Thoughts about the RPG Maker and some unusual games

After my rant last night, I have a more relaxed and positive post here. It’s about the RPG Maker, a tool for making your own old-school, old-console RPGs. I’ve owned and used the RPG Maker (in various versions) for several years now, having fun with it and, most of the time, getting caught up in figuring out aspects of a new project instead of finishing it.

While you can really make a professional game with the tool (check Amaranth Games for a lot of those), it’s actually cheap enough for a non-professional to buy and easy enough for a non-professional to use. You paint your maps with tiles, add a few events with pre-defined commands (which are pretty straight-forward), and export the whole thing as an installation file you can share with whomever you want. You can add your own tiles (there’s free ones as well as sets to buy in the shop), your own music, your own characters (the ACE, the newest version, even has a character generator), and your own scripts to make the game do something different.

And this is where this post actually starts for me. You can’t just make RPGs with the RPG Maker (although you can surely make those and they can be a lot of fun), you can also make other games, if you can script. I can’t, but I can appreciate those who can.

Three of those other games will feature in this post, two I wrote about before and one I never mentioned so far.

The first one is “Madame Extravaganza’s Monster Emporium” by John Wizard Games. It’s a monster-gathering game of sorts. It has turn-based battles like a regular RPG Maker game, but you buy your monsters from Madame Extravaganza and earn money by going into randomly-generated dungeons and fighting your way through normal monsters and one boss per dungeon. After you won the boss fight, you get rewards (you can also find stuff in the dungeons). There’s different types with different monsters which unlock as you level up (so will your monsters). You can customize your monsters by choosing which attacks they will use and you can exchange members of your group whenever you’re in the town and not in a dungeon (if you have more than 3 monsters, of course). I admit I haven’t finished this game, because I just can’t get two of the orbs I need to unlock the last area and I just can’t get some of the special rooms in the dungeons I need to spot all monsters (you need to fight a monster and defeat it once before you can buy it). That’s the downside of Madame Extravaganza.

The second one is “Our Love Will Grow,” also by John Wizard Games. It’s a game like “Harvest Moon” or “Animal Crossing.” You have your own farm, you start growing crops, you get new seeds in a while, you also can pick stuff in the forest, keep animals (cows, sheep, chicken, bees, and a dog), mine for stones, iron, silver, gold, and gemstones, and find the love of our life. There’s regular parties in town where you can meet several different women whom you can woo. If you manage to get one of them to marry you, you can even have a child. This, of course, requires a top-kept farm and a big farmhouse instead of the small hovel you start with. I haven’t finished that one, either, but I did a lot of farming and I had a lot of fun with it so far. And one of those days, I will get all I need to propose to the girl of my character’s dreams and they will have a kid and live happily forever after on their farm.

The last game is “Fortune’s Tavern” by Michael Flynn (available on Steam). It’s not an RPG and it has some aspects from both games I already mentioned. Like “Madame Extravaganza,” it offers various pets for you to raise and keep. They accompany you into the forest behind the tavern, where you go working on quests (usually ‘find this’ or ‘find out about that’). Your main job, however, is to run and to renovate the tavern itself, so you get more guests and make more money and can do even more for the tavern. There’s three fractions you can cater to, there’s different additional buildings you can rebuild and put to use. On the whole, you can do a lot of stuff in the game and they just added a DLC where you can take over the job of Mayor for the nearby town of Fortune, as well.

All three games are a lot of fun and not the usual RPGs you might expect. And they show that with the ability to use the right scripting language, you can make a lot of different things with a relatively cheap and mundane tool.

Back to Sleepy Hollow

Recently, a sub-station of Pro7 started to air the first season of “Sleepy Hollow.” That means people over here can finally see one of the best supernatural series made recently. I, however, have moved on already and took the chance to get the second season at iTunes yesterday. As with the first on, once I had started watching the episodes, I was caught and just had to go on and on and on. Which meant, with only 11 episodes, I have managed to watch the season in about a day (split between Friday evening and Saturday morning/afternoon).

It’s always a certain danger when a series is going into another season. I remember being completely taken with the first two seasons of “Warehouse 13” and finding the third so uninteresting I almost didn’t watch the final two seasons, which are great again. I did fear a little that the series, once in for a new season, might lose the things that made it so interesting to me: the close connection of mythology, history, conspiracies, and magic. I was afraid they would put some of that aside to boost other stuff. I was afraid action might take over, or the visible attraction between Ichabod and Abbie may.

Instead, they continued down the road they had chosen before. Yes, there is more action in the second season, but that is only to be expected, as the End of Days draws nearer and both sides get more desperate. They also expanded the pool of main characters a little. But they kept more than they changed. Just as in the first season, it pays to pay attention to the details of every episode. The situation can change from one moment to the next and what you thought you knew can suddenly be all wrong again. There is no such thing as a ‘monster of the week’ episode in “Sleepy Hollow,” either. With merely 11 episodes, there is no space for one. Even seeming ‘monster of the week’ episodes like “Heartless” or “Mama” include vital information and drive the main story. Often it takes one or two more episodes to realize the real impact another episode has had on the full story. “The Weeping Lady” seems to be a ‘monster of the week’ episode at first glance, since the ‘lady’ in question targets women around Ichabod and tries to drown them. The episode is important for the season in the long run, though, because of the outcome and the new information on both Ichabod and Katrina it delivers.

As in the first season, the monsters are not just creations of the show’s writers, either. Even though they might have taken some liberties with the material, all monsters have a solid foundation in mythology, history, or at least literature. They are very well-made (the Gorgon in the next-to-last episode took my breath away, once it was completely visible) and the writers know how to introduce monsters correctly: by not immediately showing them off.

At the end of the first season, the audience is left with no less than five cliff-hangers, every main character has their own. Ichabod is buried in his son’s former grave, Abbie is caught in purgatory, Katrina is in the hands of the headless horseman, Captain Irving has been arrested for the murders his daughter committed while possessed by a demon, and Jenny (Abbie’s sister) may be dead or still alive after a car accident. During the first episode of the second season, not only is a full story of a ‘possible future’ told, but all five cliff-hangers are resolved, too. And as much as there’s different threads running through the whole season (for both seasons out so far), they all get tied up nicely towards the end of each. It’s almost as if the show’s writers wanted to do a ‘how to’ about handling the story arcs right.

I really loved the second season of “Sleepy Hollow,” even though there’s less cliff-hangers at the end of it. I will definitely hope there will be a third one.

My Happy End (of sorts) with "Sleepy Hollow"

In March, I complained here about Pro7 starting to air a mystery/horror series and then cancelling the whole thing after only four episodes. The series in question was “Sleepy Hollow.” Happily, iTunes allowed me to pick up the full first season now, in English, but that’s not a problem for me.

I went on a full-fledged marathon with “Sleepy Hollow,” watching the first half yesterday in the evening (getting to bed a little before 2 a.m.) and the second half this morning. I’ve just finished the last two episodes (listed as one double-length episode at iTunes) and I can just say one thing: “More please!”

The first season ends with a huge cliff-hanger, but the second season has already been confirmed, luckily. I might have to wait for quite a while (especially since I will have to wait for iTunes to offer it), but I know the story of Ichabod and Abbie will continue. On the ‘how’ I don’t even want to speculate now.

I can see now, with the whole first season under my belt, how the officials at Pro7 might have believed that the series was not worth continuing. Not because the series is bad, but because it is very complex and demands a lot of knowledge of early American history and the more or less far-spread conspiracy theories wrapped around early America. I suspect the station just thought people wouldn’t be able to follow the series, which is stupid, but understandable.

As a matter of fact, quite some stuff is explained pretty well in the series - and we have Google and Wikipedia, which means everyone can check things online they don’t understand. There is a lot of blood and death in the series, but it is dealing with the headless horseman, after all. What else is a headless rider with a sharp axe supposed to do with his time? Chop wood? Offer free rides to small children? Naturally, he is making people a head shorter.

The series so far has been written excellently, the threads merge, the story weaves in and out, with twists and turns. There are no ‘monster of the week’ episodes in the 13 (12 on iTunes) made so far. Even seeming ‘monster of the week’ episodes, like “Blood Moon” or “John Doe,” have a meaning for the overall story arc. The middle of the season, the three episodes “The Sin-Eater,” “The Midnight Ride,” and “Necromancer,” marks a change in the story, a twist into a new direction. The motives and identity of the headless horseman are revealed, the stage for the end is set, and the group that will have to stay together in the end forms. It’s very obvious the writers knew what they were doing, where they were starting, which ways they were going, where they would end up. I like that in a series, because it shows the creators take it seriously.

What to do now? Well, it’s time to wait for season 2. I still have to finish watching the series “Dracula,” so I will be entertained. It’s too bad, though, Pro7 didn’t have enough faith in their viewers to give an excellent series a chance beyond episode 4.

Sleepy Hollow cancelled

A few weeks ago, Pro7, a German TV station, added the series “Sleepy Hollow” to their rooster. From the beginning, though, I was suspicious about the scheduling. Running a horror series with a high body-count after two episodes of a ‘chick’ series like “Grey’s Anatomy?” Very suspicious … or stupid.

There was hardly any advertising for the series which, while very popular in the US, is not widely known in Germany. Sure, we know about the headless horseman (since Tim Burton, if not before…), but we don’t know all that much about the oodles of series that run in US television. Yet, hardly any advertising for a new series. Other stations have done better. So has Pro7, with other series.

Why the placement right after “Grey’s Anatomy?” Sure, the actor playing Ickabod Crane is rather cute and can pull off fashion that’s not just a year, but 250 years ago. Apart from that, though, there’s not much that would suggest coupling the series with classic ‘chick’ material. “Sleepy Hollow” is bloody, dark, full of corpses, and full of demons. So, if I had to couple it with a series Pro7 already airs, it would go before or after “Supernatural.”

Why the break from the ‘15’ schedule? For decades, German TV has adhered to an unspoken rule. After 8 pm, series and movies start at 15 past. They start at 8.15, 9.15, 10.15 and so on. When did “Sleepy Hollow” start? 10.10.

Given the placement behind two episodes of a ‘chick’ series like “Grey’s Anatomy,” the possible audience for the series would have had to switch stations. Now, is it likely they would switch 5 minutes early? The placement at 10.10 means that either the viewer has to discard the last 5 minutes of whatever they were watching before (and not seeing the end of a an episode or movie sucks) or turn in 5 minutes late to “Sleepy Hollow” (which means missing the first 5 minutes, deadly for a series as complex as this one).

“Sleepy Hollow” clearly was misplaced, therefore, but was it intentional? I can’t really believe that, since buying the licence of a successful TV series can’t be cheap. They will eventually show the series completely, I guess, but where? Hopefully not their ‘chick’ station Sixx. They have some mystery and dark romance there, but no full-fledged horror so far. Could they run it during one or two nights? Quite likely, perhaps around Halloween. It wouldn’t do the series justice, though. It’s another TV series broken by stupid placement and missing advertising, like “Doctor Who.” (And don’t get me started on that, please…)

Shame on you, Pro7! If you spend money on a TV series, put some thought into the scheduling and do the series justice. You owe it to the series and the viewers.

TV not getting any better

I’ve had quite some time to watch TV during the last couple of weeks. That doesn’t mean I felt very well entertained or informed at all.

The gist of TV over the day is edutainment (with more entertainment than education), teleshopping, strange reality shows and soap operas. I’ve never been a fan of soap operas. I like information a lot, but I don’t like edutainment or infotainment programs. I never buy anything from teleshopping channels at all (neither from the teleshopping programs that run on certain TV stations in the morning and early afternoon). And while the strange reality shows (‘real life’ with actors and stories I don’t buy for a minute) have a certain morbid appeal, they are not something I can watch for long without laughing out loud.

Years ago I thought talk shows were bad, now I sometimes find myself wishing some of the first ones were still around. And that says something…

So I spent more time in front of my computer, usually not online (I do have my daily regime when it comes to the net), but writing, listening to music, watching DVDs or playing games. In addition, there’s always reading for me.

But I can’t help wondering whether this is the TV program people really want to see. I’ve never really been the ‘mainstream’ person, but I can’t believe I’m the only one who finds TV these days quite boring. The stations (especially those which receive money from the state and thus should make a better program) often complain about the loss of audience – so other people find something better to do than watching TV as well. They see the internet as an enemy or try to participate by putting their stuff online. Maybe instead they should use it to find out what people are interested in.

TV wasn’t all perfect and wonderful in the past. But it’s not getting any better in the present and may be really dreadful in the future.