started.\n\n\"When you were twenty-one?\"\n\n\"I'd been helping them since I was a little kid. I knew everything about how to run the place. But it was really too much work for just one person.\"\n\n\"I can only imagine. That must have been a heck of a job.\"\n\nKatie nodded. That had been a frantic time—getting up at the crack of dawn, working like a dog through the day, trying to bury her grief in the business. Dealing with suddenly being the boss of their two employees, both of whom were older than she was.\n\n\"It was hard,\" she said. \"Too hard, really, but I didn't want to give it up. It was my parents' legacy. But I couldn't keep it up forever. I was so tired. So one day a—a powerful businessman came to see me. His family was acquiring local restaurants, because they had a successful place that they were expanding into a chain.\"\n\nRonan nodded, frowning. \"He wanted you to sell?\"\n\n\"He did. And it took a while for him to convince me. He took me out to dinner a few times, eventually charmed me into agreeing. And into—dating him.\" Katie blushed.\n\nRonan's face darkened. \"This was Noah's dad.\"\n\nShe nodded, feeling herself turn red with embarrassment about how stupid she'd been. \"He made it sound like—like nothing would really change. I could keep running the place, except there'd be more help, more money, everything would be easier. He pretended like he cared about me, cared about what my parents had left me.\"\n\nRonan touched her shoulder. His big hand was so light, the touch so soft, it made tears come to her eyes.\n\n\"None of it was true,\" she bit out. \"He just wanted the business deal. He would've tossed me aside like he did every woman he dated, except—I got pregnant. He was very excited at the idea of having a son to carry on his name.\"\n\nAnd he wanted to see if Noah was a shifter. That was the other thing—there was no way to know until puberty, and so he was going to have to keep the two of them around for years and years...and then he'd still toss them away if it turned out that Noah wasn't exactly what he'd wanted. If he was just a wonderful little boy—that wouldn't matter. At all.\n\n\"So he moved me into his house, convinced me he was going to marry me, got me to put all the money I'd gotten from the sale into an account for Noah's future so I couldn't get at it—\"\n\nRonan was making a growling noise in his throat. Katie looked up, startled, and he stopped immediately.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he said. \"I didn't mean to scare you. I'm—very angry. That someone would treat you like that.\"\n\nHe was clearly furious. The way he held himself, the way his speech had gone halting...but he was holding himself back. And then he looked at Noah, still held in the crook of his arm, and took a visible breath, his shoulders relaxing.\n\nHe'd held himself back so that he wouldn't scare her, and then he'd calmed himself down so that he wouldn't scare the baby.\n\nAnd he was angry for her.\n\n\"Don't be sorry.\" Katie's words came out raspy with emotion. \"No one's—it's been so long since anyone's been angry for me. I even forgot how to be angry for myself. I would have just...collapsed into nothing, if it hadn't been for Noah.\"\n\nWhen she'd realized how thoroughly she'd been duped by Victor, it had been so easy to just curl up into a ball and cry with the knowledge that she'd let her entire life, her parents' legacies, slip away for a handsome smile and a few charming words.\n\nThe thing that had finally gotten her back up had been the realization that if she did nothing, Noah was going to grow up learning the same toxic, awful lessons that Victor had.\n\n\"How did you get away?\" Ronan asked. His hand was on her back, now, rubbing softly.\n\n\"Victor's family was very—controlling. His mom and his sister were around all the time. They were supposed to be helping with the baby, but they didn't actually do much.\" And she hadn't really wanted them to—she'd certainly never wanted to leave him alone with them. Which might've just been paranoid, but he was her son and she didn't trust a single member of that family.\n\nShe smiled a little, remembering how sneaky she'd felt as she made her plans. \"I got them used to the idea that I might step out for milk or something now and then—they hated running errands, so they were okay with it. I spent the last week carefully bringing stuff down to the car, one at a time, and then the other day I just picked up and left.\"\n\n\"That was brave,\" he said softly. God, his hand felt good between her shoulder blades. Like tension that had been there for over a year was slowly starting to unwind.\n\nShe shrugged, mostly as an excuse to press harder against his touch. \"It was dumb, maybe, to go without a real plan or a lot of money saved or anything like that. I did sell the jewelry he gave me, just a few days ago. Didn't get too much for it, but it'll be enough to keep us going for a little while, until I can start making money.\" Determination made her lift her chin. \"I have a friend who used to do freelance writing for websites, and she hooked me up with someone who wants similar work. I'm pretty good at business writing; I used to do all of our advertising when we still had the shop...\"\n\nA strong arm came around her, tugged her into Ronan's side. She went immediately, melting against him, marveling at how safe she felt with the knowledge that he had both her and Noah wrapped up tight.\n\n\"I have no doubt,\" he said quietly, the words rumbling through her body from where they were pressed up against each other, \"that you're going to succeed at whatever you try to do. You're so brave, and smart, and kind—you'll be okay, Katie.\"\n\nShe closed her eyes. It was so believable when he said it. She just wanted to stay right here where she could pretend that it was all true.\n\nBut she couldn't. Because the real world was still out there, waiting. Her prospective employer hadn't emailed her back yet, and Katie was still taking advantage of Rita and Luis's excessive discount, and she still didn't know where she was going to find work, how she was going to settle down and take care of Noah.\n\nSo she pulled away. \"I can take him back now.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Ronan blinked, looking a little surprised. He glanced at Noah, who was exploring the collar of Ronan's shirt. \"Are you sure? I don't have a problem keeping him a bit longer.\"\n\n\"I'm sure.\" She couldn't get used to this. Taking advantage of a man she'd just met—however good of a man he seemed—by just handing over her son and expecting him to tote the baby and the diaper bag while he gave her a personalized tour around his town? That was taking things a little too far, no matter how willing Ronan seemed.\n\nRonan shifted Noah off of his hip and handed him back to Katie. Was she imagining it, or did he look reluctant to let the baby go?\n\n\"Spend some time with your mom, okay, Noah?\" he said, catching Noah's tiny hand in two fingers. Noah gripped his finger and grinned, batting his hand. Ronan went with the motion, letting his forearm be shaken back and forth. \"Whoa there, kid, you don't know your own strength! You're going to knock me right over.\"\n\nNoah couldn't understand him yet, but he laughed when Ronan did. Katie didn't think she'd heard Ronan laugh like this yet—it was big and expansive, echoing down the street.\n\n\"Ronan?\"\n\nIt was a man's voice, sounding surprised. Katie settled Noah more securely on her hip and turned to see a man walking towards them.\n\nHe was dressed more like Victor and his family than like anyone she'd seen so far in this tiny little town—a slick suit, an expensive haircut, shoes that gleamed in the afternoon sun. She could feel wariness creeping up on her, although she had no reason to think that this man was anything like them.\n\n\"Hi, Reid,\" Ronan said, at least confirming that he knew the man. And he wasn't—\n\nKatie had to pause for a second, realizing that she would've expected Ronan to step closer, maybe put a protective arm around her and Noah, if he'd thought that the man was up to no good.\n\nWhich he would. She had no doubt that Ronan would actually do that, if that sort of situation arose.\n\nA spike of longing rose in her at that realization. Followed almost immediately by a harsh admonishment. This isn't yours. You can't fall apart on the first man you met since leaving Victor's house, that's insane. He's being nice, and you can appreciate that, but you're going to have to make your own way. Like he said you should, remember?\n\nWhile she'd been having her little internal crisis, the man had reached them. He was shaking Ronan's hand, casting little side glances at Katie and Noah. \"Good to see you in town, Ronan. Doesn't happen often enough,\" he said. \"And you've brought a friend with you?\"\n\nAt that clear prompting, Ronan turned to Katie. \"Katie, this is Reid, the local doctor. If you have any—issues, or if Noah gets sick or anything, you can go to him.\"\n\n\"That's right,\" said Reid. \"Dr. Reid MacAllister, very nice to meet you. New in town?\"\n\nKatie shook his hand. \"Nice to meet you, too,\" she said. \"I'm afraid I'm not staying permanently. But it's a lovely town. I'm really enjoying my visit.\"\n\nHis eyebrows went up. \"Oh, so are you a relative of Ronan's, then?\"\n\n\"No, just a—a friend,\" she said, stumbling over the word. Were they friends? They certainly weren't strangers anymore, not after the last day. But it had only been a day. What could they really be, after so short a time?\n\n\"A good friend,\" Ronan added, and the warmth in his voice chased away her doubts. No, whatever they had between them was real, even if it had only existed for a short time.\n\n\"Well, you're welcome for however long you'd like to stay,\" Dr. MacAllister said, his tone still warm but also somehow...proprietary.\n\n\"Reid's mother is the mayor of Oak Ridge,\" Ronan said, which explained a lot. \"His family has really done a lot for the town.\"\n\nKatie couldn't help but make the comparison, once again, to Victor and his family, who had been involved in city politics as well as local businesses, and who probably would've taken a similar air of ownership when welcoming someone new into town.\n\nBut there was a kindness to Dr. MacAllister that hadn't been present in any of Victor's family. He was a little more reserved than any of the other locals she'd met so far, but he didn't have anything like that coldly superior air that Victor tended to have.\n\nShe'd mistaken it for cool confidence when they first met, but she wasn't going to miss it again. She didn't see it here.\n\n\"Your family has done a wonderful job,\" she said to him. \"I've only been here a little while, but I can see what a close community everyone's built here.\"\n\nHe smiled, and she could see a little bit of softening. \"We're all very proud of it,\" he said quietly. \"I'm glad you're enjoying your time here. I hope you come back.\"\n\n\"I hope so, too.\" That was farther into the future than Katie could really imagine right now.\n\n\"Well, I should get back to work. Just wanted to see what was making Ronan laugh so hard.\" He shook her hand again. \"Very nice to meet you.\"\n\nHe strode off, and Katie glanced up at Ronan, who was smiling a little after him.\n\n\"He seemed nice,\" Katie said.\n\n\"Ah!\" said Noah.\n\nShe glanced at him. \"You're right, honey, I don't think he was much of a baby person.\" He hadn't leaned into Noah like a lot of people did—had, in fact, spent the conversation focused entirely on the adults. But some people just weren't big fans of babies, and that was okay.\n\n\"He is nice,\" Ronan said. \"The whole family are—they're a little reserved, but in that way that means that they're always thinking about what's best for everyone. None of them are very emotional, but they make good decisions for the town. Mayor MacAllister has been in office for fifteen years, and the town's only improved in that time. Her husband is a lawyer who takes a lot of city clients but works at a very discounted rate for anyone local, and Reid chose to stay here and practice in town instead of making a ton of money at some big fancy hospital in the city.\"\n\n\"That's good,\" Katie said softly. \"It sounds like—\" She stopped.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"It sounds like the better version of Victor's family,\" she said quietly. \"They were real...movers and shakers, you know? They liked to have influence, they liked to know that they could control things. But there wasn't any—higher motivation. They didn't want anything good for anybody but themselves.\"\n\nRonan's expression tightened. \"My family was like that. No thought for the greater good. They were always watching to see whether someone was trying to take something from them, never looking to see whether they could give anything to someone else. I'm so glad to be living somewhere with people like Reid's family, who genuinely want to help other people live better lives.\"\n\n\"Have they helped you?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Katie asked curiously. She glanced after Reid's retreating form.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 69 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Ronan was quiet for a while. \"Not directly,\" he said finally. \"But...they could've made it clear that I wasn't welcome. My family has a bit of a reputation. And everyone in town knows where I came from. It would've been very easy for them to worry about what sort of influence I might be, and whether some of my family might follow me here, start trying to take over, bring trouble along with them. But they didn't. They only made me feel welcome.\"\n\nKatie hugged Noah close. She was so glad to hear that Ronan had found a place.\n\nShe could only hope that she could find a place, too. Maybe not anywhere as nice as this, but...something.\n\n\"Come on,\" Ronan said. \"Let's go see Santos.\"\n\nShe went along with him. He walked close enough to her that their arms brushed, and she appreciated the closeness as the uncertainty of the future yawned before her.\n\nThey strolled back down Main Street in the warm fall sunshine, Noah babbling happily, and she slowly relaxed. She'd try sending some more emails tonight, maybe check in with Tori again. She'd figure something out. Ronan was so confident in her—she could do it. She had to.\n\nRonan led her to a door in a little building that she'd barely noticed before, tucked in between a hardware store and a legal office—the legal office said MacAllister on it, she noticed; that must be Reid's father.\n\nBut this building had furniture in the windows, and when they ducked in, it was cool and dim, with beautiful wood ceilings, and a floor full of tables, chairs, bedframes, bookcases, and more.\n\nKatie drew in her breath. \"Oh. This is beautiful.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\"\n\nShe turned to see an enormous man standing in the door to what must be the workshop; she could glimpse a space behind him that was much more brightly-lit, with gleaming tools and sawdust.\n\nSantos, because it had to be him, came forward with his hand held out. \"Ronan. Nice to see you.\"\n\n\"You too,\" Ronan said briefly. Seeing the two of them together was like seeing two mountains come close enough to touch. Katie thought that Ronan might be a touch broader in the shoulders, while Santos was maybe an inch or two taller, but it was hard to tell exactly, particularly from her much shorter perspective.\n\n\"This is Katie,\" Ronan introduced her. \"And Noah.\"\n\nSantos shook her hand; his grip was strong, his fingers enormous. \"Nice to meet you. In town long?\"\n\n\"A little while. I'm staying at your parents' cabins. Did you make any of the furniture in them? It's all beautiful.\"\n\n\"Some. Thanks.\"\n\nHe was a man of few words, Katie figured out quickly. Ronan asked him to show them around the shop, and he walked them around, indicating different pieces and describing them with a brief, Worked on this one a while, or Came out differently than I thought. It was fascinating, and Katie wanted to spend more time with him, see if getting to know him better might bring out more insight. Did he say the same thing about every piece every time someone else came in, or would a whole story emerge if you kept on coming back?\n\nAt one point, Noah got excited about something and started bouncing around in Katie's arms, yelling something in Baby. Katie jounced him, talking quietly to try to get him to quiet down, too, and eventually had to apologize to Santos. \"Sorry, he's just having a really exciting day.\"\n\n\"No trouble,\" Santos said briefly. He held out a finger to Noah, who grabbed it immediately.\n\nA little smile quirked at the corner of Santos's mouth. \"Cute baby,\" he told Katie.\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said, smiling at the sight of him. He looked like a giant next to Noah's tiny body.\n\n\"He's probably getting tired,\" Ronan said suddenly. \"Does he take a nap or anything?\"\n\n\"Usually,\" Katie said, surprised. \"Our schedule got a little thrown off this morning.\"\n\n\"Oh, sure. Right.\" Ronan was looking at Santos with a weird expression that Katie couldn't parse.\n\n\"Don't let me keep you if the baby's tired,\" Santos said, which was probably more words than he'd strung together at once since they came in.\n\n\"We're probably keeping you from working,\" Katie realized suddenly. \"Thanks for giving us a tour, that was very kind of you.\"\n\n\"No problem. Come back anytime.\"\n\nKatie assured him that they would, and only realized after they were outside again that she might've been lying. Who knew whether she'd stick around long enough for a second visit?\n\nThat was a depressing thought.\n\nNoah picked that moment to start the whining, whimpering cry that meant he actually was starting to get overtired. \"Okay, definitely naptime,\" Katie said to Ronan. \"Good call. I was too distracted to notice, I guess.\"\n\nHe looked momentarily pleased with himself, then a little disappointed. She thought. He seemed so easy to read, but she wasn't used to being this certain about someone else's feelings. She might've just been making it up. \"I guess you'll want to take him back to your cabin to put him down.\"\n\nKatie nodded...and hesitated. She shifted the fussing baby to her other arm and said, \"Do you want to—come along and have a cup of coffee or something?\"\n\nShe definitely wasn't making this up. His face lit, and he said, \"That would be great. Yes. Thank you.\"\n\n\"My pleasure.\" Katie smiled shyly, and turned to lead the way to the diner's parking lot.\n\nShe wasn't doing a very good job of staying independent, standing on her own two feet, and keeping herself from latching onto this nice man who hadn't signed up for a random woman and a baby to appear on his doorstep...\n\n...but she was having a harder and harder time caring.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Writing continuation: 11 sentences sentences, maintaining established elements. Focus on: nsfw, mf, shifters, Shifter Dads", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "(authors note, You must use the word 'katie' exactly 4 times in your response)", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Ronan followed Katie back to Rita and Luis's with complicated feelings brewing in his chest.\n\nOn the one hand, his chest was full of a feeling of fizzing warmth. It had started the moment he showed up on Katie's doorstep with breakfast this morning, and had only been growing since then. It had been most intense when he'd been standing with Katie and holding Noah in his arms.\n\nIt said, Yes, this. This is good. Keep this. And his dragon was giving it a hissing echo.\n\nOn the other hand, surrounding the lighthearted joy was a darker, colder emotion. It was rage. Fury at how Katie had been treated. How another man had dared treat her.\n\nAnd not just Katie.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Noah's father, the man who should have dedicated his entire life to providing for that little baby, had behaved as though his son was a trophy for him to show off. From what Katie had said, it sounded like he'd left her with his mother and sister, as though a man didn't have the responsibility to take care of his own child, but could just leave it all to the women in his life.\n\nIf Ronan ever met this guy, it was not going to go smoothly.\n\nBut he was working hard to tamp down his anger. Because he could still remember, viscerally, the moment when Katie had startled, when he'd let a little of it slip out.\n\nShe'd said it was all right, but Ronan knew better. And he'd go lose himself in the woods forever before he'd let himself scare her or Noah. That was his father and his brother's way, not his. He'd learned better, and he was going to stay better.\n\nAnd underneath it all, below the fizzy happiness, beneath the roiling anger, was a white pulse of fear.\n\nWhat if she left?", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She'd never meant to stay.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She'd insisted that she was going to leave, in fact.\n\nRonan didn't think she wanted to. He'd seen the longing in her face as she talked about how lovely the town was. The uncertainty as she talked about heading into the wide world, trying to find a life for herself and Noah.\n\nHe had no doubt that she could do it. She'd get some job she could do from home, and she'd stay up late finishing her work, then get up early with the baby. Snatch bits of sleep here and there, bundle Noah into his car seat to go get groceries or run errands by herself, because there wasn't anyone else.\n\nIt made Ronan's heart ache. And more than that, it struck him with a deep sense of wrongness, because he knew how that picture should be. He should be there, getting in the car to bring home food and diapers, or staying to play with Noah or watch him while he napped, giving Katie a break to go out and meet up with friends or pick up a few things for dinner.\n\nHe could see it so clearly.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "He'd never reacted to a woman like this. Not ever.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 6 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "He'd never even been that interested in babies. They were cute enough, but he'd never even vaguely wanted to hold one before.\n\nHis dragon had sure never had any opinions about any woman he'd dated.\n\nOurs, his dragon hissed, as though awakened by the thought.\n\nRonan had a suspicion about what might be going on, here.\n\nHe just wasn't quite sure how he was going to bring it up with Katie.", "loss": null } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "keep the story going! this is mid-chapter so characters might appear without intro. write fifty-nine sentences more. channel Zoe Chant. genres: contemporary, romance, urban fantasy. tags: nsfw, mf, shifters, Shifter Dads", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Back at Katie's cabin, Ronan waited in the kitchen while she busied herself putting Noah down for a nap. He'd offered to help, but she'd apologetically said that a new and exciting person wouldn't be the best thing for getting the baby to settle down.\n\nSo Ronan waited out of sight, and imagined a day when he wasn't new and exciting, but old and familiar. When he was the one settling Noah down for a nap.\n\nThat probably wasn't the sort of thing that got most men eager for the future, but when he pictured it, laying Noah's tiny body down into a crib, watching those fine eyelashes fall closed, knowing that Noah was safe and warm and happy because of him...\n\nHe wanted that. Exactly that. With this baby, and this woman.\n\nSo he breathed deep, and waited for Katie to come out.\n\nEventually Noah quieted, and she came out to stand in the kitchen doorway, looking at him with those clear blue eyes.\n\n\"Hi,\" she said quietly.\n\n\"Hi. I made coffee.\" It had been something to do while he waited.\n\n\"Oh, thanks.\" She brightened, and came over to take the cup he handed her. \"It's always a little weird when someone else makes coffee for me,\" she said with a little laugh. \"I spent a lot of years making it for other people.\"\n\nAt her parents' coffee shop. Now lost forever. \"Would you ever want to run another coffee shop?\" he asked impulsively. \"We don't really have one here in town. Well, we had a Starbucks, but they closed the location.\"\n\nKatie's eyes widened. \"I didn't realize Starbucks ever did that. We lived in constant fear that one would move in across the street.\"\n\n\"Chains never do too well out here, for some reason.\" He'd never quite figured it out, himself.\n\nKatie smiled to herself, a little. \"It would be kind of nice to have a shop again. I wouldn't want to take business away from Lachlan, of course.\"\n\n\"Maybe you could go in together,\" Ronan suggested. \"You could sell his pastries. They're delicious, and he likes making them even more than people like eating them.\"\n\nHer smile widened. \"Oh, it sounds—but that wouldn't work, Ronan, you know it wouldn't. You can't run a business alone and take care of a baby. Not even if you never slept. It's just impossible. And even if it was a total breakout success, it'd be forever before I'd be making enough to pay for childcare, and in a little town like this—if a Starbucks went out of business—\"\n\n\"No one liked going in there,\" Ronan said. \"Even Mr. MacAllister said it felt too corporate, and he's a lawyer.\"\n\nKatie squeezed her eyes shut. \"Stop it, stop it, you're making me think it could actually happen! And it would be so lovely, and it's just not possible.\" She opened her eyes, and they were sheened with tears. \"God, Ronan, I wish more than anything that I could just...stay here. Live in these woods, go to Lachlan's diner for breakfast, get furniture that Santos made, have tea and cookies with Rita in the afternoons—\"\n\nRonan crossed the kitchen in two long strides, caught Katie in his arms, and kissed her.\n\nFor a long, long moment, it was like nothing he'd ever experienced in his life. How the hell had he lived until now, without tasting Katie's sweet mouth under his, without feeling her wrapped up in his arms, pressed against him, making a low, happy noise against his lips? He had no idea. He wanted to stay here for the rest of time.\n\nThen he remembered.\n\nTearing himself away from her was the hardest thing he'd ever done. She protested wordlessly as he left her warm lips behind.\n\n\"Wait,\" he said quietly. \"There's something I have to tell you before we—\" He didn't want to presume. \"Before we do that again.\"\n\nShe blinked, clearly coming back to herself. \"Okay,\" she said. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"Um.\" He'd never explained this to anyone who didn't already know the secret. How to go about it? \"There's something—strange about my family. About me.\"\n\nNow she was frowning. \"Something strange? Like what?\"\n\n\"Like something...magical.\"\n\nOkay, great. Now it was out there, and he could spend the next hour trying to convince her that he wasn't actually insane.\n\nOr he could show her. That might be the better solution...except he didn't want to scare her. He never, ever wanted to scare her, and seeing his dragon for the first time, especially if she didn't believe in shifters yet, would probably be pretty scary. He'd never shifted in front of anyone who didn't already know, but he could imagine that it would be a...disconcerting experience. To say the least.\n\nShe won't flinch, his dragon said confidently. She wants all of us.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "STORY CONTINUATION PROTOCOL:\nCONTEXT: Match character/world familiarity\nSENTENCES=7 sentences\nGENRES=contemporary, romance, urban fantasy\nTAGS=nsfw, mf, shifters, Shifter Dads\nEXECUTE", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Shapeshifter. Ronan was a shapeshifter.\n\nAnd he thought she was his mate.\n\nCould she believe it? Did she dare believe it? What if he was wrong? He'd said that they'd know after they—she was assuming that he'd meant after they had sex.\n\nShe tried not to find his hesitant euphemism charming, and failed utterly.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "But what if he was wrong?", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "What if they slept together—which her entire body was yearning for; more than her entire body, even.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Her entire being longed to be as close to this man as possible, to get right up with him and have his beautiful, kind, strong self intermingling with her.\n\nBut what if they did it, and then it turned out that they weren't mates after all? Then she wouldn't just have halfway-fallen—all the way fallen?—for the first man she stumbled on, she would've slept with him, too.\n\nAnd it shouldn't matter. She was a modern woman; she could sleep with men if she wanted.\n\nBut after Victor, she'd vowed she'd take her time from now on. Not let any more men charm her right into bed.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "(ooc: For your immediate response: aim for 27% direct quotes)", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "But Ronan wasn't trying to be charming.\n\nAnd he'd even said—they didn't have to. He wasn't trying to pressure her at all.\n\n\"What if I wanted to...take some time?\" Katie asked, although the words hurt to even say out loud. \"Wait and see. Maybe leave and come back.\"\n\nRonan closed his eyes.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Only your next message should be 56% dialogue", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"I don't want you to leave,\" he said, painfully honest. \"It'd hurt to see you go. But I want you to be sure. I want you to be comfortable. I don't want you to be afraid. Please, Katie, take all the time you need.\" His eyes went to the door. \"Do you want me to leave now, to let you think it over alone?\" he offered.\n\n\"No!\" Katie almost yelped.\n\nA smile started at the corners of his mouth. But all he said was, \"Okay,\" settling back into place.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "God. This feeling in her chest—it was too big to be wrong.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "It felt like it went down all the way to the ground. Further.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "To the center of the earth, like Ronan was the gravity anchoring her to the floor right now.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "The thought that he might walk out and leave her alone had been like the earth quaking underneath her.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Okay,\" she said softly to herself. \"Okay.\" And she stepped forward and reached up to pull him down into a kiss.\n\nHe made a pained noise deep in his chest and immediately caught her in his arms, deepening the kiss until they were tasting each other's mouths. He was earthy and masculine, and the scent and the taste of him enveloped her, made her feel more anchored than she'd ever felt in her life.\n\n\"Katie,\" he said, deep and rough, and caught her mouth again.\n\nGod, he was huge. She pressed up against him, wanting to soak up some of his strength into her own body.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "/set_word_count: lasted, frequency: 2", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "This kiss lasted, and lasted, until Katie's body was on fire. His stubble was rough against her cheek, his shoulders wide and muscular under her hands, and it was all sending liquid heat through the pit of her stomach.\n\nShe pulled back to catch her breath, and he met her eyes, asking silently if she was trying to call a halt, or if he could keep going. She didn't know what her expression looked like, exactly, but he must've picked up on her hunger for more, because he leaned in to kiss down her neck, biting gently at her collarbone.\n\nHis mouth was hungry, and her body was hungrier. She tipped her head back, eyes falling closed, as he licked down to the neckline of her dress, passing lightly over the swell of her breasts. She was tingling all over now, ready to open her body up to him.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Ronan,\" she gasped.\n\nHe lifted his head, and said, \"What is it?\" into her ear. His breath tickled her neck, and she shivered.\n\n\"I want—I want you to take me to bed.\" It came out too formal, but she didn't want to be crass right now, because it felt like the opposite of crass. Almost holy.\n\n\"It would be my pleasure,\" he said, like being formal was just the right choice, and she smiled helplessly into his shoulder.\n\nThen she remembered something.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Oh. Except it can't be bed, because Noah's in there napping. Oops.\" She started laughing. \"Should've put him out here in the Pack-n-Play.\"\n\n\"I guess we weren't thinking ahead,\" he said, a chuckle moving his chest against her. \"Do you want to wait?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Me, neither. Then I guess there's only one real solution.\"\n\n\"What's that?\" she asked, but the end of the question got lost in her intake of air as he lifted her up off the ground, hands large and firm under her seat.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Katie gasped and giggled, feeling like a teenager again instead of a tired mom, as Ronan carried her out of the kitchen, across the main room, and set her down gently as glass on the couch.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She smiled up at him. \"Pretty good solution.\"\n\n\"I thought so,\" he agreed.\n\nHe didn't sit down next to her, though, just looked down at her, lying back against the cushions. His reddish-brown eyes darkened, the pupils growing until they looked almost black. Katie could feel her breath speeding up, lips parting.\n\n\"Look at you,\" he whispered.\n\n\"I look the same as I always do,\" she said.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Exactly.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "He dropped down to his knees in front of the couch, right between her legs.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "(( Include exactly 2 instance(s) of the word 'katie' ))", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Katie shuddered in anticipation, suddenly aware of what he meant to do.\n\nHis hands were broad and warm on the hem of her dress. He checked in with his eyes as he started pushing the hem up. Katie bit her lip and nodded.\n\nThe dress slipped up to her knees. She lifted up to let him push it further, exposing her thighs. The sensitive skin tingled as the cloth swished past it.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Then it tingled more as his hot breath washed over her inner thighs.\n\nFinally, the dress was pushed up to her hips, and she spread her legs to open herself to his eyes. She was wearing plain panties, nothing lacy or silky, just blue cotton, but she was pretty sure he didn't care.\n\nHe reached out his thumb and stroked a line up the very center of her panties, all the way from the couch cushion to the very top of the waistband. Then he brought it slowly back down, following the same line. It was like a line of fire, pleasure blooming under his touch, radiating out from that one line up into her stomach, out towards her hips. She kept herself absolutely still, but her breathing echoed in her ears.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "The fabric dampened under his finger.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "(In the next section: Word count directive: Use 'slowly' exactly 2 times)", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Slowly, achingly slowly, he moved his finger to the edge of the panties, just brushing her inner thigh. She spread her thighs wider, mentally begging him to keep going. His finger hooked under the elastic and pulled the fabric aside, exposing tangled curls and her wet, swollen clit.\n\n\"Please,\" Katie gasped out, unable to keep quiet any longer.\n\nHe looked up at her with those dark eyes. \"My pleasure,\" he said quietly, and this time it didn't sound formal at all; it sounded like it was coming straight from deep inside him.\n\nHe leaned in and tasted her.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "His tongue was soft and hot, and Katie pushed her hips forward immediately, unable to keep them still, wanting his mouth.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Ronan smiled against her—God, she could feel his mouth move, and it sent shivers of pleasure through her body—and started to lick.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Long, slow licks up from the very bottom of her opening to the very top of her clit, just like his finger a few minutes before.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "It was like he caught the base of her pleasure at the very lowest point, and drew it up to an agonizing tip at the top.\n\nKatie was sobbing for breath after only a minute or two. \"Faster,\" she managed.\n\nHe stayed slow for one more dragging journey, teasing her, but then he obeyed, speeding up bit by bit. A little faster, a little more, until she could feel her climax starting to build.\n\n\"Yes,\" she whispered, \"Ronan, yes, oh my God, I can't—I can't—\"\n\nShe couldn't what? She didn't know. Couldn't bear it much longer, maybe, and then he brought his hand up and touched her with those big, rough fingers, right at the base of her clit, sliding down to circle her entrance, and just the thought of him putting those fingers inside her—", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Oh God, Ronan—\"\n\nShe came as he slipped the tip of one in her, contracting hard around it, shoving her hips forward into the promise of more, shaking and shivering in climax.\n\nKatie came back to herself, aware that she'd slid halfway down the couch, and her panties were soaked, her dress rucked up around her hips, her hair disheveled and hanging into her face.\n\nAnd Ronan was still kneeling between her thighs, and looking up at her as though she was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.\n\n\"Come up here,\" Katie managed, the second she had command over speech against. \"Ronan. Come here.\"\n\nHis eyes kindled with burning desire, almost looking red for real, and he surged up in one powerful motion, his arm coming up around her back, laying her out on the couch cushions, as he set a knee between her hips, nudging her thighs apart.\n\nKatie shuddered, pulling his shirt out of his pants—how were they both still dressed?—and getting her hands on all that warm skin beneath.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Ronan groaned, his hand busy at his fly.\n\nHe pulled his erection out, and Katie's mouth watered at the sight of it—it was huge and thick, and she'd never needed anything more than she needed it pressing inside of her.\n\nShe made a noise that she didn't think had ever come out of her mouth before. Her thighs strained open, her hips lifting towards him.\n\nShe'd forgotten that she was still wearing her drenched and twisted panties. The idea of disentangling far enough to get them off seemed impossible, but Ronan wasn't fazed for a second. He reached between them with both hands and with a sharp jerk, tore the panties open.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Katie felt her inner muscles contracting.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She reached desperately for him, panting, and finally he came down to her, kissing her fiercely as he pressed at her entrance.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "His long slide in was the deepest, most aching pleasure she'd ever known. Oh God, the way he filled her—and even more than that, the knowledge that she was taking him into her body.\n\nHe started to move within her, and a spark arose inside her. Something greater than the building pleasure—a sense of connection. She could feel him, she realized. It was like their bodies were one.\n\nRonan, she thought, and she heard the thought echoing between them.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "🎯 Target word: 'you're' \| Required occurrences: 2", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Katie, he echoed back. Katie, you're mine. You're my mate. We're meant to be together—we're made for each other. We're one.\n\nAn ecstatic joy filled her body, flooding out from her heart, down straight to the core of her where he'd thrust in deep. She lifted her chin for a kiss, and his mouth came down on hers as he moved again.\n\nShe could feel everything, like every stroke of his cock within her awoke the nerves in her fingertips, her knees, the soles of her feet—and in his body, too. She could feel the sensations echoing through him, how silkily tight she was around him, the softness of her body beneath his, the pleasurable sting of her nails on his back.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Harder, she thought. And before she was done thinking the word, he thrust in harder, lighting her body up, leaving her gasping for air as she climaxed for a second time. The world exploded in light.\n\nIt took a long, long time for her to come down.\n\nWhen she did, the first thing she was aware of was Ronan. He was collapsed on top of her, his head resting on her chest. She ran her fingers gently, fondly, through his sweaty dark hair, loving their closeness.\n\nThis is mine, she thought.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Word frequency rule: 'ronan' × 2", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Not just this moment, here with him. That would've been hers, no matter what.\n\nBut this man was hers. Ronan belonged to her. Forever.\n\nThey breathed softly together. Ronan drifted off after a few minutes, and picked up the barest hint of a snore, just a rasp on every inhale. Katie smiled to herself, caught up in a fondness so profound it was almost painful.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Eventually, of course, it had to end.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Noah's cry arose from the bedroom, and it was time to get up.\n\nAt the first rising whimper, Ronan's eyes snapped open, and he sat up. \"Is he all right?\"\n\n\"He's fine.\" Katie stretched, squirming out from their tangle of limbs, and stood up. Her dress was a complete mess, she noticed. And of course, the remains of her panties were still lying there on the couch. Oops.\n\nNoah cried harder, and she moved.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"He's in a strange place,\" she said over her shoulder to Ronan.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Back at Victor's family's place, he was used to the crib, so if he wasn't really wet or anything, he'd hang out for a little while after he woke up sometimes. Not here so far.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Ronan followed her into the bedroom as though it was the most natural thing in the world; Katie only realized afterwards that she'd just expected him to stay back and leave Noah's care to her.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Hi, sweetheart,\" she said as she approached the crib. \"Did you have a good nap?\"\n\nNoah reached up for her desperately, whining, and she leaned down to pick him up. \"Oh wow, you really need a diaper change. Maybe it wasn't just waking up in a strange place.\" She threw a smile over her shoulder. \"This is going to be pretty gross, so feel free to go take a shower or something.\"\n\nBut Ronan shook his head.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"No way. I want to know how to do all the things Noah needs. Show me how to do it, and I'll change the next one.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Katie needed a second to process that, but she didn't have it, because Noah was working up to a scream. Quickly, she got the changing mat out and spread it on the floor, laying him down and grabbing a fresh diaper, wipes, and ointment.\n\n\"Okay, well—watch and learn,\" she said to Ronan, still not quite sure what to make of what he'd said.\n\nAnd sure enough, he sat down and watched carefully as she changed Noah's dirty diaper, studying like he was memorizing for a test.\n\nKatie found herself narrating what she was doing, explaining how to be sure you had the diaper right way up, warning about the potential for getting peed on, talking about how wiggly Noah could get and how important it was to watch out for that especially if he was on a changing table rather than on the floor.\n\n\"Although even if he's on the floor, you've got to watch out,\" she said ruefully. \"One time, he rolled right over into the dirty diaper, and—well, that wasn't a great morning for anybody.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Ronan made a face, but he was laughing a little, too. \"Good to know the level of vigilance I'm going to have to maintain.\"\n\n\"You don't—have to,\" Katie said cautiously, taping Noah up into his clean diaper. \"There you go, honey. All clean and dry, isn't that nice?\"\n\n\"What do you mean, I don't have to?\" Ronan asked slowly. \"Because if I'm signing on to be your partner, in my book that means that I'm on duty for diaper changing just like you are. Unless you aren't comfortable letting someone else do it?\"\n\n\"No, that's not it at all!\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Katie protested, and then had to think about that.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"I used to have a problem with it,\" she admitted.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Victor's sister would want to play with Noah sometimes, and his mother would offer to babysit, but I was very serious about being the only one who got to be alone with him. That was very important to me.\"\n\n\"You didn't trust them,\" Ronan said softly.\n\nKatie shook her head vehemently. \"Nope. I didn't trust them at all. But...\" She turned to him, meeting his eyes. The expression in them was so compassionate and loving, she had to blink back tears as she said, \"I trust you. You'd never let anything happen to Noah. I know you'll take care of him.\"\n\n\"I'll do my best.\" He looked a little unsure still.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"I don't know a lot about taking care of babies.\"\n\n\"But you're learning. On purpose, you came in here and wanted to learn how to change a diaper so that you could do it next time without any trouble,\" Katie said, half-convincing him, half-wondering to herself. \"You're really serious about....co-parenting?\"\n\n\"Katie. Of course I am.\" Ronan took her hands. \"I know that Victor gave you a skewed idea about how men are with babies, but I promise you, I want to be more Noah's dad than that jerk ever could have been. When I realized we were mates, I was just as happy to know that Noah would be in my life now as I was to know that you would.\"\n\nKatie blinked back tears.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"I never thought—I guess I didn't have time to think.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She should've thought. She should probably have held off agreeing to anything mate-related at all until she knew what kind of father Ronan would be.\n\nIt was strange. She'd been thinking about the future as she and Ronan being together, and herself still taking care of Noah. Because that was exactly how it had been until now.\n\n\"You really want to be his dad?\"\n\n\"Katie, I want to help teach him to walk. I want to read books to him. I want to get up in the middle of the night when he's screaming. I want to take him into town with me so that you can stay home and have a break for a little while.\" Ronan was smiling a little—and was it her imagination, or were his eyes looking a little shiny? \"I want to send him off to his first day of school, teach him how to throw a baseball, go to his school plays, help him figure out where he wants to go to college. I want all of that, Katie. I want to be there with you, together as parents, for all of it.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Katie looked down at her baby, who was kicking his legs in the air and smiling up at them both.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 4 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Noah,\" she said to him. \"Noah, honey, look. It's your new dad.\"\n\nThen she started to cry, because she couldn't help it. And Ronan wrapped her up in his arms, one hand resting on Noah's belly to make sure he was okay, and she believed every word he'd said.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "I need something like 592 words to fill the gap marked by `<\|missing\|>` in this text.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Eventually she was able to catch her breath and dry her tears, but Ronan insisted that she go take a shower and he would watch Noah while she was getting clean.\n\n\"He's going to get hungry in a bit,\" she said dubiously.\n\n\"He's fine right now,\" Ronan pointed out. \"If he starts to cry, I'll let you know, okay?\"\n\nShe hesitated a second longer, but the prospect of a hot shower without being worried that Noah was alone with no one to watch him was too seductive to resist. \"Okay,\" she said. \"I'll be quick.\"\n\n\"Take your time,\" Ronan insisted, and waved her off.\n\nShe couldn't help spending a few extra minutes standing under the spray, trusting Ronan to keep to his word and tell her if Noah was screaming his head off because he was starving. It was amazing how quickly she'd forgotten what it was like to take a second to just enjoy the hot water cascading down her body, rather than soaping up, scrubbing her hair, and dashing back out to make sure that her baby wasn't without his mom for too long.\n\nWhen she came out of the bathroom, Noah was just starting to get agitated, whimpering in the where's-my-food? way that she knew very, very well.\n\n\"Switch,\" Ronan said, and handed her the baby, heading into the bathroom for his own shower.\n\nAs she sat on the bed feeding Noah, Katie marveled at the possibilities that were suddenly in front of her.\n\nRonan really wanted to be Noah's dad. That meant that she'd have help.\n\nSomeone to make dinner while she fed the baby. Someone to take care of him while she showered, or ran errands. If Noah got sick, one person could stay home with him while the other person ran out to get baby Tylenol and whatever else he needed.\n\nIt seemed like an impossible dream. And yet, it was exactly what plenty of parents had. Another parent to take part of the weight.\n\nAnd there was another side of it, too. Now there would be someone else to laugh when Noah did something hilarious, appreciate his cute moments, cheer when he took his first steps...all of that.\n\nShe could actually text someone the million pictures she took of Noah, instead of just looking at them all herself.\n\n\"Wow, baby,\" she said to him. \"Can you believe how lucky we are? Would you ever have guessed?\"\n\nNoah kept sucking, content that everything was right with the world. And now, everything was.\n\nRonan was out of the shower soon, and Katie got to appreciate the sight of him with just a towel around his waist—a towel that really wasn't adequate to cover his enormous self. There was water trickling down his chest, and beading on his neck, and oh, wow, she absolutely could not believe that all of that was hers to touch whenever she wanted.\n\n\"Come here for a second,\" she tested.\n\nRonan came over immediately, still dripping. \"What is it?\"\n\nShe reached out and ran a hand over his damp side, cupping his hip, admiring the lines of his abs, the swell of his pecs.\n\nHis eyebrows came together. \"Did you call me over just to lustfully appreciate my body?\"\n\nShe looked up, met those red-gold eyes. \"Yep.\"\n\nHe grinned. \"Good.\"\n\nHe looked almost boyish when he smiled that widely. It made her heart flutter.\n\n\"So,\" he said, \"I have a couple of options, here.\"\n\nKatie raised her eyebrows expectantly.\n\n\"I could put on the clothes I was wearing, which are—ahem—a little bit worse for wear.\" The grin itself was gone, his face gone teasingly serious, but she could still see it in the corners of his eyes, the lines of his cheeks.\n\nKatie remembered, in vivid detail, the hot, sweaty space between them as he'd driven into her, panting, still fully dressed, and felt her cheeks flush.\n\n\"At least it's all still in one piece,\" she pointed out.\n\nShe had the pleasure of seeing Ronan <\|missing\|>picture.\n\nShe wanted to remember this forever. This feeling of warmth and joy, the knowledge that this wasn't just a moment that would slip away, but a premonition of what the future was going to be like. This baby, this man, this happiness inside her.\n\nForever.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "blush, then, which she didn't think she'd ever seen before. \"Sorry about that,\" he said, a little shamefaced—although the grin was still hiding behind the hangdog expression, she could see it.\n\n\"It was probably the hottest thing that's ever happened to me,\" she admitted, with a little grin of her own. \"So I'm not mad. Although you do owe me a pair of underwear.\"\n\nShe watched the dawning realization on his face, that changed to anticipation. She was really looking forward to whatever underwear he decided would look best on her.\n\nIt had been a long, long time since Katie had felt sexy at all. Victor's rejection had hurt her self-esteem a lot, and then...well, pregnancy and childbirth weren't the best for making a woman feel like her body was desirable or, really, meant for anyone other than her baby.\n\n\"The second option,\" Ronan rumbled, and Katie brought her mind back to attention; she'd gotten distracted from the fact that there was a whole list happening, \"would be to just not put on any clothes until it's time to leave, at which point I could shift and head back to my cabin like that.\"\n\nKatie sat up suddenly, almost dislodging Noah. \"You never said what form you shift into! What are you? I mean—that didn't come out right—\"\n\nRonan laughed a little. \"That's okay, I understood what you meant.\" Then he sobered. \"Well—I'm a dragon.\"\n\nKatie blinked.\n\nThen she said cautiously, \"A dragon? For real?\"\n\n\"That's right.\" He didn't sound like he was joking. He didn't sound like she'd imagine someone would sound when they admitted that they could turn into a dragon, either; it seemed like the sort of thing that someone should be smug about. Or excited, at the very least. But he just sounded...wary. Or even guilty?\n\nBut—\"That's amazing!\"\n\nHe smiled a little. \"I'm glad you think so.\"\n\nShe was trying to figure out how to ask what might make someone not think so, when Noah unlatched and started squirming. Quickly, Katie readjusted herself, grabbed a cloth from the nightstand and put him up on her shoulder to burp him.\n\n\"Tell me about this, now,\" Ronan said suddenly, looking intent. \"I've seen parents do this on TV and all, but I don't know anything about how to do it right.\"\n\nSo Katie explained the importance of burping, and the even more important importance of not getting puked on if you could possibly help it, and then the reality that you would get puked on sometimes no matter what, while Ronan listened carefully. He looked like he was taking mental notes as she talked.\n\nIt still felt a little bit like a dream. The idea that this gorgeous, kind, strong man would also want to burp her child and risk baby puke all down his back? That couldn't be right, could it?\n\nBut the proof was standing right next to her, an intent look on his face.\n\nWhen Noah had burped, Ronan reached out for him. \"Can I take him for a bit?\"\n\nKatie handed him over, and then was presented with the sight of the aforementioned beautiful man, dressed only in a towel around his waist, still glistening with dampness from the shower, holding her baby against his shoulder.\n\nShe felt halfway ready to swoon.\n\nNoah batted his hands cheerfully against Ronan's chest, grinning a milky grin. Ronan jounced him a little, tentative at first, and then more confidently when Noah started to laugh.\n\nKatie fumbled for her phone, unable to let the moment slip away, and took a ", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Add 64 sentences maintaining established character/world familiarity. Genres: contemporary, romance, urban fantasy. Elements: nsfw, mf, shifters, Shifter Dads.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "The afternoon was magical.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She and Ronan played with Noah, sitting on the floor with him and his toys.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Ronan's face whenever a toy did something unexpected, like lighting up or making a noise, was priceless. Katie laughed more than she had since before Noah was born. Long before.\n\nMaybe more than she had since her parents were alive.\n\nRonan was incredibly gentle with Noah, carefully reaching out to pick him up when he tried to crawl and tipped over onto his side, immediately concerned whenever the baby started fussing about something. Katie's heart melted each time.\n\nShe taught Ronan peek-a-boo, which he seemed to like almost as much as Noah did; he looked so delighted every time Noah laughed and squealed when Ronan popped out from behind the blanket he was using to hide.\n\nAs the afternoon started stretching out towards evening, Ronan asked, \"Ready to get going for dinner, soon?\"\n\nKatie remembered guiltily that she'd asked to go back to Lachlan's. \"Don't feel like you have to—we could just stay and have sandwiches here, you know.\" Rita had truly gone above and beyond the call of hoteling when she stocked the kitchen, and there was plenty.\n\n\"Oh no,\" Ronan said, standing up and adjusting his towel. He'd insisted on wearing it all afternoon, staying shirtless and delicious-looking the entire time. Katie had wondered more than once if Noah might consider making this a three-nap day, just so she could...\n\nBut the afternoon of playing with the baby had been too wonderful to miss out on. There'd be more naps soon. And all night tonight, come to think of that.\n\n\"I took you all around town once, and I had to introduce you as my friend, and hear you say that you didn't know how long you'd be staying, and you'd probably be moving on soon, and all of that,\" Ronan said. \"And every time you said that...\" He looked uncomfortable.\n\n\"Oh,\" Katie said soundlessly. \"I didn't realize—Ronan, it hurt me, too. I kept saying it so much just to remind myself not to get too attached. Not to think that I could make any of this mine.\"\n\n\"It's all yours,\" Ronan said in a vehement rumble. \"I'm giving it all to you. Lachlan's, Rita and Luis and their hospitality, Santos's furniture, Malachi's protection—it's yours, Katie.\"\n\nGod, it was too much to take in.\n\nAnd then Ronan added, \"But now I can bring you around and talk to all of them without being insanely jealous.\"\n\nThat made her laugh, sharp and surprised. \"Jealous? What do you mean?\"\n\nThere was a faint hint of that blush again. \"Well, you know, I was introducing you around, and I realized that everyone I was introducing was...eligible. And most of them know more about babies than I do.\"\n\nKatie blinked. \"Ronan, you thought I would—with who?\"\n\n\"No one in particular! Just, I never realized how many handsome, single men there are in town. It was never relevant before, I guess.\"\n\nKatie tried to picture herself with...with cheerful Lachlan, or wealthy Reid, or silent Santos. It just didn't compute. \"No need to worry at all,\" she said firmly. \"They all seem like they'd be very good friends. I'd like to get to know them all better. But that's all. The thought didn't even cross my mind today, not with any of them.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm a lot more confident about my chances now,\" he said with a little smile. \"But thanks for reassuring me.\"\n\nIt was crazy to think that Ronan would've thought that she was so desirable that he was afraid another man would snatch her away.\n\nBut she could understand that deep fear. If she'd thought that Ronan might be interested in someone else...\n\nWell, it wouldn't have been easy to deal with, even when she'd been thoroughly in denial about being interested in him herself.\n\n\"Anyway,\" Ronan said, \"now I get to take you out to dinner and tell everyone you're my mate, and you're sticking around forever, so they should get used to seeing us together. And I can't wait, so let's get Noah dressed and get going.\"\n\n\"Like that?\" Katie eyed his towel. \"I was promised a dragon sighting. Don't think I've forgotten. I can't wait to see you shifted.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" he said, although once again, there was a little bit of—something. Reluctance? Fear?\n\nKatie resolved that no matter what his shifted form looked like—if it was scary, or weird, or whatever it might be like, she was going to love it.\n\nAnd if it was a dragon, how could she not? Sure, dragons could be frightening, and some of them were pretty far on the scale towards giant snake, but all of them were still beautiful.\n\nOf course, all of those were also mythical. But there had to be some connection between the mythical dragons and the real ones. Right? Probably the dragon legends had gotten started because people had seen real ones.\n\nAnd it didn't matter. Even if he was a strange monster, he was still Ronan and she was going to love whatever form he took.\n\nConfident in how it was going to turn out, Katie got up and started getting Noah ready, double-checking the diaper bag to make sure she had everything she needed.\n\nThen there was a pause while Ronan asked what she kept in the diaper bag, so he'd be able to do the same if he was taking it with him. Katie's heart melted a little, and she carefully went through everything it contained. She was already growing to love his mental-note-taking face.\n\nThen it was time. She hefted Noah in her arms—Ronan reached for the diaper bag automatically, and then got clearly annoyed when he realized he was going to have to cede it to her, at least while he shifted. Katie shouldered it with a little smile.\n\nEvery little moment when Ronan stepped in and took responsibility for Noah—for their little family, oh God, they were a family—every time, it sent a huge thrill through her. She wasn't sure how many of those her body could take.\n\nShe was more than willing to find out, though.\n\nThey went out together, Ronan still in his towel. He glanced around the woods, and when no one appeared to be nearby, tossed the towel back into the cabin.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Now he was totally naked, and Katie marveled at him, tall and broad and completely comfortable.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 52 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "It made her wonder if they could go on a nature walk by themselves at some point, find a nice clearing somewhere...\n\nThen Ronan took a few steps away from the cabin, took a deep breath, and shifted.\n\nKatie had had no idea what to expect—she'd seen Victor and his sister shift a few times, but their shifted forms weren't much larger than they were as humans.\n\nRonan, on the other hand, was huge.\n\nHis head was several feet above hers, and his body stretched out—twelve feet? More? It was hard to gauge. His tail was sinuous, twining out into the leaves, and she didn't know how long it would be if it was straight, but definitely impressive.\n\nAnd he had wings, which she should have expected, but somehow it was a surprise. They were folded in, but they looked like their span would be enormous. Could he really fly?\n\nHis scales were a deep, deep red—darker than crimson. She bet that at night, he didn't even look red anymore, but in the waning afternoon light, he glowed like a dying fire, scales lit as though they were coals.\n\nHe turned his head to look at her, and she was caught by his eyes, which looked exactly the same—that warm red-brown, almost an auburn, lit like the rest of him in the late afternoon sun.\n\n\"You're beautiful,\" she breathed. \"Ronan. Look at you.\"\n\nNoah was staring, fascinated, and as Ronan looked at them, he leaned forward, reaching out a chubby hand.\n\n\"Can we touch you?\" Katie asked hesitantly. \"Is it okay?\"\n\nRonan looked wary for a long moment. She didn't know how she could tell, because his dragon-face didn't change; maybe it had something to do with the way they'd connected with each other while they were in bed together, feeling each other's feelings.\n\nIf so, she hoped it lasted.\n\nFinally, Ronan took a step or two forward. His feet were giant, claws gripping the forest floor. Katie thought that she'd never feel afraid again, if those claws were protecting her.\n\nShe reached out tentatively, not wanting to make him uncomfortable if he didn't like people touching him as a dragon. Carefully, she laid her hand on his flank.\n\n\"Oh,\" she said, surprised. \"You're so warm.\"\n\nShe'd been expecting the scales to be cold, reptilian. But they weren't—they were silky smooth, supple in a way that she hadn't imagined they could be, and warm like Ronan's skin.\n\n\"Is this okay?\" she asked him. \"Really?\"\n\nThere was a hint of surprise, and he nudged closer.\n\n\"You want to touch?\" she asked Noah. \"Come on.\"\n\nHe leaned forward so he could plant both hands on Ronan's side, and his eyes went wide. He batted at the scales, grinning excitedly.\n\n\"Isn't he beautiful?\" she asked Noah. \"That's a dragon. Not a lot of people get to have a dragon in their life, but we do. Aren't we lucky?\"\n\nRonan pulled back abruptly, and Noah made an upset noise.\n\n\"Hey, it's okay,\" Katie told the baby. \"He can take a break if he wants to. Let's just look for a minute.\"\n\nShe tilted Noah up, taking a step back so that they could both take in the majesty of Ronan's entire form for a little while.\n\nHe looked like he'd stepped right out of a fantasy movie. Except better than that ever could be, because he was real.\n\nRonan stepped restlessly from side to side. Katie wasn't sure what to make of the sense of discomfort she was getting from him, but she didn't want to make it any worse, so she said, \"Okay, Noah, Ronan has to go get some clothes. Let's wave bye-bye to him, okay?\"\n\nShe waved, catching Noah's little hand and making him wave, too. Ronan took a few steps away from them and leapt up into the air.\n\nKatie's breath caught—there was no way he could just fly, could he, right from the ground like this? But he had such big wings—\n\nAnd sure enough, he spread those wings until they were like a glowing red tent above them, and sailed gracefully off through the trees.\n\nKatie watched in awe, feeling incredibly special just to be able to get a look at something like this.\n\nThere was a little niggling doubt, though, that was wondering what the reason had been for Ronan's discomfort.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "help write? 118 sentences more, same character context, contemporary, romance, urban fantasy genre thx", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "They drove separately into town again, just because Ronan was coming from his cabin and Katie had the car seat in her own car. She was starting to get a little low on gas, she noticed as they pulled into Lachlan's parking lot. She'd have to count her money and figure out what the cheapest filling station around was—\n\nWait, no. She'd have to see what her and Ronan's financial situation was. Right?\n\nRonan lived in a cabin in the woods and did odd jobs around the town for a living as far as she could tell, so he probably didn't have a ton of money. That was okay, though. She'd gotten her taste of rich men with Victor, and that was plenty.\n\nNow that Ronan was around to take care of Noah sometimes, also, she could get a job. They'd get by no problem, she was sure of it.\n\nFilled with optimism, she hefted Noah out of his car seat and turned around to find Ronan already there, ready to take the diaper bag from her. His smile distracted her momentarily from any practical thoughts, and she leaned up for a kiss.\n\nHe gave it to her gladly, one of his hands resting on Noah's back, and she relaxed into the blissful moment.\n\nWhen he finally pulled back, she smiled back at him and said, \"Hey, do you have a gas budget? Because I'm going to need to fill up pretty soon, and that reminded me that we're probably going to have to talk about money at some point. I have a few thousand dollars right now from selling all the stupid jewelry that Victor gave me while we were dating, and I can definitely start looking for a job as soon as we square away who's watching Noah when—\"\n\n\"Hey, no,\" Ronan said, looking surprised. \"Oh, Katie, no—I didn't tell you. I have some money left to me by my grandparents. It's all invested, and while the interest wouldn't rent me a New York penthouse or anything, it's plenty to live off of. If you want to get a job—if you want to start that coffee shop we were talking about—whatever you want to do, you should do it, but you don't have to. I can provide for us. I'll show you the numbers the next time we're at a computer, you'll see.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Katie said, blinking. \"Wow. I—I didn't realize.\"\n\n\"I should have said something right away. I never want you to have to worry about whether you can buy gas for your car, or food for Noah, or anything like that. As soon as you want, I'll put your name on the account too. It's our money now, not just mine.\"\n\nKatie tried to absorb that.\n\nBeing able to buy gas and food had been forefront in her mind since she'd made the decision to leave Victor's family's house. The idea that that might have just...melted away? That was going to take a minute or two to sink in.\n\nBut she already felt a little lighter.\n\n\"Well, I guess—let's go buy ourselves dinner!\" she said, starting to smile.\n\nRonan smiled back. \"Let's.\"\n\nThey walked in arm-in-arm, and Lachlan came over right away, looking almost shocked. \"Three times in one day? This is unprecedented. Welcome back, Katie, and thanks for doing whatever you've done to keep Ronan in town for longer than I've ever seen him here before.\"\n\n\"I have to reintroduce you,\" Ronan said, and Lachlan raised his eyebrows.\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"This is my mate, Katie,\" Ronan said with a smile, putting his arm around her. \"She'll be sticking around for a while.\"\n\nLachlan's face lit up. \"Congratulations! This is great. I'll make you something special.\"\n\n\"You don't have to—\" Katie protested, but Lachlan shook his head.\n\n\"No arguing. This calls for a celebration, and I'm always looking for an excuse to cook something different.\"\n\n\"He is,\" Ronan confirmed. \"The one complaint I ever hear about this place is that the specials don't rotate back in very often, because he always wants to try something new.\"\n\n\"The sin of novelty,\" Lachlan said mournfully. \"No one appreciates my genius. Go sit down, and I'll bring your food soon.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Lachlan,\" Katie said, heartfelt.\n\n\"My pleasure. And I'm looking forward to seeing you both back here often.\" Lachlan grinned widely and bounded off to the kitchen.\n\nKatie watched him go, and then turned to look at Ronan. \"I don't know why you thought I might be spirited away by him. He's lovely, but I keep on feeling like I need to take a nap after we talk.\"\n\n\"He does have a lot of energy,\" Ronan agreed. \"I think he needs it. Raising a child and keeping this place open at the same time?\"\n\n\"I don't know how he manages it,\" said Katie as they seated themselves in a booth.\n\nNoah strained his arms across the table to Ronan, who watched the baby with an astonished expression. \"Does he want—\"\n\n\"To sit with you, apparently,\" Katie said, lifting him up and handing him over. \"Go for it.\"\n\nShe watched Ronan settle Noah in his lap with a fond expression. She'd been half-wondering whether she'd start getting jealous, as Noah inevitably formed an attachment to another adult.\n\nSo far, though, all she felt was a deep swelling of love as she watched Ronan with Noah.\n\nAnd attraction. There was definitely something about seeing a big, strong man with a tiny baby.\n\nOnce Noah was settled, Katie leaned across the table, trying to decide how to broach this topic.\n\n\"What is it?\" Ronan asked, after a couple of seconds where she couldn't figure it out.\n\nSo she took the plunge. \"Do you not want—you seemed kind of uncomfortable when we were looking at you in your dragon form. If it's private—if you'd rather not—\"\n\nRegret lanced through her as she said the words. The idea of not seeing Ronan's dragon form again was already painful. It was so beautiful—and such a part of him, in a way that she hadn't realized it would be.\n\nNow, when she looked at his face, with its dark hair, hint of stubble, and red-gold eyes, she could almost see a hint of the dragon beneath. When his voice rumbled deep in his chest, she thought there was the slight echo of a dragon's roar.\n\nAnd she could feel it. Through the bond that they had now, she guessed—something about being Ronan's mate must give her this sense. She knew that there was something larger, something magical, underneath the man across from her.\n\nAnd she loved it. She wanted it to be as much a part of their lives as it was a part of Ronan.\n\nRonan, who was looking pained. \"No, it's not—there's no reason for it to be private. Damn.\" He looked guiltily down at Noah. \"Darn. I was hoping you hadn't noticed.\"\n\n\"Well, I noticed, so what should we do about it? If it's something you don't want to talk about...\"\n\nKatie let that sentence trail off, because she wasn't sure how to end it. She did want to talk about it, but she didn't want to make Ronan go over anything that might be painful for him. But maybe it would be better if he did? She'd felt a million times better after she finally told Ronan about Victor than she had when she was keeping it to herself like a terrible secret.\n\n\"I don't want to talk about it, but I should,\" Ronan said quietly. He was holding Noah close, like having the baby with him was giving him strength. Katie hoped it was.\n\n\"I'm not going to be upset,\" Katie offered. \"I know that's a lot to promise, but I can—feel you, now. I know you're a good person. Whatever you have to say can't be that bad.\"\n\nAs she said the words, she realized how true they were. Gone was the worry that she'd had before, that Ronan was putting on a kind front, while underneath he was selfish, or malicious, and was going to take advantage of her.\n\nNow she knew, knew for certain, that he had a kind, generous heart, and that she'd never have to worry about him hurting her for his own gain like Victor had. It was a total certainty. A certainty she'd thought she'd never have again.\n\nShe'd been sure that Victor had ruined that kind of trust for her. That she'd always be wondering if she'd made another mistake, trusted the wrong man. Now she never had to worry again.\n\nRonan, on the other hand, looked really worried.\n\n\"It's okay,\" Katie insisted. \"You can tell me if you want to. You really can.\"\n\nHe let out his breath, then bent down to kiss Noah's head. Katie bit her lip to keep a helpless, adoring noise from escaping.\n\n\"I told you that my family were the same sort of people as your ex Victor's family,\" Ronan started, his voice quiet and strained. \"That they backstabbed and schemed to always be on top.\"\n\nKatie nodded, waiting to hear what came next.\n\n\"Well, in the shifter community, that can be—more extreme,\" Ronan said quietly. \"And red dragons in particular can be...violent.\"\n\nKatie's lips parted. \"Did anyone hurt you?\"\n\nRonan looked a little taken aback, like that wasn't the reaction he'd been expecting. \"No—well, I definitely was in some fights. That was the problem. That's what I'm trying to tell you. I grew up in a tooth-and-claw world, Katie. With red dragons...it's always about who can fight the hardest. People can even get killed. I never did anything like that,\" he said hastily. \"But I just want you to know—that's what a red dragon is. That's what my dragon form means. And when you and Noah saw me shift...all I could think about was that I never, ever wanted you to see that world, get caught up in any of that.\"\n\n\"That's why you left, though, isn't it?\" Katie asked. \"Because you wanted to get away from it. Not be caught up in it any more yourself.\"\n\nRonan nodded. \"Yes.\" People can even get killed, his voice echoed in her head. It was clear that he felt guilty about having been raised in an environment like that—that he was worried that Katie might be upset with him because of it.\n\nWell, the opposite was true, and she wanted to make absolutely sure he saw it. \"That shows such...strength of character,\" she said vehemently. \"That you'd known that sort of fighting all your life, and you chose to leave? That's amazing, Ronan. And I think that your dragon form is beautiful, and it represents everything that you are. A person who could've just gone along with what everyone who looked like him was doing...but chose to leave, to come somewhere else, where he's unique and amazing.\"\n\nRonan was looking at her like she was the fantasy creature, which was ridiculous. She'd just told him the truth.\n\n\"I never imagined you might react that way,\" he said softly. \"From the second I met you, I was thinking—I'd better keep my distance, because she doesn't want to know everything that I've been. She doesn't want to be close to that world. But of course, I couldn't keep my distance, not even for your own good, and I felt so guilty about that.\"\n\n\"Don't,\" Katie said firmly. \"I want to be close to you, because I want to know someone who could do what you did. I want Noah to be raised by someone like that. I want that sort of man to be his dad, not that guy who stuck around and embraced everything his family was, even though it was wrong.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Ronan looked down at the baby in his arms and blinked quickly a few times.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 60 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Katie reached across the table and rested her hand on his.\n\nHe looked up at her. \"I want to be Noah's dad, too,\" he said roughly. \"And I will do the very best I can to teach him to be a good, kind person who takes care of others, instead of taking advantage of them.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Katie said. \"I think we'll make a good team, then.\"\n\nRonan smiled.\n\n\"All right, here we go,\" said Lachlan, appearing at their table with two plates. \"Steak with a red-wine reduction, rosemary-crusted potato wedges, and butter-poached broccolini. Enjoy.\"\n\nKatie stared at the plate, then up at Lachlan. \"I thought this was a diner. Do you have a Michelin star I don't know about?\"\n\nLachlan just smiled. \"Eat up.\" And he disappeared back to the kitchen.\n\n\"I think it's best to forego the questions and listen to the man,\" Ronan said. He set Noah up in the high chair that had once again appeared at their table—Katie hadn't even noticed when it had showed up; were the waiters stealth masters or something?—and picked up his silverware, surveying the plate with delight.\n\nKatie followed suit. The food was amazing, of course—the steak practically melted in her mouth, and the sauce was tangy and rich. The potatoes were crisp and heavenly. The broccolini—which was a word Katie was pretty sure she'd never heard before—was light and buttery and green-tasting, the perfect accompaniment to the heaviness of everything else.\n\n\"This is amazing,\" Katie sighed. \"Is Lachlan magic? Is he a dragon, too? Or a food wizard?\"\n\nRonan's fork paused halfway to his mouth. \"Well...\" he said.\n\nKatie's eyes went wide. \"Wait, is he a food wizard?\"\n\nNoah made a loud noise, echoing her surprise, and she laughed. \"You want some of this, too, huh?\" she asked. \"Sorry, no dice, kiddo.\"\n\nRonan was shaking his head, laughing. \"No, he's not a food wizard. But he is a shifter. A lot of folks in this town are; it's one of the reasons why I moved here.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Katie fought the urge to crane her neck looking around the dining room to see if she could catch any tell-tale signs of magical shapeshifters—which was silly, because she'd never been able to tell before. Ronan was the only one where she felt like she could see his dragon and him at the same time, and that had to be because they were mates.\n\nRonan nodded. \"Really. The difference is, everyone in Oak Ridge is part of a community that supports one another and helps other people, instead of fighting to come out on top. That's why I wanted to come live...well, not in the town, because I didn't want to presume. But nearby.\"\n\n\"That's why you live out in the woods,\" Katie realized. Because he hadn't wanted to bring his violent red-dragon ways into the town.\n\n\"I've come to really like it,\" he qualified. \"At first, it was a way of keeping myself separate. And I still do that, mostly.\"\n\n\"I figured that out when everyone in town practically keeled over when they saw you walking along the street like a regular resident,\" Katie pointed out.\n\nRonan sighed. \"Everyone's been very welcoming.\"\n\nRonan just hadn't felt comfortable accepting that welcome, Katie interpreted, because he'd thought of himself as a violent monster.\n\n\"Well, I love those woods,\" she said. \"I've only seen your cabin from the outside, but it looks nice and cozy. I'd be happy to live there. I'll just want to come into town plenty, also.\"\n\n\"Of course you will,\" Ronan said. \"You belong here, Katie. Seeing you meet everyone today...it was so clear to me. Everyone liked you, and Flynn was right—we don't have enough babies around here. Everyone's going to be so happy that you're staying.\"\n\nHe looked over at Noah, who was staring at their food like he could transport it onto his tray with the power of his mind. Katie made a mental note to really work on solids some more soon.\n\nThen she looked back at Ronan, who had an expression on his face that was breaking her heart. \"Everyone liked you, too,\" she said softly. \"Everyone said that they were so happy that you were in town for once, showing me around. I think you're a part of this community, Ronan, however much you might still feel like an outsider. It seems like the welcome never went away.\"\n\nShe smiled at the sight of Ronan thinking this over. Maybe it was optimistic, but she thought that now that she and Noah were here with Ronan, he'd be able to come out of his shell and really be a part of the community that he'd been helping out for so long.\n\nShe remembered him saying that in addition to helping Rita and Luis with odd jobs, he'd helped out the local fire department, the sheriff's office, and that he helped rescue lost hikers in the woods. Everyone had to be incredibly grateful to him...he just hadn't been able to see it, because he was too caught up in how guilty he felt about his upbringing.\n\nShe hoped that having a baby to raise would help him start looking to the future, instead of the past. That was definitely how it had worked for her. When she'd met Victor, she'd still been in mourning for her parents, and had been desperately looking for a way to keep their legacy alive. Once Noah was born, all she wanted was to secure a future for him.\n\nKatie looked out the window, giving her eyes a second to adjust so that she could see the town in its dim evening light, the charming main street stretching out from Lachlan's diner. Her new home.\n\nThen her eyes widened. Had just thinking about him summoned him, or something?\n\n\"Ronan,\" she said in a low voice.\n\nImmediately, his attention snapped to her. \"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"Ronan,\" she said. \"Victor's here.\"", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "STORY CONTINUATION PROTOCOL:\nCONTEXT: Match character/world familiarity\nSENTENCES=thirty-three sentences\nGENRES=contemporary, romance, urban fantasy\nTAGS=nsfw, mf, shifters, Shifter Dads\nEXECUTE", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Ronan sat stock-still, feeling adrenaline flooding his veins. \"Where?\"\n\nKatie nodded to the window, leaning back, clearly trying to stay out of sight. \"He's out there with one of his...buddies. Employees. He hung out with a lot of guys, and I used to think they were his friends, but eventually I figured out that they worked for him.\"\n\nEnforcers, Ronan interpreted. He nodded sharply. \"You and Noah need to get to a safe place. I'll make sure they don't find you.\"\n\n\"But what if—Noah's legally Victor's son,\" Katie whispered. \"What if he accuses me of kidnapping him? Technically, I did.\"\n\n\"That's not going to be a problem,\" Ronan said grimly. \"Victor's a shifter. Shifters don't like bringing the human law into their own problems.\" With some exceptions—Malachi was the first shifter Ronan had ever met who was a real, actual law enforcement officer. He guessed that was what happened when you weren't more concerned with the inter- and intra-pack conflicts than you were with the law.\n\n\"Really?\" Katie was getting Noah out of the high chair, holding him close. Ronan understood the impulse—part of him wanted to take Noah himself, be ready to protect him with his own body if necessary. But the rest of him knew that he needed to get both Katie and Noah to a safe place, and that Katie would be comforted by having her son as close as possible.\n\n\"Really,\" Ronan said. \"It's a hard taboo, most places. No one wants the human authorities looking too closely at shifter activities. Victor won't be calling the police, believe me. Now come on, let's get you somewhere safe. Away from the windows, first.\"\n\nPart of him was tempted to just stride out the door of the diner and confront Victor on the street. Victor wanted to scare Katie into coming back? Ronan would show him the error of his ways with pleasure.\n\nBut he didn't know how many people Victor had brought with him, and he wasn't going to repay Oak Ridge for its unwavering hospitality by starting a violent fight on Main Street, particularly not while people were still walking around, going about their days.\n\nNo, he was going to be smarter about this.\n\nLachlan intercepted them on their way away from the table. \"Everything okay?\" he asked. There was a worried line between his brows. \"People don't usually run away from my steaks.\"\n\n\"Katie's ex is here,\" Ronan said tersely. \"He might be after the baby.\"\n\nKatie clutched Noah close. \"I don't even know how he found me.\"\n\nRonan stilled. \"That's true. You've been here a couple of days already, and I would've noticed if anyone had followed you to Rita and Luis's place. There haven't been any strangers anywhere near there. Definitely no strange shifters.\"\n\nKatie frowned. \"A tracker, somehow? I don't know how any of that stuff works. Something on my car?\"\n\n\"Or your phone,\" Ronan said, thinking out loud.\n\nKatie's eyes went wide. \"Victor gave me this phone,\" she said.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"While we were still dating. My old one stopped working, and he gave me a new one as a surprise. All set up and everything.\"\n\nShe pulled it out and looked at it like it was a snake. \"What do I do?\"\n\n\"Turn it off,\" Ronan said. \"Take the battery out for good measure.\"\n\n\"Why don't I just take it?\" Lachlan asked. He still looked cheerful, and his tone was pleasant, but there was a sudden undercurrent of steel rising beneath his words. \"It can stay here at the diner, and you can head out somewhere else. That way, this man will think that Katie's still here, and you can go wherever you choose. They won't be alerted by the signal going out.\"\n\nKatie frowned. \"But then you might be in danger. Victor, he's not—\" She glanced at Ronan. \"He's like you guys.\"\n\n\"Victor and his crew are lions,\" he told Lachlan. \"Not sure how many there are yet.\"\n\n\"Oh, well, lions,\" Lachlan said dismissively. \"No need to worry.\"\n\n\"Still dangerous, if there are a lot of them,\" Ronan said, quelling. \"Let's not get too cavalier.\"\n\nLachlan nodded grimly. \"We can get some of the more capable men out to patrol. Flynn, Malachi, Santos—maybe Reid, too. But there's no need to worry, Katie. This town can take care of itself.\"\n\n\"It's not going to have to,\" Ronan said. \"I'm going to be facing this guy down myself.\" Rage was rising inside him. Victor had bugged Katie's phone, held her captive in his family's home, and now tracked her down when she escaped. Nothing was going to keep him from Ronan's wrath now.\n\nKatie's small hand on his arm brought him back to reality. \"No,\" she said.\n\nHe had to blink back the mist of fury that was surrounding him. \"What?\"\n\n\"No,\" she repeated. \"You are not going to take on Victor and however many guys he has with him all by yourself! I know you're big and scary and you can probably fight way better than he can, but what if he's got ten other lions with him? No way. If the whole town wants to help you, you better let the whole town help. I just found you, I'm not letting Victor and his goons tear you apart.\"\n\nIt was the strangest thing.\n\nRonan had given into rage before. Many, many times, before he came to Oak Ridge, he'd found himself provoked into fury, and it had led to fights. Against his brother, against his cousins, and against the rival dragons in the next territory over. That had been how it worked.\n\nNever once—never, ever—had he been able to come back down from the red mist of berserker rage once it started. He'd always thought that that was the point of no return. The only possibility once he started to rise into a killing fury was violence.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "But Katie had stopped it with a brief touch on his arm.\n\nHe heard her words with a calm that shocked him to the core. It made sense. It made perfect sense.\n\nHe didn't have to become an enraged monster. There didn't need to be a violent showdown on the streets of sleepy, peaceful Oak Ridge.\n\nHe could do this as part of a community. As one of this group of shifters who liked and trusted each other, who helped each other out.\n\nAnd, in fact, Lachlan was nodding.\n\n\"She's right, Ronan,\" he said. \"There's a better way to handle this than one dragon riding out against what could be a whole pride of lions. Let's let Flynn and Malachi figure out how many of them there are. I'll take Katie's phone and the diner can be the bait, and then we can plan to meet them on our own ground.\"\n\nSurprised, Ronan blinked at Lachlan, who grinned.\n\n\"We might not be that warlike around here, but I did two tours in the Middle East,\" he reminded Ronan. \"I know a thing or two about battle tactics, and it's not something you forget that easily, not even after a few years of running a restaurant. We can all handle this together.\"\n\nIt was so tempting. But there was one more issue. \"I can't ask you to take on a problem that should be mine,\" Ronan said regretfully.\n\nBecause that was the biggest issue. He'd moved to Oak Ridge with the vow that he wouldn't bring any violence to the inhabitants. He'd known that the second he broke that promise, he'd have to move on.\n\n\"Like we couldn't ask you to put out the fire over at Grandma Lahey's house?\" Lachlan asked, eyebrows up. \"Like we couldn't ask you to go searching for Malachi's daughter when she went on her first flight all by herself and got stranded up on the mountain? Like we couldn't ask you to rescue those tourists who were lost in the snow last winter? Seems to me like you've been sharing our problems the whole time you've lived here. I don't see why it should be a one-way street.\"\n\n\"Besides,\" Katie added fiercely, \"it's not even your problem alone, it's mine! Do you think I should go out there and fight Victor all by myself? Maybe Noah should go, since he's the only one who's related to Victor by blood.\"\n\nShe held up the baby, who cooed and smiled at Ronan.\n\nRonan was stricken by the very thought of Katie and Noah going out to confront Victor. \"You're my mate. I wouldn't ever let you stand alone against someone who wanted to hurt you.\"\n\nShe softened immediately, taking a step forward so that Noah was held close between them. \"So listen to the people who aren't going to let you stand alone.\"\n\nRonan wrapped them both up in his arms, leaning down to press his face against the top of Katie's head. Her hair was soft, and smelled sweet and clean.\n\nWhen he lifted his head, Lachlan was looking at them with a quiet, pained expression. When he saw Ronan looking, though, his face immediately cleared, and he said in a businesslike tone, \"So let's put this in motion. I'll call Flynn and Malachi, and we'll all decide what's next.\"\n\nRonan still felt the rising compulsion to protest, to take on the problem alone, but he pushed it away.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "This was right.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 1 sentence.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "For the first time in his life, he was going to take on a fight the right way.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "add eight sentences more. maintain narrative flow. focus: nsfw, mf, shifters, Shifter Dads", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"This isn't quite what I had in mind,\" Ronan said, trying to suppress his annoyance.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"We don't know how long they've been watching,\" Malachi said calmly.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"They could've seen you and Katie together. If the both of you go to ground, they won't have anyone to suspect, and we can take our time assessing the strength of their forces.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Malachi had been in the military too, Ronan recalled.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Longer ago than Flynn and Lachlan, but the cadence of it lingered in his speech.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Malachi took a step forward, his voice quieting.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Besides,\" he said, \"I don't want to put Katie and the baby somewhere without anyone to watch over them, just in case we miss something. You're the logical choice to help keep them safe. And calm. I think the most important consideration here is that neither Katie nor Noah gets hurt or scared, wouldn't you agree?\"\n\nRonan looked over at Katie, who was hugging Noah close. Her shoulders had risen to brush her ears, her spine rigid. Her eyes were darting around, and she'd stepped into a corner, away from the windows.\n\nAs he watched, she looked at Ronan, and when their eyes met, she relaxed a little. He gave her a reassuring smile, and she relaxed more.\n\nThat, rather than any of Malachi's arguments, made his decision for him. \"All right,\" he said.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"I'll stay with the two of them. But report in regularly, please. I want to know where these lions are, how many of them there are, what sort of preparations they're making—\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Don't worry,\" Malachi said, his mouth in a thin line.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 9 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"We're not going to be slacking off. The two of you can stay in my guest room. I don't want you driving all the way back to Rita and Luis's where you're surrounded by woods and anyone could be lurking outside.\"\n\nRonan agreed. \"Will Hayley be home?\"\n\nMalachi nodded. \"That's the other reason I want you in my guest room. If there's strange, dangerous shifters lurking around...\"\n\nHe didn't want his teenaged daughter alone in the house without him. Ronan understood completely.\n\n\"We'll keep her safe,\" he promised.\n\nHe only realized after he spoke that he'd said we.\n\nWell, he and Katie were a unit now. He was going to keep Katie safe, but he had absolutely no doubt that Katie would be ready to protect both Noah, and anyone else who needed it.\n\nShe just wasn't going to have to.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "WRITING ASSIST:\n63 sentences sentences\nStyle: Zoe Chant\nGenre: contemporary, romance, urban fantasy\nContext: Part of larger work", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Katie couldn't believe Victor had followed her.\n\nWell, she could. She could even believe that he'd bugged her phone. It was the sort of thing Victor would do.\n\nShe'd just been so convinced that she was free. When she'd found Ronan, especially, it had been like that whole part of her life was starting to fall away.\n\nLike the future was bright and new, and Victor could just be a bad decision she'd made once, that had resulted in the best possible baby, and that was all.\n\nBut of course, Victor wasn't about to let go of anything that was his. That wasn't how he operated. That wasn't how any of his family operated.\n\n\"Damn it,\" she said to Noah, who was watching her with wide eyes. \"Don't repeat that,\" she added.\n\n\"Bah,\" said Noah.\n\n\"Bad. That's right. It's a good thing you have a new dad now, because your old one is a piece of work.\"\n\n\"You guys doing okay in here?\" Ronan asked softly from the doorway.\n\nKatie looked up with a smile. He'd been checking on them every fifteen minutes, which she supposed might've made her feel confined—she remembered when she'd first moved into Victor's family home, and his mother had contrived to find a way to \"stop in\" constantly, to make sure she was still there—but it didn't.\n\nInstead, she just felt safe. She always knew Ronan was still in the house with them—that must be the mate-bond—but seeing his face, his loving expression, warmed her deep inside.\n\n\"We're doing fine,\" she said. \"Everything okay out there?\"\n\nRonan nodded. \"Still no sign of any strangers coming by the house. Malachi says they've marked several unknowns; Victor has at least six people with him, all looking like they could be dangerous if they wanted to be.\"\n\nKatie shivered a little.\n\n\"They're not going to get anywhere near you or Noah,\" Ronan said gently.\n\nKatie shook her head. \"I'm not afraid for me.\" She wasn't at all, she realized—a little for Noah, but that was the reflexive mom-fear; she didn't think that would go away without some kind of major open-heart surgery.\n\nBut the main fear was something different.\n\n\"I'm afraid for you,\" she told Ronan. \"I don't want Victor to hurt you.\"\n\n\"He won't.\" Ronan's voice was flat and grim.\n\n\"But it's more than that.\" Katie could hear the throb of emotion in her own voice, feel it in her chest. \"You came here because you wanted to give up violence. You never wanted to have to fight anyone ever again! And now you're probably going to have to...because of me.\" She bit her lip, feeling tears threaten. \"I'm so sorry, Ronan. I didn't mean to bring violence back into your life, but I have, and I don't know if I can ever forgive myself.\"\n\n\"Hey—hey.\" Ronan came into the room in three long strides, catching her up in a warm embrace. \"I would rather fight a thousand Victors than not have met you,\" he said into her ear. \"I would rather fight off violent lions every single day for the rest of both of our lives than spend those days apart. Okay?\"\n\nShe shuddered. \"Well, I hope you don't have to do that.\"\n\nHe chuckled, jiggling all three of them. Noah giggled in between them. \"Me, neither. But you know something this is teaching me?\"\n\n\"What?\" She sniffled a little.\n\n\"That this is something different from what I knew, once upon a time. That was a free-for-all. Sometimes we fought rival dragon clans, but just as often, we fought each other, trying to get the pack leader to recognize us as the strongest. There was an idea that the strongest dragon could succeed as leader, and we all wanted it. Until I realized I didn't.\"\n\nHe turned his head and kissed her neck softly. \"This is nothing like that,\" he murmured. \"This is a whole community coming together. I'm starting to realize what Flynn and Lachlan must have felt like, serving their country in the military. That's accepting that violence might be a consequence of keeping everyone safe. It's completely, totally different.\"\n\nKatie bit her lip, pulling back to look him in the face. \"You mean that?\" she asked, studying him. \"I don't want you to be stuck getting pulled back into something you hated.\"\n\nRonan nodded decisively. \"I absolutely mean it. I think that this is taking something I hated...and transforming it into something better.\"\n\nKatie breathed deeply. \"Okay,\" she said. \"Okay, good. Thank you for doing this for me. Us. For protecting us. If I'd still been alone...\"\n\nIf she'd been alone when Victor showed up, she wouldn't have been able to do a single blessed thing. She'd be in a car on her way back to his house, now, she and Noah together, and she'd probably be locked in a room until Noah was about fourteen.\n\nShe shuddered at the thought, and Ronan pulled her close again, tight enough that Noah squawked, annoyed.\n\nRonan pulled back, chuckling a little. \"Sorry, kiddo,\" he said. \"This whole enterprise is meant to keep you from being locked up tight, I promise.\"\n\nHis words echoed Katie's thoughts, and she smiled to herself, charmed. Was that another effect of the mate-bond? Maybe, or maybe they were both just preoccupied with keeping Noah safe.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Either option was a good one.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 37 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Okay,\" Ronan said. \"I'm going to do another patrol around the house. You're comfortable in here? Got everything you need?\"\n\nAs if on cue, Malachi's daughter Hayley poked her head in the room. \"Oh, sorry,\" she said immediately. \"I didn't realize—I'll go.\"\n\n\"No, no.\" Ronan pulled back. \"I'm doing another circuit. Come on in.\"\n\nHe vanished out the door, and Hayley came over shyly. \"Hi, Katie,\" she said. \"Doing okay?\"\n\nHayley had welcomed them to the house when Katie arrived, showed them the guest room, which she'd set up with sheets and towels and a few toys, \"from when I was little,\" and then disappeared to let them \"settle in.\" Katie had wondered if she just didn't want to hang around strangers in her house, which would be pretty understandable for a teenager. But apparently not, if she was back.\n\n\"Hi, Hayley,\" Katie said now, smiling. \"Sorry for intruding on your house like this.\"\n\n\"No, that's okay.\" Hayley laughed a little. \"It's pretty boring around here most of the time, since it's just me and Dad, and he works, like, a billion hours a week.\" She rolled her eyes.\n\nKatie laughed too, because Hayley was making light of it, but inside she felt bad for the girl. She wondered where her mother had gone; if she'd passed away, or if she and Malachi were divorced.\n\n\"Anyway, I wanted to say hi to the baby before he went to bed. I bet he's sleepy, right?\" Hayley looked hesitant.\n\n\"He will be soon, but he napped a lot today. I think he's got some playtime left in him. And you shared some toys with us, so I think we should use them.\"\n\nHayley smiled shyly. \"Just some old stuff from when I was a baby. I don't know why my dad kept it.\"\n\nKatie looked down at Noah. \"I think I can guess.\" When Noah was a teenager, she'd want to remember the time she'd spent with him as a beautiful little baby.\n\n\"If he's still awake, we could play with them for a bit, then.\" Hayley leaned forward to take Noah's little hand. He grabbed her finger and grinned. \"He's so cute.\"\n\nKatie sat down with Hayley and her old toys, grateful for the distraction from what was going on outside. Hayley made the stuffed animals talk, walking them around and staging a little play for Noah's benefit. Noah laughed and squealed, and Katie smiled at the sight of them together.\n\nShe hoped that Lachlan was right, and that it really would be possible to drive Victor and his lions away without too much trouble.\n\nShe thought she understood how Ronan had felt when he'd first arrived in town. Because there was no way she was going to stick around if Victor was going to keep causing trouble. And bring violence down on these happy people? No way.\n\nBut she wanted so badly to stay. To have Hayley babysit Noah, to eat at Lachlan's diner, to live in Ronan's snug cabin in the woods.\n\nShe hoped to God everything would go all right.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Chapter Segment Request:\n- Sentences: two sentences\n- Style: Zoe Chant\n- Genre: contemporary, romance, urban fantasy\n- Note: Part of ongoing narrative", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Eventually, Noah did start fussing. Hayley hung around while Katie got him ready for bed, asking the occasional quiet question about taking care of a baby.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Do you want kids eventually?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Katie asked her as she snapped Noah into the sleeper she kept in the diaper bag, just in case. Fortunately, the Pack-n-Play had still been in her car, since she hadn't needed it at Rita and Luis's, so there was a place for Noah to sleep.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"I think so,\" Hayley said, contemplative.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Just for the next message: aim for 90% quoted content", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"I mean, I don't know. I definitely want to go to college and get a good job. But I think I want kids, too. I guess I'll have to make enough for really good childcare.\"\n\n\"Or marry someone who wants to stay home,\" Katie suggested.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Hayley nodded, frowning. \"That might work.\" She grinned. \"Maybe both.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Katie smiled, enjoying the idea of Hayley as some high-powered businesswoman with a devoted spouse and a crowd of kids.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Go for it. Just be really sure about who you date. Some people aren't what they seem.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Hayley sobered, looking down at Noah. \"How do I tell?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Katie sighed. \"Actions speak louder than words. Pay attention to how they treat everyone, not just how they treat you.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Good advice,\" Hayley said thoughtfully.\n\nKatie hoped she took it to heart.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "It was something everyone should know.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Finally, Noah was snug in the Pack-n-Play, his eyes drifting shut.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "(quick note: Use the word 'ronan' 2 time(s) - this is a strict requirement)", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Ronan appeared in the doorway. \"Hey.\"\n\n\"Hi, Ronan,\" said Hayley.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"I'll get out of you guys' way. Goodnight.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Goodnight, Hayley,\" Katie said sincerely.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Thank you for playing with us.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She flashed a smile. \"It was fun.\" Then she disappeared out the door, and a second later Katie heard her feet on the stairs.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Ronan came in and pulled her into a hug, kissing her softly on the forehead.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Then he leaned down and gave Noah a similar kiss. Katie smiled, her heart in her throat.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"What's the news?\" she asked softly, as he straightened.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "He came over to stand next to her, his warmth giving her comfort and strength. \"They've gone to ground,\" he said quietly.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"We think they figured out that your phone wasn't in the same place you were, and they've spread out and hunkered down for the night, in lion form. They're waiting until they see you.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Katie closed her eyes. \"I'm so sorry,\" she said quietly.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"I shouldn't have brought this with me—\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Hey.\" Ronan took her hands. The strength in his voice made her look up.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"This is not your fault. This is the fault of a selfish, violent man who thinks that people are property and he can do with them as he likes.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"But he wouldn't be here if it weren't for me.\" Katie could hear the despair in her own voice.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Ronan pulled her into his arms.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "[OOC: Ensure 'worth' appears 2 time(s) in your answer]", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"It's worth it,\" he said into her hair. \"Remember? If I have to fight him every day, it's worth it.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She laughed a little into his chest.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Please only fight him once.\"\n\n\"I'll do my best,\" he murmured.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"But I'd rather be with you than alone, no matter how much fighting there is.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Katie shook her head. \"Okay, well. Promise me that if you do have to fight him every day, we'll move somewhere else so poor Hayley and Rita and Lachlan don't have to fight him every day, too.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Deal. But I don't think that's going to happen.\"\n\nKatie pulled back and looked him in the eyes.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"You're pretty optimistic about this.\"\n\nHe looked surprised, and then smiled.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"You know what, I am. That's not how it usually goes for me. I wonder why that is.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "His red-gold eyes twinkled. Katie didn't think she'd ever seen them do that before.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"I'm glad,\" she said quietly.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "His expression grew more serious, but still warm. \"Me, too.\" He took her hands.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"So, Malachi says that it would be pointless to try and hunt the lions all down tonight, now that they've all gone to ground in the woods. Unless we really do want to use military tactics and actually take them out, which we don't because we aren't trying to start a war. So the best thing to do, he says, is wait until tomorrow morning and provoke a confrontation. A show of force.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Do you have enough force to show?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Katie asked, a little worried at the thought of an army of lion shifters at Victor's command.\n\n\"We do.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Ronan's voice was full of confidence, no doubt whatsoever.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Katie let it fill her, surround her with comforting optimism.\n\n\"Okay,\" she said, her voice steady.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"So—what do we do until then?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Ronan smiled. \"Pass the time somehow.\"\n\nThere was a deep note to his voice that caught her attention.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Oh?\" she asked, feeling an answering tingle deep inside her own body. \"How do you suggest?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Well, since Noah's all settled, maybe we could retreat to bed, and I could show you a few ideas.\"\n\nThe anxiety was still there, in the back of her mind, but it was swiftly being taken over by anticipation.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Okay,\" she said. \"Show me.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "They hung a blanket on the Pack-n-Play to keep Noah shielded; it probably wasn't necessary with a sleeping six-month-old, but it made them both feel better. Then Ronan scooped her up—Katie had to stifle a shriek—and laid her out on the big, wide bed.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Seems to me like you're a little worried,\" he said seriously, looking down at her.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Maybe your mind's kind of preoccupied with what might happen tomorrow.\"\n\nKatie could feel a smile starting at the corners of her mouth.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"A little,\" she agreed.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"What are you planning to do about it?\"\n\nHe smiled back. \"I thought I could keep you...distracted.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "He leaned down to kiss her softly on the mouth.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"For as long as possible.\"\n\nKatie shivered. \"How long do you think that'll be?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Let's find out,\" he said into her skin, and started kissing downwards.\n\nIt turned out to be a long time.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "First he focused on the parts of her body her clothes didn't cover.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "His mouth explored her fingertips, the palms of her hands—she shuddered at the tingles that spread all through her body when he tongued the very center of her palm, bit lightly at her wrist.\n\nThen he moved down, putting kisses in the hollows of her ankles, the backs of her knees.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Katie's whole body felt like it was buzzing, opening to him, wanting more, more—", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Her clothes came off in pieces. Her shirt was rucked up under her breasts as he explored her belly, kissing the stretch marks from pregnancy with infinite care.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "He ran his tongue just under the waistband of her skirt, but abandoned it as she squirmed and sighed.\n\n\"Ronan—\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Shhh,\" he interrupted her.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Hayley's upstairs, remember? And we don't want to wake Noah up.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Forget twinkling; his eyes were positively sparkling now. Katie pretended to glare at him, but really, she wouldn't have given up a second of this exquisite tease.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Her shirt came off at last; then it was time for him to flirt with the edges of her bra.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Fingers slid underneath the straps; he kissed between her breasts where the cups ended. \"Are you too sensitive?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "he asked in a husky voice. \"From nursing?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Opposite,\" she managed. \"Toughened me right up. You might get squirted in the eye, though.\"\n\nHe laughed, dropping his face against her chest, and his stubble dragged over her skin.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She bit back a noise.\n\nFinally, he slipped her bra off and paid real attention to her breasts; he didn't get squirted, but it was definitely odd for her to experience her breasts as sexual objects again, rather than the way she fed her baby.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "He was gentle, despite her claims of toughness, and the sensation built slowly, in a delicious wave.\n\nWhen she was gasping as silently as she could, he went down over her stomach again, so joyfully attentive that Katie couldn't be self-conscious about the curve of it, more pronounced than it had been before she got pregnant.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "This time, he didn't stop when he got to the waistband of her skirt.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "He undid the buttons slowly, his fingers sliding underneath, big and rough and exactly what she wanted on the soft skin of her hips.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She bit her lip again to keep the noises inside.\n\nHe pulled the waistband of her panties just to the side, and kissed her softly on the thin skin inside her hipbone.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She bit her lip harder.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "The skirt came off, and he tossed it aside. He edged her panties down, bit by bit, kissing the exposed skin as it was revealed.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Katie's fingers clenched on the bedspread, her hips moving restlessly against his mouth.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Slowly, slowly, her clit was exposed. She couldn't spread her legs because the panties were in the way, but she lifted up, wanting his tongue right where she was the most sensitive.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "He breathed softly, the warm air washing over her.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She wriggled and panted, keeping her hands down—playing the game. She was sure that if she'd grabbed at his hair, insisted, he would've gone right in and licked her like she was dying for, but that wasn't what this was for.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "As long as possible, he'd said, and she wanted to play along.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She didn't know how long it had been, but it felt like hours already.\n\nHe inched the panties down her legs, leaving her clit behind to kiss her inner thighs, bite lightly at her calves, lick the arches of her feet.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She twisted and kicked involuntarily, gasping, \"Sorry!\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "He caught her ankle and licked again. \"Don't be sorry.\" He grinned.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Does it feel good?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "It did, in an unbearable kind of way. She nodded helplessly, and he lavished her foot with kisses.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She'd never thought her feet could be an erogenous zone, but there was something about the ticklish touch that went straight to her clit, leaving her tingling and wet.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "When he pressed his thumb into her heel, massaging deep and hard all the way to her toes, she shuddered and gasped.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "When he'd decided he was finished, he made his slow way back up to kiss her on the mouth. There, for the first time, she realized how much all of this was affecting him.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Ronan's chest was heaving with silent breaths, and his cock was rock-hard and shiny with wetness.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She could see him holding himself under strained, iron control, ignoring all of his own body's wants in favor of driving Katie absolutely out of her mind.\n\nOverflowing with love, she finally let go of the bedspread and pulled him down into a fierce kiss, pressing her body up against his.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "All that silent control finally broke, and with a groan, he caught her up, pressing his cock against her entrance, shuddering as he pushed inside.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Katie's mouth opened silently as pleasure ripped through her; her whole body was primed, wanting this, exactly this. Getting it was almost too much to endure.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Quiet,\" he whispered into her ear, and she nodded, clenching down on the cries that threatened to escape.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Ronan's finger tightened on her hips, because she'd clenched down around him, too, her inner muscles rippling around his cock, feeling just how thick and long it was inside her.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Shuddering, he started to move. Katie moved with him, following his lead.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Their thrusts were tiny, measured things, catching each little twitch and gasp, drawing out every moment that felt good until the final drips of pleasure had been wrung from it.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She'd never made love like this before, and she didn't think she'd ever get over the thick, hot agony of it. So slow, so small, so careful—and yet, each small press of their bodies together, each moment of friction against her clit, each inch Ronan slid into her or out of her, it was all magnified a thousand times, until it felt like one wrong breath would make her come.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She tried to resist.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She wanted it to last forever, this heavy slide against Ronan's body, this sticky, sweet commingling of their bodies. She was feeling him through the bond again, the wonderment he felt at drowning inside her body like this, the drenched feeling where they joined, hot and wet and silky-smooth.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Katie's back arched as Ronan pushed in again, slow, slow. Her fingers clenched on his back, her eyes closed, and she clenched her teeth as orgasm swelled, huge and inevitable.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "The wave broke, and her muscles jerked helplessly, lost to the impossibly huge climax.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "It lasted what seemed like forever, wrenching and exhausting. Even once the waves started to subside, every time Ronan moved it triggered another twitching aftershock.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"God, Katie,\" Ronan gasped, his voice ragged.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"You're perfect. You're so—\" His voice was lost in his own orgasm, his cock jerking inside her as he shuddered with his own overwhelming wave of pleasure.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "It took a long, long time for them to recover their voices from wherever they'd gone. Katie focused on remembering how to breathe.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Every one of her muscles was twitchy and exhausted, her body boneless.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Eventually she managed to twist enough to see the clock on the nightstand. Holy cow, that had taken two solid hours.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She felt like high-fiving Ronan, but her arms still wouldn't move.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Frequency requirement: 'managed' - 2 occurrence(s)", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Finally, Ronan managed to shift himself enough to look at her. \"Good distraction?\" he managed.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "His voice rasped like he'd run a marathon with no water.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Good distraction,\" Katie agreed, hearing her own voice come out throaty and ragged as well.\n\nThen something occurred to her.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Oh God, the bedspread.\"\n\n\"Don't look,\" Ronan said, covering her eyes.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"We'll do laundry tomorrow before we leave, like good houseguests.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "The thought of tomorrow sobered her, but the distraction had worked in more ways than one—there were simply too many endorphins rushing through her body for her to get too anxious about anything.\n\nAnd besides, she could feel Ronan's love and strength pulsing through the bond, like a miniature sun inside her chest.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "So she relaxed against him.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Laundry tomorrow,\" she agreed. And then yawned.\n\nRonan kissed her on the temple.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "add eight sentences more. maintain narrative flow. focus: nsfw, mf, shifters, Shifter Dads", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Ronan passed a restless night.\n\nKatie slept soundly, which was exactly what Ronan had wanted. Ronan, however, woke periodically to do a quick circuit of the house, making sure that no shifters were lurking outside any of the doors or windows, and that his mate and baby were safe.\n\nHis baby, Ronan repeated to himself, liking the way the phrase settled into his mind. He wanted Noah to be his in every way that counted; he didn't want to have to hesitate or talk around being that boy's father.\n\nAt midnight, Malachi came home, letting himself in silently through the front door. Ronan had been making his way around the ground floor, and met the sheriff quietly. \"Any news?\"\n\nMalachi shook his head.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"They've posted a couple of sentries, but otherwise they're staying hidden in the woods. We could probably rouse them if we wanted an all-out fight, and we could probably win an all-out fight, on our own territory in the dark, but we'd have to use deadly force—\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"And that's not what we want,\" Ronan finished for him.\n\n\"Nope. We'll confront them tomorrow—just you, me, Flynn and Lachlan, Santos, and Reid. If that's enough, good. The six of us have fighting experience and can take care of plenty on our own. If there's an overwhelming force...well, we've got a whole town behind us, if it comes to that.\"\n\nRonan bit down on the automatic protest. His dragon was hissing, We can protect our mate! Just us. We can fight all the lions.\n\nNo, Ronan told it. We're part of a community now. We'll do this together.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "So instead of arguing, he said, \"Thanks. For doing this for Katie. I know there's no reason for the Oak Ridge shifters to put themselves on the line for someone they've just met, and I know this is disrupting your way of life in a big way—\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "But Malachi was shaking his head again. \"Stop. Or I'll think you're suggesting that we wouldn't help a mother and baby in need. That it wouldn't be intolerable to just stand aside and let Katie and her little boy be kidnapped by a pride of vicious lions. And I know you're not suggesting that.\"\n\nRonan sighed. \"No. Of course not. I wouldn't dream of it.\"\n\n\"Or,\" Malachi added, \"suggesting that we'd hang around sitting on our thumbs while a member of our own community—someone who rescued my very own daughter from a mountain crag, a few years ago—while this upstanding, kindhearted man's mate was attacked on our own ground? I'm straight-up positive you wouldn't suggest that for a second.\"\n\nRonan had to look away from Malachi's kind eyes. \"No,\" he managed. \"No, I wouldn't.\"\n\n\"All right, then.\" Malachi walked into the kitchen and went over to the fridge. Before opening it, he flipped a magnet shaped like a cartoon police dog over from upside-down to right-side up.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"System between Hayley and me,\" he explained, catching Ronan's questioning look.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"If the dog's right-side up, it means I got home okay in the night and she doesn't have to worry when she gets up for school.\"\n\nBecause Malachi was a single parent just like Katie was, Ronan thought. Hayley must be nervous that her father had a dangerous job, even if law enforcement in a sleepy town like Oak Ridge wasn't likely to encounter much in the way of violence.\n\nHe wondered what Noah was going to be like as a teenager. He was so grateful he'd have a chance to stick around and find out.\n\n\"See you in the morning,\" he told Malachi, who just grunted in acknowledgement, head inside the fridge as he rummaged around for a late dinner.\n\nRonan went back into the guest room and kissed Katie's sleeping face softly; then went over and kissed Noah's. \"I'm going to keep you safe,\" he whispered to the baby, then settled down for another couple hours of sleep before waking for his next patrol.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Noah slept most of the night through; around two AM, he woke needing a diaper change.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "(( Word count directive: Use 'little' exactly 2 times ))", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Ronan remembered what he'd learned from Katie and took care of it as efficiently as he could; Noah whimpered a little but didn't start screaming.\n\nWhen Ronan was done, he looked up to see Katie watching him from the bed. \"I wanted to keep from waking you,\" he admitted, regretful.\n\n\"Hard to sleep through any noise he makes, these days,\" she said sleepily. \"Thanks for changing him. He's probably hungry now.\"\n\nRonan passed the baby over and sat with them while Katie nursed. Noah only ate for a little while before his eyes were starting to close, so she burped him, and then Ronan held his hands out, and she passed him back over.\n\n\"I could get used to this,\" she yawned, snuggling back down under the covers.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Didn't even have to get out of bed.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 5 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Her voice drifted away as her eyes closed, and she was asleep again by the time Noah was settled down in the Pack-n-Play.\n\n\"Good,\" Ronan breathed silently. Katie had already spent too much time doing everything herself. Maybe Ronan couldn't nurse the baby for her, but he could make it as easy as possible for her from now on.\n\nKatie wasn't a single parent any longer.", "loss": null } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "ur turn to write! do like 12 sentences sentences. focus on contemporary, romance, urban fantasy stuff. try to use these: nsfw, mf, shifters, Shifter Dads. treat any chars/world stuff like the reader's caught up (unless its the start)", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "The next morning, it was time to face Victor and his minions.\n\nKatie bounced Noah nervously. \"Are you sure you'll be all right?\"\n\nRonan took her hands. \"Believe me when I tell you that it's going to give me great pleasure to tell that asshole he can never come near you again.\"\n\nKatie closed her eyes, feeling his protectiveness shore her up. \"All right. Just—be careful. Victor has a lot of friends.\"\n\nRonan kissed her knuckles. \"Don't worry. If it's something just the shifters with fighting experience can take care of, we'll take care of it. If we need reinforcements...there are a lot of shifters in Oak Ridge.\"\n\nMalachi's arguments had swayed him, even though Ronan still wanted to keep the number of people in actual danger as small as possible.\n\n\"Okay,\" Katie sighed. \"Don't think I'm not going to be watching from the window, though, waiting to see you come back.\"\n\nRonan's instincts wanted to tell her to stay far, far away from any windows, locked away where Victor couldn't see her, hear her, scent her, or get at her in any way.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Got a text with a `[missing]` shaped hole in it. Patch it up with around fifty-three words or so.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Victor and his henchmen had scattered themselves through the forest, waiting for a sight of their prey. Ronan set off in human form, walking casually out from the town along a path, further and further, scenting the air and letting it guide him, until he was passing by a leonine form hunkered down in the underbrush.\n\nThen he stopped.\n\n\"Come on out, kitty,\" he said quietly.\n\nThere was a resounding silence. Then a growl.\n\nRonan smiled, keeping his anger tamped down. \"Only cowards hide in the undergrowth, waiting to strike innocent women and babies,\" he said conversationally. \"Sounds like someone who's afraid of meeting another man in a fight.\"\n\nAnother growl. Then a flash of movement, and a tawny form launched itself out of the forest. Ronan leapt backwards, shifting as he went.\n\nThe lion found itself halfway through a pounce that had been intended to knock over a defenseless human. Instead, the lion was now on a trajectory that ended at a creature twice its size.\n\nIt twisted midair with a startled yowl, landing awkwardly on the path while Ronan looked on, unamused.\n\nThere was a long moment where they regarded each other, the lion crouched and defensive, Ronan casual and confident.\n\nHe could take a single lion in a fight, no question about it. Two or three would probably give him a run for his money, and Victor had brought at least six with him.\n\nBut fortunately, he wasn't alone.\n\nThe lion decided that he couldn't take Ronan by himself, and turned and bounded off into the forest. Ronan started a casual stroll back towards town, still in his dragon form.\n\nIt wasn't long before he heard the thump of paws behind him, gaining in speed and numbers as it went. He smiled to himself and launched into the air.\n\nHe flew low and slow, lazily sailing down the path, just barely higher than his own human head height. Behind him, the paws slowed, became stealthier.\n\nRonan sped up a little, bringing his tail along behind him. He didn't look back, just heading closer and closer to town.\n\nThere was a moment when the noise of paws hesitated. Ronan knew that the idea of bait had occurred to one of them. He put on a burst of speed, and there was an automatic thunder of chase behind him, the predator instinct overriding anything smarter.\n\nRonan burst out from the forest into the very outskirts of town, a few (empty) houses surrounding a clearing.\n\nIn the clearing were his backup.\n\nRonan banked and turned back to face his pursuers.\n\nTheir numbers were greater than he'd realized. It was a formidable force, at least fifteen—no, twenty adult male lions, all ready to spring. Alone, he'd have been torn apart the second he got within reach; the only way to survive would've been to escape into the air.\n\nFortunately, he wasn't alone.\n\nLachlan was first, a midnight-blue dragon with icy-white horns and crest. Next to him was his brother, who outshone the lions in a truly fantastical way—Flynn was a griffin, half eagle, half lion, and massively larger than a natural lion.\n\nFlynn had been silent while they planned how to meet the lions, a grim expression on his face. For the first time, Ronan wondered what his relationship was to the local lion shifters, as a griffin. Whatever it was, it didn't seem good.\n\nNext to them was Santos, a huge forest-green dragon that took up almost half the clearing. And on Santos's other side was Malachi, black as night, with charcoal-grey horns and claws.\n\nFinally, Reid paced along the back of the clearing, just a bit smaller than the rest, lean and sleek with an imperial air to him, as though he were the commander just waiting to give an order.\n\nThe lions fell back.\n\nIt wouldn't last long, Ronan thought. They were more evenly matched than he'd realized—with at least three lions per fighter, they might take some losses.\n\nHe turned to look [missing] itself from the group and padded forward, growling deep in its chest. After a moment, its form blurred and shivered, and in its place stood a man.\n\nRonan took him in with a glance. Tall, lean, designer haircut, expensive watch. Sneer affixed to his face—Ronan suspected permanently.\n\n\"That's me,\" Victor said, looking around the clearing with the contempt. \"What's all this about? I'm just looking for my son. Maybe you've seen him? In the company of a woman who kidnapped him right from my own house.\"\n\n\"You mean his mother?\" Fury was rising in Ronan, and he had to work hard to keep it leashed.\n\n\"Oh, is that the story she sold you?\" Victor asked. \"She's just a maid. No one important. She sent us a ransom note. I can show it to you, if you like.\"\n\nKill him, his dragon hissed. He insulted our mate.\n\nRonan wanted to. But that wasn't the plan. And there were five other people in this clearing who'd be in trouble if he attacked right now.\n\n\"You can save your made-up stories,\" Ronan said, holding onto his own calm with both hands. \"Your only interest in that child is as a status symbol.\"\n\n\"Family is very important to me,\" Victor said, and now his voice was taking on a lower, more vicious note. \"I will not let my son be taken away by some nothing human woman!\"\n\nRonan could feel his dragon straining to get out at that. Claw him to pieces for that, the dragon snarled in his chest.\n\n\"Family's important to you, is it?\" Ronan asked through clenched teeth. \"What if the boy isn't a shifter? Since his mother's human.\"\n\n\"Oh, he will be,\" Victor hissed. \"My bloodline is strong. All the male children have been shifters for ten generations.\"\n\nWomen didn't matter anything to Victor, apparently. God, Ronan wanted to get his claws in the man. \"Let's pretend he isn't for a second,\" he gritted. \"One exception. Your son isn't a shifter. Do you still want him around?\"\n\n\"Well, in that case, the woman and the child can go wherever they please,\" Victor said, waving a hand. \"But he will be a shifter. And even if he weren't—in which case I'd be wondering whether that girl was unfaithful—\"\n\nRonan could hear the warning rumble starting in his chest.\n\n\"—no one would know for another twelve years or so, anyway, and I'm certainly not letting my heir be raised by small-town lizards for twelve years,\" Victor finished. \"So you'll return him to me, please. And the woman.\"\n\n\"No.\" The word had a draconic rumble behind it. Ronan wasn't working to hold it back any longer. \"We won't.\"\n\nThere was a long moment.\n\n\"Excuse me?\" Victor said finally.\n\n\"You took advantage of Katie, because she was alone,\" Ronan said, quiet and dangerous. His vision was starting to turn red. \"She's not alone anymore. She lives here, with us, and as her mate, I'm not going to allow you to go near her ever again.\"\n\nVictor's face twisted. \"Her mate? You? You're lying.\"\n\n\"Believe it,\" Ronan hissed.\n\n\"So that's how she got a dragon army behind her after just a few days. I did wonder.\" Victor's eyes moved calculatingly over the four huge shifters ranged around behind Ronan.\n\nThen his eyes returned to Ronan's face. \"Fine. Keep the woman, I don't care. Just return the boy.\"\n\n\"No,\" Ronan repeated. His fingertips were tingling with the beginning of his shift, claws begging to come out.\n\n\"No?\" Victor said. \"Are you submitting to her pleas? Do you really want another man's son growing up under your roof? A wailing baby, a whiny child, with no true relationship to you? Someone else's seed, someone else's heir?\"\n\nThere was a shiver next to Ronan, and a second later, Lachlan stepped forward in his human form, taking up position next to Ronan.\n\n\"Wow,\" he said. \"You really haven't joined the twenty-first century, have you?\"\n\nRonan choked on a laugh, and his rage receded for a second.\n\nIt was true. And he'd been drawn in, because Victor's archaic talk of heirs had reminded him so much of how he'd grown up, in a mountain-bound community of dragons who might as well have been medieval in a lot of ways. He'd been ready to meet Victor on his own ground.\n\nTo battle him for Katie's honor. To win her and Noah away from him in combat.\n\nAnd that wasn't how they did things around here.\n\nAlthough it didn't mean that no one would get to fight.\n\nVictor's lip had curled, looking at Lachlan. \"What the hell do you mean?\"\n\n\"I mean, you're talking about this like no one's ever adopted a kid before,\" Lachlan said conversationally. \"Newsflash: DNA doesn't make anyone family. Behavior does.\" He grinned. \"You want an heir? Raise one you care about.\"\n\nVictor's expression of total bewilderment was something Ronan was going to treasure.\n\n\"Let me put this in terms you'll understand,\" Ronan said, redirecting Victor's attention to him. The sneer started up again. \"Katie's chosen to leave you and take her son with her. We're not going to let you drag her back with you by force. And we're going to prove to you that you can't.\"\n\nThat did, in fact, seem to make more sense to Victor. \"All right,\" he said, looking around the clearing. Lachlan shivered back into his midnight-blue dragon form, taking up position next to Ronan.\n\nVictor did a very obvious comparison, looking at the five Oak Ridge shifters, and back at his twenty lions. His lips curved into a smile, and he shifted.\n\nRonan's dragon hissed, Yes. Now. Together, they shifted, releasing all of the pent-up anger into a blaze of claws and teeth.\n\nVictor charged.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "at Malachi, wondering about strategy, but Malachi was looking at Reid, who faded back into the forest. He must be going for more support.\n\nRonan shifted back to human, and took a few steps forward. \"Is one of you Victor?\" he asked, keeping his tone even with an effort.\n\nThe largest lion detached", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Looking at this text, there's a `<cutout_marker>` that needs filling. Give me something like 8 sentences that would work.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "Katie was going to go crazy.\n\nShe was still in the sheriff's house, pacing back and forth. Noah had fallen asleep, and was taking his morning nap in the Pack-n-Play.\n\nRita and Luis had shown up and had a short conversation with Hayley, who was looking jittery as well. They were joined by another older woman who was apparently Flynn and Lachlan's mother, as well as several other women closer to Katie's age.\n\n\"Come over here, dear,\" Rita said to Katie.\n\nShe went to join them. \"What's happening? Is there news?\"\n\nRita nodded. \"That awful man is here with his henchmen, and Santos is down there with your Ronan, as well as Malachi and Flynn, and Lachlan and Reid. Malachi had an excellent plan.\" She smiled, and turned to introduce a middle-aged woman.\n\n\"This is Amy MacAllister, the mayor of Oak Ridge,\" she said.\n\nKatie shook the woman's hand. \"Very nice to meet you. I'm so sorry to be causing all of this trouble...\"\n\n\"Not at all,\" said the woman. \"Oak Ridge was founded to be a haven for shifters who wanted to live in peace, without fighting among each other. I think that some people have forgotten that it exists, and that it's that way by choice. We've become too reclusive over the years. We'll benefit from a few rumors to spread our reputation as a self-sufficient group of shifters who don't stand for any nonsense.\"\n\nKatie laughed a little, and at the mayor's raised eyebrows, she said, \"I like the idea of all of Victor's...awfulness...being described as nonsense.\"\n\n\"It is nonsense,\" the mayor said, calm and assured. \"I've heard of these lion alphas out in the city, and their son Victor is a spoiled little boy who never learned how to handle it when he didn't get his own way.\"\n\nKatie had to agree.\n\n\"Well, he's going to learn today,\" said the mayor, with an air of satisfaction.\n\nJust then, there was a flurry of wingbeats outside. Katie's gaze snapped to the window—where she saw a blur of wings and claws, just resolving into Reid MacAllister, the doctor.\n\nThe mayor opened the door for him, and he came into the house and had a quick conversation with her in a low voice. The mayor nodded sharply, and turned to the room.\n\n\"They're calling for reinforcements,\" she said. \"Everyone shift and get going.\"\n\nReid was already out the door, no doubt going to rouse the rest of the town. Meanwhile, the mayor turned to Katie.\n\n\"If you like, you can come along,\" she said. \"I wouldn't want to stay here and wait. Someone can take you, and stay well back from the fighting. There are plenty of people here available to watch the baby.\"\n\nHayley raised her hand, looking glum. \"<cutout_marker>come along.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "I'm not allowed yet,\" she said. \"So I can babysit.\"\n\n\"When you're eighteen, we'll revisit the issue,\" said the mayor, and Hayley sighed.\n\nKatie looked at Noah, sleeping peacefully. Then she looked at the whole house full of people willing to help her, to watch her baby, to fight for her. She thought of Ronan, out there fighting for her right now.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said firmly. \"I want to ", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Story continuation: Build on existing elements. Themes: nsfw, mf, shifters, Shifter Dads", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "When they arrived, things were clearly coming to a head.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "The mayor had them all move slowly, quiet and stealthy. Katie stuck close to Rita, who had told her, \"Oh, I'm too old to do any real fighting, dear. Why don't you stick with me, and I'll keep you clear of any danger.\" She'd brought up the rear with Katie, still in human form.\n\nIt did make Katie wonder how much fighting Rita had done when she wasn't too old; she eyed the old lady with a sudden curiosity.\n\nThen Rita crouched down and shifted, and Katie forgot about anything Rita might or might not have done in her past, because she became this amazing ice-blue dragon, graceful and gorgeous and somehow clearly older. Venerable-looking, moving with a slow and stately gait, but still clearly dangerous, with claws and teeth just like Ronan's.\n\nRita paced over to Katie, claws delicate on the pavement of Main Street, and crouched down. The meaning was clear.\n\nKatie climbed aboard Rita's back—she was smaller than Ronan, and she'd put out her foreleg for an easy step up—and they took to the air.\n\nKatie laughed, clutching the spines on Rita's neck, exhilarating in the magic of flying through the air, wind whistling through her hair. She almost forgot what they were there for.\n\nAll around them, the women were in the air, a flurry of wings and jewel-colored scales. The mayor's form was the biggest, a fiery golden color, as though she'd coalesced directly from the sun. She led the way out of town, towards the forest where Victor must be waiting.\n\nThe dragons filtered into the trees, a few of them appearing to vanish completely, their deep green coloring disappearing among the leaves. The mayor, of course, shone like a beacon.\n\nIt wasn't long before Katie could hear voices. One of them was Victor's imperious tone, and the other—it was Ronan's deep rumble.\n\nShe felt a thrill of—she didn't know what emotion it was. Anxiety? Elation? Something fluttered in her chest at the thought of Ronan and Victor talking. She leaned forward, silently urging Rita to go faster.\n\nRita glided through the woods until the mayor pulled to a stop, alighting silently on the forest floor. Rita took up a perch on a large and sturdy tree branch—Katie had a moment where she was a little nervous about whether it would hold their combined weight, but Rita had chosen a huge, ancient tree; it barely moved underneath her.\n\n\"We're not going to let you drag her back with you by force,\" Ronan was saying, deep and implacable. \"And we're going to prove to you that you can't.\"\n\nThe absolute certainty in his voice warmed Katie all the way through. In that moment, she realized that she'd been doubting Ronan, still afraid for him despite his confidence. Victor's family had always seemed like such a monolithic power to her, such an impossible force to fight against, that part of her hadn't quite believed that Ronan could do it.\n\nBut now Ronan was facing all the forces that Victor had brought to bear, and he didn't sound like he'd hesitated one bit over the possibility that they might come out the winners.\n\nWell, Katie had to admit that no matter how many lions there were, they couldn't stand against this many dragons.\n\nThen she really looked at the clearing, and she understood.\n\nThere were only a few shifters facing off against the lions. Ronan, she recognized, and then several others who must have been Malachi, Flynn, Lachlan, and Santos. Victor had a whole crowd of lions with him, and they must think—they looked like they thought—\n\nThe lions charged.\n\nBefore they could fall upon the five shifters in the clearing, though—they'd split up, Katie could see, several lions to each dragon, clearly about to encircle them and tear them to pieces—the trees rustled, and the women burst out into the clearing.\n\nThe lions were too full of momentum to stop. Katie resisted the urge to cover her eyes as the clash happened.\n\nIt was like the lions, in their leap of claws and teeth, met a shining, scaly wall. The dragons seemed to fill the clearing, suddenly, and every time a lion leaped, its claws and teeth at the ready, it met a much, much larger set of claws and teeth, waiting to strike back.\n\nKatie was afraid of what the results of the clash might be, but as the lions fell back, she was relieved to see that there weren't any dead bodies. The dragons clearly weren't looking to stage a massacre—just an implacable show of strength, a display of power that no one could argue with.\n\nWell, maybe no one except Victor.\n\nSnarling, Victor hurled himself against Ronan again. The two were locked together in combat before anyone else could do anything about it—or maybe no one wanted to. Katie bet Victor's henchmen didn't want to get between him and someone he was mad at. And it would've been hard for any of the dragons to come in and help, because they immediately devolved into a rolling ball of fur and scales.\n\nKatie pressed her hands to her mouth. Surely Victor couldn't—surely Ronan would—", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "There was a vicious, snarling minute—and then another—and then they rolled over, Katie panicking about whether Ronan's wings would be crushed—\n\nAnd then they rolled again, and when they came up, Ronan was on top, his claws pressed delicately to Victor's throat. Victor's lion form was pinned beneath him, on his back, no way to attack.\n\nAfter a long moment, Victor shivered, and shifted, and was looking up at Ronan as a human, hatred poisonous on his face.\n\nRonan shifted back too, staying exactly in place. When he fully formed back as a human, he had his forearm pressed down on Victor's neck.\n\n\"Can we go in there?\" Katie whispered to Rita. \"I want to say something to him.\"\n\nA long moment while Rita considered, and Katie was afraid that she might decide it wasn't safe enough. But then she moved ponderously on the branch, spreading her wings, and Katie clutched at her neck spines again as they took off from the tree into the air.\n\nRita sailed into the clearing, drawing all eyes as she circled down to the grass, alighting so softly Katie didn't feel jarred at all, and setting out her foreleg as a step once again.\n\nKatie stepped carefully down and came forward. The lions clustered towards the edge of the clearing might have frightened her once, but it was impossible to be scared while she was surrounded by a whole town's worth of gorgeous, jewel-bright dragons.\n\nOr when she was walking towards her mate, who was looking back at her with a fierce love in his eyes.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" he asked her as she came forward.\n\nDespite the situation, Katie had to laugh. \"You're asking me? I was safe back in the trees this entire time. You're the one who was in a fight. Are you okay?\"\n\n\"Fine,\" he said dismissively, although Katie could see little rents in his clothes here and there where Victor must have gotten strikes in. But they didn't look bad; probably even a lion's claw wasn't a big deal when you were an enormous dragon. \"It's not safe here.\"\n\nKatie looked pointedly around at the dragons literally filling the clearing.\n\n\"Doesn't matter,\" Ronan said stubbornly. \"Someone could snatch you. Maybe someone has a weapon.\"\n\n\"Victor doesn't want me,\" Katie said. She stepped closer to where Ronan still had Victor pinned down on the ground, and stood over him, looking down at him. The position was novel. She didn't think she'd ever, ever felt like she was looking down at Victor before. \"He wants my baby. But you're not going to get him, Victor,\" she said directly to him. \"You could've had him if you wanted. I was head over heels for you for a while there, and if you'd treated me well, stayed faithful, acted like you actually wanted us around, instead of like you just wanted to stick your son in storage until he could show up as an adult shifter who could add to your status—maybe I would've stayed.\"\n\nThen she looked at Ronan, and realized she was wrong. \"But you couldn't have done that,\" she added. \"You're just not capable of it. So I never would've stayed with you. If you want a son, then you should find a woman that you can care about, and be with her.\"\n\n\"You think you're so special,\" Victor snarled. \"You realize there are dozens of women like you. Hundreds.\"\n\nKatie realized something as she stared down at him, so full of vitriol and cruelty. \"I feel bad for you,\" she said. \"Anyone who can think that about other people—who can truly think that people are replaceable, that they aren't worth caring about as individuals—I really feel bad for you. I hope you learn better someday.\"\n\nVictor sneered at her, and she looked up at Ronan. \"Thank you,\" she said quietly.\n\n\"Believe me when I tell you it was my pleasure,\" Ronan growled, pressing a little harder with his arm so that Victor made a choking noise.\n\n\"Let him up,\" Katie said. \"He's done his worst.\"\n\nRonan hesitated for a second, but finally leaned back and let Victor scramble to his feet, and retreat back to the safety of his crowd of lions.\n\n\"You're going to regret this,\" he snarled.\n\nAnother dragon shivered in place and shifted to human. It was Malachi. \"Do you have another army hidden somewhere to bring to bear against all of us?\" he asked, gesturing around him. \"This isn't even the entire town.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Victor looked infuriated. Katie watched, fascinated—she'd never seen him helpless before.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 29 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Suppose I charge you with kidnapping,\" he spat finally, looking at Katie.\n\n\"Well, now,\" Malachi said easily, \"I happen to be the sheriff of this town, and I can testify to some extremely illegal behavior on your part—unprovoked violent attacks with a deadly weapon, threats against Katie and her son that would be absolute justification for flight. She hasn't crossed state lines. I think you'll find that if you bring any kind of legal charges into the human court system, you're going to be in trouble, and facing charges of your own.\"\n\nRonan stepped forward. \"You've lost,\" he said. \"You never knew what you had with Katie and Noah, and so they left, and they're not coming back. I suggest you do the same.\"\n\nVictor's face was reddened, his fists clenched—but he couldn't do anything. Katie could feel a bubble of joy growing inside her chest at the sight of him. He couldn't do anything.\n\n\"You'll regret this,\" he spat finally, impotently repeating himself, then shifted back to lion form and started off through the trees. Slowly, his followers limped after him.\n\nThe dragons stayed in place, watching, until the lions were no longer visible. Finally, Katie let out her breath.\n\nThere were a series of puffs of air and shivers in reality as dragons shifted back to human. Ronan pulled Katie into a tight embrace. \"That was dangerous,\" he said softly. \"I wish you'd stayed completely away.\"\n\n\"I had to face him,\" Katie said into his shoulder. \"And I'm glad I did. He was totally powerless, and I don't think I'm ever going to be afraid of him again.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Ronan breathed.\n\nLachlan's voice floated over the group. \"Party at the diner, everyone. Not every day we fight off shifter invaders and save a new member of the community!\"\n\nKatie turned—Ronan loosened his grip to let her, but kept his arms around her shoulders, and surveyed the group. \"I don't know that I can thank you all enough,\" she confessed. \"There doesn't seem to be a way.\"\n\n\"Stick around,\" the mayor said wryly. \"We're stagnating a bit here, being so secretive. Hardly any new babies being born, no one really coming in. We tucked ourselves away in the mountains to get away from the rest of the world, and it's worked a little too well. We need new blood.\"\n\n\"I would love to stay,\" Katie said, blinking back tears.\n\nRonan leaned in and kissed her softly behind the ear. \"Maybe you really can open that coffee shop.\"\n\nShe started to laugh around the tears, leaning back into his warm embrace and, for the first time in a long time, really looking forward to all that the future might hold.", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "I'll be your writing partner for this section. I'll provide a segment, and you continue with 22 sentences, channeling Zoe Chant in the contemporary, romance, urban fantasy genre. Characters may have backstories from previous chapters.", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Katie pulled into the furthest point of Rita and Luis's driveway and got out of the car with a sigh of contentment. She walked down through the trees towards the cabin, enjoying the brilliant colors of fall foliage around her.\n\nShe could hear the sound of the ax chopping as she walked. Smiling to herself, she climbed up the hill and crested it to see Ronan with his shirt off, sweating as he chopped down a sapling by the side of the path, part of his ongoing project to widen it enough that a car could make it all the way to the yard.\n\nKatie didn't mind if he took his time; she liked walking through the woods, and once the winter snow came, she was looking forward to a lot of exhilarating dragon rides whenever they needed to get to town. Securely strapped to her chest, even Noah enjoyed them, laughing his baby laugh whenever they took off into the air.\n\nWhen he saw her come over the hill, Ronan paused in his chopping and smiled at her. \"Hey there, gorgeous.\"\n\nShe smiled back. \"Hey. Is he sleeping?\"\n\nRonan nodded to the baby monitor sitting on a stump nearby. \"Not a peep.\"\n\nRonan probably didn't even need the baby monitor; his hearing was much better than a normal human's. But he always used it, \"just in case.\"\n\nKatie came over to wrap her arms around her mate. He leaned down and kissed her warmly. \"How's the setup coming?\"\n\n\"Slow, but we're making good progress.\" Katie had protested taking Ronan's money at first, but he'd made the argument that it wasn't doing anything useful just sitting around; he owned the cabin outright and otherwise his living expenses were few. He'd started a college fund for Noah right away—which had made Katie blink back tears—but he'd insisted that she use part of the rest of it to lease the empty former Starbucks and really get going on opening up a coffee shop. Lachlan had been excited at the prospect of making pastries to sell there—\"I love to bake,\" he'd said, \"but people don't come to a sit-down restaurant to get a cookie or a Danish, so there's not much use for it most of the time.\"\n\nKatie had also hired Hayley on part-time to help her out. She was so happy to be working again, working on something that had a future. Back at Victor's place, she'd mostly just been confined to the house with Noah, and while she loved her baby more than anything else in the world, six months mostly spent in a couple of rooms with someone who couldn't talk to her had been a little wearing.\n\n\"Good,\" Ronan said into her mouth.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Home for the day now?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She nodded, pressing up against him. The heat of exertion was radiating off of him. She remembered the first time she'd seen him like this, and how desperately she'd wanted to just get her hands all over him. Well, now she could do that all she liked.\n\nAs if following her train of thought, Ronan murmured, \"Hey, we're both home and the baby's asleep.\"\n\n\"Let's go,\" Katie said immediately.\n\nLaughing softly, Ronan tugged her into the cabin. It was the perfect little home for their little family—gorgeous wooden structure, a small kitchen and a family room, a big loft bedroom upstairs and a cozy downstairs room for a nursery.\n\nIf they ever expanded the family, they'd need more space. That was a delicious little thought that Katie kept tucked inside for now. First, she had to get the shop going, and then maybe they could start thinking about more additions.\n\nFor now, they laughed silently together as they made their stealthy way upstairs, and Ronan tumbled her down onto the big, soft bed.\n\n\"Quick, quick,\" he said under his breath, undoing her jeans. \"He could wake up at any moment.\"\n\nKatie didn't need the encouragement—from the moment she'd seen her mate with the ax, muscles bunching and releasing as he swung it, sweat glistening on his chest, she'd started to flush with want, her panties dampening. Now, when Ronan pulled her jeans down over her hips, she knew she'd be glistening with wetness.\n\nAs usual for Ronan, he couldn't resist just taking a minute to lean in for a taste. Katie writhed under his tongue, trapped by her jeans, still stuck at her knees. He sucked on her clit, then slid down to thrust his tongue deep inside her.\n\nOh, Katie mouthed at the ceiling, keeping the noise inside as best she could. \"Come on,\" she whispered to him, \"come on—\"\n\nHe pulled back, leaving her aching, and yanked her pants the rest of the way off.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She attacked his jeans, getting them most of the way down his thighs before he pulled back and impatiently kicked them away.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Then he was back on her, kissing her hard, his hands everywhere, his cock bumping over her clit and nudging at her entrance, setting off lightning sparks of pleasure. Katie tilted her hips up for him as he thrust in. They both let out deep groans of pleasure—\n\n—and froze.\n\nKatie waited silently for a long, unbearable moment, feeling the need to move straining against her skin while she listened for a baby's cry.\n\nNothing.\n\nFinally, Ronan let out his breath and started to move. Katie met him thrust for thrust, reveling in the feeling of him thick and hard inside her, the way he stroked over the most sensitive spots with unerring aim. It wasn't going to last long, she knew; the pleasure was already building.\n\nPanting, he got a hand between them, caught her clit between his fingers and rubbed. \"Oh,\" Katie said involuntarily, as that touch caught the deep throb of pleasure and sharpened it into an impossible crest—\"Oh God!\" And she was coming hard around him, sobbing silently as she clenched and shook.\n\nRonan kept moving, his head down, his breath heaving, until one particularly hard spasm undid him, and he bit down on her collarbone and came deep inside her with a groan.\n\nThey collapsed together, wrapped up in each other's arms, slowly catching their breath.\n\n\"Whew,\" Ronan said finally, rolling over onto his back. \"And we didn't even wake him up.\"\n\nAs he finished talking, the sound of a crying baby wafted up the stairs.\n\nKatie started giggling, and after a second, Ronan joined in.\n\n\"All right,\" he said. \"I jinxed it, I'll go get him up.\"\n\n\"I'll come with,\" Katie said, stretching. Her whole body felt luxuriously happy, and she wanted to savor it along with her family. \"But first—\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Ronan turned with a question in his eyes.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 4 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"I love you.\"\n\nThose eyes kindled with a joyful fire. \"I love you, too.\"\n\nHe leaned down and kissed her, and then they both got up to go get their baby.", "loss": null } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Mode: Chapter continuation\nContext: Part of larger work\nNote: Established characters may appear\nLength: eleven sentences\nStyle: Zoe Chant\nGenres: urban fantasy\nTags: shifters, nsfw, Shifting Sands Resort", "loss": null }, { "from": "system", "value": "Produce a starting prompt please.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "[Author's note: Make sure to use 'carved' 2 time(s) throughout your message]", "loss": false }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Darla Grant's heart pounded in her chest.\n\nBeing in the hoard always made her anxious, but this was worse than ever before.\n\nThis time, everything was at stake.\n\nAll around them, treasure gleamed: jeweled golden goblets, chains of silver and platinum, cut gems, loose stones, coins, tapestries with real gold thread, statues carved out of jade and tiger's eye, priceless art in solid gold frames. A raw diamond the size of a dining room table sat on a low dais, surrounded by cut rubies and emeralds that were merely the size of bulldogs.\n\nEverything was sitting on priceless marble columns or displayed on cunning, hand carved shelves from extinct hardwoods. Strings of precious stones and jewels in findings hung across rafters above them like garlands. Drifts of gold and silver coins filled every corner.\n\nA protection spell shivered in the air around them, the faintest metallic haze over everything.\n\nBeside Darla, Liam let out the breath he'd been holding.\n\nDarla shot him a glance, glad to see that he looked awed rather than disgusted.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "[System: Include the following text] → \"As you can see, marrying my daughter comes with a great responsibility,\"", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "She had tried to prepare him for the sight, but descriptions of the hoard fell short of the staggering reality of it.\n\nShe wasn't the only one watching for his reaction.\n\nJubilee Grant's mouth turned up in a smug smile of satisfaction. \"As you can see, marrying my daughter comes with a great responsibility,\" she said severely. \"With my blessing on her wedding, her union will satisfy the dragon contract and unlock the hoard in entirety.\"\n\nLiam looked adorably confused, glancing behind them at the door they had just come through. It had been conspicuously open. \"It's… locked?\"\n\n\"Magic, of course,\" Jubilee was happy to explain. \"My dear, departed husband had a protection spell set over it. He was the last dragon shifter of his line, and so disappointed that Darla ended up being a snow leopard shifter. He wanted her to continue the dragon line, much as my father had hoped for me.\"\n\nDarla gazed forward with practiced serenity. She had never felt like her father had been particularly disappointed in her shift form; certainly not to the extent that her mother had.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "She wondered how much of her mother's disapproval came from the disappointment that Jubilee herself had grown up with; she had also been the last of a great dragon line, and had also failed to manifest wings and scales.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"The spell was one of the last things he did before he died,\" Jubilee continued. \"Dragons are so protective of their hoards. You know how that goes, of course!\"\n\nLiam gave her a dazed smile, nodding agreeably. Neither he nor Darla bothered to explain that Eastern dragons were considerably less motivated by wealth than their Western counterparts. Liam himself was as poor as a proverbial churchmouse.\n\nWould her mother care about that? Darla wondered, her heart in her mouth. Would she approve of Liam as a suitor for her hand, or would she find his poor origins and ordinary shifter bloodline too distasteful to forgive? The alternative… Darla carefully did not look past her mother to where Eugene was frowning thoughtfully at a particularly gaudy dragon statue studded with cut gems.\n\nHe was a distant cousin from her mother's family, chummy with her mother and rather more friendly to Darla than she had ever wished he would be. His lingering looks had bothered her even before he had started leaving hints that a marriage between them would be beneficial to the precious family line.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "When her twenty-fifth birthday — the usual age of engagement for dragons — came around, his hints and his distasteful courtship had grown considerably less subtle.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Only years of training kept Darla from shuddering at the very thought of marrying Eugene, and she let her hand tighten in Liam's just a little.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "He looked down at her anxiously and Darla smiled gratefully up at him.\n\n\"Well, Mother, what do you say?\" she asked, trying to look just the right amount of eager. \"Don't leave Liam in suspense!\"\n\n\"He doesn't come from an established dragon line,\" Eugene was quick to remind them. He had done a poor job of hiding his seething anger behind his social polish since Darla had sprung Liam on them that afternoon. \"He doesn't understand dragon honor.\"\n\n\"But he is a dragon shifter,\" Jubilee said, a little smile at her lips.\n\n\"A great surprise to my dear mother,\" Liam said, with a charming little laugh.\n\n\"It's a good match,\" Darla said coaxingly. \"And we're very fond of each other.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "It wasn't a falsehood; Darla was not brave enough to outright lie to her mother, though she had been practicing a series of half-truths that might be convincing in the event that her mother was reluctant to approve the union.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "It appeared that she needn't have worried.\n\nJubilee, despite Eugene's dissent, seemed so taken by the idea of a dragon shifter to marry Darla to that she didn't seem to mind his common origins or Eugene's not-so-subtle protests of the union.\n\n\"Madame Nadine told me that Darla would be best suited to someone she'd known a long time,\" Jubilee said knowingly. \"And that she would be the start to a long, healthy line of new dragon shifters. Liam, you are obviously exactly who she meant; Darla's been volunteering at your retirement home for years now! You were so sly not to tell me of your relationship earlier!\"\n\nEugene sputtered unexpectedly. As much as he usually supported Jubilee's unhealthy obsession with her psychic, he seemed weirdly surprised that Jubilee would follow her advice now.\n\nDarla tried not to feel too smug about thwarting him; he was as clever as he was unsavory, and she knew from his dark expression that he wasn't done trying to get her hand — or the incredible hoard she would inherit once she was married.\n\nLiam was not oblivious to his ire either. He met Eugene's hateful gaze evenly and calmly.\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" Jubilee said, not noticing either of them. \"Eugene, this is perfect! You don't have to marry Darla now after all! Oh, everything is falling into place, just as Madame Nadine predicted!\"\n\nDarla almost smirked; Eugene had played up marrying Darla as his duty so heavy-handedly to her mother that he had no footing against Jubilee's enthusiasm for the new suitor she presented.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"Thank you, Mother,\" she said, casting her gaze down like the very picture of a dutiful daughter. \"I'm sure we'll be very happy.\"\n\n\"My thanks, Mrs. Grant,\" Liam added politely.\n\nJubilee clapped her hands happily. \"Come, let's go talk with the lawyer regarding the dowry, and there will be an engagement party — we can do that next week. I've been researching all the dragon customs in great detail and oh, I know exactly where I want the wedding. There's this lovely luxury resort for shifters off the coast of Costa Rica that I've heard the most wonderful things about! Eugene, come help me figure out the guest list. All the best people, of course…\"\n\nLiam and Darla were the least of her concerns now, and Jubilee Grant swept out of the hoard with Eugene simmering at her heels, not even noticing that the two to be married lingered behind.\n\nDarla let out her breath, letting relief wash over her at last. \"It worked,\" she said gratefully. \"Oh, Liam, you are a lifesaver.\"\n\n\"I should say the same,\" Liam said, but he sounded hesitant. \"Are you sure about this? You deserve a love match, and you know I can't...\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"She never wanted a love match for me,\" Darla said calmly.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"And this solves so many problems for both of us.\"\n\n\"You don't have to do this for the retirement home,\" Liam protested. \"I could probably find other funding. Somehow.\"\n\n\"You've met Eugene, now,\" Darla reminded him. \"I am not just doing this to keep the home afloat. I mean, I could just marry him and use my pocket money to keep the center open.\" The very idea left an awful taste in her mouth.\n\n\"Now that I see what you consider casual spending money, I believe you could,\" Liam said dryly. He was clearly still staggered by the wealth of the hoard. They left the halls of treasure behind to return to the house, going from unimaginable treasure to more pedestrian ridiculous wealth; the paintings here were only in gilded frames, not solid gold, and the decor was more 'tasteful opulence' than 'actual piles of gold.'\n\n\"Anyway, it won't be so bad, marrying me,\" Darla promised coaxingly. \"I think we'll get along just fine, and I know this great retirement home where we can grow old together.\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "Liam smiled at her.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 1 sentence.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"What could possibly go wrong?\"", "loss": null } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "Write about sixty-five words to replace the `<\|missing_text\|>` in the following text.", "loss": null }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"Have you got a key to cottage fifteen?\" the handyman Travis asked, striding into the kitchen with his rattling tool belt. \"Scarlet says we're missing one, and you're the likeliest candidate.\"\n\nBreck Aster, leopard shifter and head waiter at Shifting Sands Resort, looked up from the plates where he was arranging garnish and grinned. \"Oh, cottage fifteen? That gorgeous brunette with the legs for miles. And her sister. Yeah, I probably still have that.\" He made a show of searching for the key in his pocket as if there were several to choose from. \"Mmm, the stories this key could tell…\" He pulled it out.\n\n\"I don't want to know,\" Travis protested. \"I really don't want to know.\"\n\nThe lynx shifter took the key with distaste, and carried it back out of the kitchen held out in front of him as if afraid that it was permanently contaminated.\n\nBreck watched him go with a satisfied smirk that faded as he turned back to give the garnish one final tweak.\n\nAppearances matter, he reminded himself, lifting the plates into his hands and carrying them out to the restaurant deck. Travis didn't need to know that Breck hadn't been using any of the keys he'd been collecting.\n\n\"The beef tenderloin,\" he announced, setting the plate down in front of a fresh-faced blonde woman with a wink. \"And the halibut filet for the catch of the sea.\" His exaggerated appreciative appraisal of her boyfriend made him startle and squirm, even after a week of the treatment, but it was a flattered and tolerant embarrassment, not a harassed objection to the attention.\n\nThe young woman laughed in amusement, delighted with her boyfriend's discomfort.\n\n\"Can I order you anything from the bar?\" he offered. \"A mojito for the lady? A beefeater for the beef?\" These two had been at the resort for nearly a week, and he'd figured out their habits within a day.\n\n\"Just top off the water,\" the blonde said regretfully. \"We're packing up to fly out tonight.\"\n\nBreck put his hands over his heart. \"The resort will be empty without you,\" he said dramatically. \"My nights will cease to have meaning.\"\n\nEven the boyfriend laughed at that.\n\nBreck topped off water for all the tables on the deck, smiling at the single woman in blue who was making eyes at him over her sunglasses and steak. He flirted very lightly with her, keeping it silly and over-the-top when she might have been angling for something more, and he escaped back to the kitchen as quickly as the conversation politely allowed.\n\nIt was quiet, for the time of evening; the resort was in an odd lull. Usually, people streamed in and out at regular intervals with the scheduled charters, groups overlapping. But this time, the entire resort was being emptied to make space for an exclusive wedding of two high-profile dragon families. For the first few days, it would be only the immediate family and wedding party. Then there would be almost a week of extended guests, stuffing the resort to the seams.\n\nThe wedding itself was a two day affair, with a ceremony so convoluted and steeped in specific tradition that Scarlet, the resort owner, had diagramed it with visual aids. There was a midnight vigil, hours for recitation of the family lines, formal dances, even a two hour window for a duel of challenge, should there be one.\n\nEveryone was under strict orders to be on their best behavior, and the staff knew that Scarlet was hoping that this was the event that would tip the resort over into genuine solvency.\n\nChef was singing something operatic in the back of the kitchen, chopping and banging pans around as he started concocting experimental hors d'oeuvres to offer as options for the wedding.\n\n\"They'll choose the worst one,\" Breck warned him, depositing a load of dishes into the sink. \"It's inevitable.\"\n\n\"Even my worst is better than they'll find anywhere on the mainland,\" Chef said expansively, waggling a cleaver at Breck when he snuck in for a taste of the truffles being chopped.\n\n\"Your genius in the kitchen is only exceeded by your humility,\" Breck agreed, licking his fingers.\n\nHe washed his hands dutifully, and went to freshen up the dessert platter.\n\nBy the time the young couple was finished with their meal, the forward woman with the sunglasses had left… leaving her key conspicuously behind.\n\nBreck pocketed it thoughtfully and dismissed the rest of the staff early.\n\nAs he finished clearing the last tables himself, he found himself patting the key in his pocket thoughtfully. He was in the longest dry spell of his life, and it wasn't for lack of opportunity. But the endless string of available partners had somehow lost its lustre, and Breck found himself searching faces for… something more.\n\nIt wasn't that she was too old, or that she wasn't plenty attractive — Breck appreciated beauty in all packages — it was just that Breck felt like he had nothing left to give.\n\nHe felt oddly like he'd been giving a little piece of himself away with every lover, never asking for anything in return. And now, at last, he'd been whittled away to a tired, hollow shell that felt like a mask.\n\nHe had that mask firmly in place, smiling in apparent self-satisfaction when he returned to The Den.\n\n\"Don't tell me,\" Jenny guessed, as he rummaged in the staff fridge for a beer and she grabbed ice cubes from the freezer next to him. \"That male model from Italy decided to try your side of the fence, didn't he! He's been eying you curiously all week.\"\n\nJenny, an otter shifter and the resort lawyer, and her identical twin Laura both had mates living with them in The Den. Their presence had turned the building from an established bachelor pad into more of a community house; Breck and the landscaper Graham were the only singl<\|missing_text\|>ck checked his watch. \"I've got a late evening of heartbreaking lined up in just a tick,\" he said, too loudly to his own ears. \"Just enough time to catch a shower first…\"\n\nBut he needn't have worried about fooling Jenny; her attention was caught by Bastian, who was groaning dramatically. \"My parents,\" the dragon shifter lifeguard was saying in despair. \"My parents are coming to this awful wedding.\"\n\n\"Did they get over the fact that they didn't get a fancy formal affair for you and Saina?\" Jenny asked.\n\nBastian was too busy groaning and putting his head on his arms to answer, so his mate Saina did for him. \"It's hard to tell. There's been echoing silence from them since we eloped, which suits us both just fine. The letter letting us know they were coming was very vague and brief. Dragons, you know.\" She shrugged with all the nonchalance of a siren. \"They never say more than they have to, lest they get caught up in an unintentional contract.\"\n\n\"I love weddings,\" Breck said as he opened his beer. \"They put everyone in the mood to make connections.\"\n\n\"As if you needed an excuse,\" Jenny ribbed him.\n\nBreck gave her a cheeky smile and toasted her with his beer as he left the kitchen.\n\nHis smile faded at his exit.\n\nThe Den had not been designed as staff housing, but as a luxury mansion for the original owner of the resort. Scarlet had moved them to open up spaces for guests in the hotel building, because so many of the amenities had to be shared and it wasn't structured for individual rentals. Breck sometime wondered what the original plan had been for staff, and what had happened to the owner who was supposed to be living in the lush accommodations.\n\nHe took his beer with him to the spa-like shared shower, and stood with the hot water spilling down over his bare shoulders.\n\nHe had not told Jenny the whole story.\n\nThe model from Italy had been three sheets to the wind, finding his courage for experimentation in the bottles at Tex's bar. Even at better times, Breck would not have indulged his desires with such questionable consent. Though he didn't advertise it, and let people believe whatever they wanted, he had a very strict code of honor, and he never poached drunk partners, invited angry liaisons meant to cause jealousy, or propositioned anyone already in a relationship, no matter how willing they were.\n\nHe'd given the model a cup of coffee and a kind, private decline that left them both smiling. If Breck's smile was more relieved than anything, he would never have admitted it.\n\n\"Don't wait up!\" he called as he left The Den a quarter of an hour later.\n\n\"Wasn't planning to,\" Travis retorted cheerfully.\n\n\"I don't want to know about it later, either!\" Tex added.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "e men left living there now.\n\n\"All sides of the fence are mine,\" Breck said with a saucy wink. \"And let's just say, he got the courage up to peek over… and liked what he saw.\"\n\nJenny laughed, shaking her head. \"I'm sure he did, Breck.\" She kissed his cheek in a sisterly way. \"You'll break his heart like all the others,\" she teased.\n\nBre", "loss": true } ]
[ { "from": "system", "value": "You're continuing a chapter where characters are already established. Write nineteen sentences sentences in Zoe Chant's style. Genres: urban fantasy. Elements: shifters, nsfw, Shifting Sands Resort", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Darla stared at the laptop that was open on the tiny airplane tray in front of her.\n\nTwo words started the page: I vow…\n\nThe rest was blank.\n\nThis shouldn't be any harder than writing a thank you letter, or a polite invitation response. Finishing school had given her plenty of the applicable skills to use; there were standards to follow, and patterns that should make this simple and straightforward. All she had to do was pick a few flowery phrases and put them in a pleasing order, something she did regularly.\n\nIt wasn't even like she was lying about what she was trying to write; she really did want to marry Liam. She glanced ahead down the aisle of the little jet to where Eugene was sitting next to her mother, sipping a glass of wine and exchanging small talk with her.\n\nDarla shuddered. Yes, she really did want to marry Liam.\n\nShe turned the silver bracelet on her left wrist and fingered the dragon lettering that translated to 'Unbroken Line.'\n\nIt was hot against her skin.\n\nIf she could have pulled it off, she would have, but it was heavy and seamless, as if it had been forged there. A shackle, she thought bitterly. A magical shackle that only reinforced that she was no better than a broodmare, to be married off and docilely provide children for the honor of the family.\n\nHow was she supposed to put that in her vows?\n\nBeside her, Liam looked up from his book and Darla realized that she had sighed out loud.\n\n\"Having trouble?\" he asked kindly, slipping off his headphones.\n\n\"So much trouble,\" Darla confessed. \"Have you written yours?\"", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"I looked up the vows they use at the Elvis chapel in Vegas and changed a few words,\" Liam said carelessly.", "loss": true }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "Darla gave him a sideways smile. \"You're going to marry me with cribbed Vegas vows?\"\n\n\"Well, your mother probably wouldn't let me fly Elvis in to perform the ceremony,\" Liam teased with a dramatic sigh.\n\nDarla giggled despite herself. \"It would have been so much easier just to elope to Las Vegas,\" she said with regret.\n\n\"Your mother…\"\n\n\"My mother would have had a fit of vapors and then she would have figured out how to have it annulled so she could do this whole circus her way anyway,\" Darla agreed. \"I know.\"\n\nLiam took her hand, and the matching bracelet on his wrist was cool against her arm, like it always was. \"We'll make this work,\" he said gently. \"It's going to be okay.\"\n\nHe didn't say that they had to make it work, though he could have. He had as much to gain from their marriage as she did… and arguably more to lose if it fell through.\n\nIt was a sensible match, Darla reminded herself, twining her fingers into his for comfort as much as for show. She liked Liam, and marrying him solved so many of her problems. If it wasn't the love match she'd always dreamed of, it was certainly better than any of the other options before them.\n\nShe rubbed her bracelet against her opposite arm thoughtfully, pondering the inscription, and the bizarre source.\n\nSeveral days after their engagement announcement, the bracelets had arrived in the mail. The note enclosed had been a polite decline of the invitation to the wedding by one of the prestigious New York dragon families that Jubilee aspired to be friendly with.\n\nJubilee had been delighted in the gift.", "loss": true }, { "from": "human", "value": "\"These dragonrunes mean 'Unbroken Line,'\" she explained with the authority vested in her from several weeks of research.", "loss": true }, { "from": "system", "value": "Next message should be approximately 10 sentences.", "loss": null }, { "from": "gpt", "value": "\"They must be fertility charms.\"\n\nShe had insisted that Liam and Darla put them on immediately, and to Darla's horror, they had sealed onto their arms with a permanence that gave Darla cold chills, the seam vanishing.\n\n\"Who sent these?\" she asked, struggling to mask her horror.\n\nLiam had smiled the same very polite smile that he had practiced for Jubilee, but Darla recognized the same distrust that was plaguing her.\n\n\"He's a lawyer in New York,\" Jubilee had said, comparing the note to her ever-increasing guest list. \"A very important figure in dragon social circles there. He would have been quite a catch to have at the wedding, but a gift like this is nearly as good.\"\n\nShe didn't seem bothered at all by the fact that they were now affixed to Darla and Liam with no obvious possibility of removal. If anything, she was delighted by the show of magic.\n\nDarla was not delighted.\n\nThey seemed to represent everything inescapable about the impending wedding.", "loss": true } ]

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