THE YEAR OF CHANGE

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Brendan Frye CORPORATE RELATIONS Melanie Emile SENIOR CONTENT EDITOR Wayne Santos ART DIRECTOR Scott Dixon ILLUSTRATOR Jo Enaje MARKETING/PROMOTIONS Carter Thomson COVER ART Courtesy Namco-Bandai CONTRIBUTORS Reid McCarter Laura Thomas Phil Brown Alexander Leach Bryan Calhoun Alex Coop Khari Taylor

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The end of 2014 is, I suspect, going to present us with a different landscape from the start of 2014. Were only just looking out at the expanded horizon that is a new year, but its obvious to me even at this early stage that 2014 will be a year of change. In the traditional console arena, things have already changed, and that change is going to accelerate. Were moving away from the hurriedly produced, proof-of-concept launch titles. The new generation of hardware will finally start getting games developed exclusively with their power in mind, taking advantage of a more mature developer environment and more generous development time. Games like InFamous: Second Son, Titanfall and Dragon Age: Inquisition are part of this new wave. Then there are the new features like Xbox Ones Kinect/Media capabilities and PlayStation Now which are trying to change our notions of just what a console is supposed to do. The Xbox One has the potential to turn into the surprise de facto exercise product of the home thanks to the surprising inclusion of the Xbox Fitness initiative while PlayStation Now can turn the PS4and virtually any modern smart deviceinto a machine capable of playing the breadth of the entire PlayStation library for a subscription fee. In comics, were seeing an interesting transition year as companies undergo some surprising changes. Vertigo, once the undisputed champion of original, creator owned content, is entering into its first full year of operation without Karen Berger helming the ship. This is no longer the Vertigo of the 90s that challenged the conventions of the industry, this is a Vertigo that is now in competition with other publishers that are rapidly adoptingand in some cases surpassingthe practices Vertigo established. Image, of all publishers, is one such contender, gradually turning around its reputation in the 90s of being all flash and no substance to one of the most exciting publishers today with critical hits like The Walking Dead and new surprises like Sex Criminals. But perhaps the biggest change of all is the one in how we perceive and interact with our games. There havent been any official announcements, but many industry pundits (including me) are expecting that 2014 becomes the year of virtual reality. Every new presentation of the Oculus Rift unit shows more progress, and it wouldnt really surprise anyone if Oculus VR finally makes an announcement at this years E3 that final dev-kits are ready, and the retail version will be available at Christmas. If that happens, we have a whole new world of clunky VR exploration ahead of us as after-market peripheral manufacturers create everything from omnidirectional treadmills to upper body motion sensors. As far as other changes go, CGM itself is also experiencing something of a metamorphosis. While the latest issue youre now reading is part of your regularly scheduled bi-monthly release, CGM will be embracing the digital age, with a digital only issue on alternating months. In other words, CGM is now going to be available every month, but only six of those issues will be available in print. As you might expect, the new change is going to keep us busy, but nothing that we cant handle (we did used to be a monthly publication in the past, after all) but it does mean youll see more comics and more gaming content coming out of us than ever before. This month, weve talked to some of the people behind Dark Souls II, both the game and the comic, which is a nice little double whammy for a publication with our particular interests. We also have more reviews, more interviews and even a little bit of a nostalgia trip for people that enjoy old adventure games. So welcome to a new year, and a new phase for CGM. Its going to be a wild ride.

CGMagazine does not claim copyright in the screenshots herein. Copyright in all screenshots within this publication are owned by their respective companies. Entire contents copyright 2013. CGMagazine All rights reserved; reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Products named in these pages are trade names, or trademarks of their respective companies. Follow CGMagazine on Twitter, Facebook and by RSS FEED to get the latest about comics and gaming. We will also give you all the sneak peeks as what you can expect for the coming months. Find all links for this and more at www.cgmagonline.com
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Alexander gives us the scoop on Digital Extremes latest space ninja fighter.

Phil tells us why Swamp Thing is one of the most important comic book characters around.

Reid has a PS4. He doesnt play it much though. Should we all just be playing our PCs?

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CGMagazine #31 designed and hustled by:
Scott Dixon
Favourite pastime: Practicing break dancing Designed while listening to: Office Space OST - Various Artists

Jo Enaje

Favourite pastime: Break dancing Designed while listening to: Philip Glass

CONTENTS

6 Minimalist Storytelling 18 Will Comics Crash 29 Rise of Indie Comics 36 Dark Souls II: Into the Light 46 Alan Moores Magic Wor[l]d 56
Enter the Warframe Reviews

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Pg. 40

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12 Chris Avellone 22 Origins: Swamp Thing 32 Star Citizens Chris Roberts 40 Dark Souls II 52 History of Vertigo 62 The Case for PC Gaming
Endgame

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Warframe / Steve Sinclair

Steve Sinclair, Creative Director for Warframe

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Digital Extremes Steve Sinclair on Warframe

Words By Alexander Leach
Digital Extremes isnt a big Canadian studio. Its nestled away in the town of London, Ontario and has had a mixed bag of success over the years, ranging from critical hits like The Darkness II to problematic movie-tie in games like Star Trek. Their latest venture is a free-to-play title available on both PCs and the PS4 called Warframe. We got in touch with Warframe Creative Director Steve Sinclair, to talk about both their newest game and the studio itself.

ENTER THE WARFRAME

After 10 years and several publishers rejection, Digital Extremes brought the battles of Warframe to the world - as a free-to-play game run entirely by the studio. Steve Sinclair, its Creative Director, talks about its history.

Comics Gaming Magazine: How did the idea for Warframe start?
Steve Sinclair: That idea actually started about 10 years ago, when at the end of the Unreal series that DE collaborated with Epic on, the two companies came very close to merging, and there was tax law and all of these other things that made that deal fall through, so the companies decided they would go their own separate ways. We did a couple of Unreal games; Unreal Championship was one that was an Xbox Live launch title. After that, we were looking at working on our own tech, so we started making a tech demo. We all loved Metal Gear Solid and manga, so we made this crazy wacky space tech demo. We even got footage of it on CNN: Game of the Future they proclaimed. This was right at the end of the Xbox era, and Xbox 360 was right around the corner. Everyone got excited about that, so I took it around publishers, and pitched it, pitching the tech and the idea for a crazy space ninja game. They all said, This is awesome, its beautiful, this is cutting edge, the techs amazing. Can you make us a World War II shooter? So we didnt go anywhere with that concept, and we put it on the shelf. A few years ago, when we just started Warframe, we were looking at what we would do next for the studio, and weve always come back to this idea to try something completely independent of the publisher system and of working with other peoples intellectual property. We started looking into making an Xbox Live game, and
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Star Trek, Warframe (opposite), The Darkness II (below opposite), and Dark Sector (below).

there were people talking about how that was a problem for studios unless they were a two-man studio, and we were midsized from all our console projects, and wanted to keep everyone. It became an idea that we would try to make that old crazy space ninja game that we were super passionate about and that we had so many ideas in waiting, and thats wed go really quickly into this crazy, wacky thing called free-to-play.

CGM: What are some of the challenges in making a free-to-play game rather than a standard title?
SS: The obvious one is striking the balance between making the game actually decent and free, versus giving people value for their money when they make a purchase. That sort of balance between what is actually free and what players can accomplish free, is something we really struggled with initially to make sure that the project was viable financially. We learned a lot of crazy lessons early on. The one I remember the strongest was that we had a Founders program, which was kind of
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our mini-Kickstarter, which I think youre seeing a lot of games doing now; selling access into their betas, which is basically what we had. We were selling those Founders programs, and it was doing awesome for us, and we were updating the game. Then we added this system called GoPro, which was that you have a weapon that levels up, and you have your Warframe which is our space-ninja armour, and it can level up, but you can only level to 15, and if you wanted to go all the way to the maximum level you have to give me, like, a dollar, and I would uncap the level. We all congratulated ourselves and through this GoPro system sounded awesome, was going to be great, the players were going to love it and it was going to be fair... and there was a riot on our forums and in the community of this. The strongest voices were coming from those who has already paid massive amounts of money. They obviously had the disposable income, but this system prevented them from playing with other people they wanted to involve in the game, who maybe wouldnt be spenders. I guess that story illustrates a couple of things, like learning our way through

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this landscape of making sure that the game is still playable and free, and the politics of running a free-to-play game. We are constantly updating it; it really is a community-focused game.

how its tied to the overall Mastery system, which is this level that exists outside of the items that really indicates how much of the arsenal youve gotten and attained, and brought to level 30.

CGM: Are the updates the main method to keep people coming back?
SS: Thats one of our biggest tools. None of us have a lot of MMO design experience, and yet accidentally we took a game we were sort of patterning off a space ninja version for Left 4 Dead, and whats ending up happening is that weve attracted a lot of MMO players. I was reading our forums, and a guy was, Congratulations, DE, I have a subscription to Final Fantasy and yet here I am playing Warframe. Weve attracted an interesting, diverse audience who arent just there to run-and-gun, have a session and log out. They love the persistence, they love the progression. We have an invasion system that has an ebb and flow that is changing the gameplay and gives them a reason to come back. But the truth of it is that players really want cool new items. The gear questing really is the most popular thing in Warframe, and

CGM: The updates are particularly substantial, yet the game is still listed as a beta game. Why is that?
SS: We initially just had this open beta excuse because we were radically changing systems so frequently. For example, in Update 7, we completely scrapped our upgrade system from a Dead Space style, to what you see now, a crazy Japanese trading card style. Weve been using that as an umbrella of upheaval and change, but a bit of that is worn out, because it seems that this is going to be the norm for Warframe, were going to keep changing and evolving. Were not really super focused on competitive play, we need to be constantly updating, changing and growing the game to keep the players interested and keep them coming back. The beta is really a thin veneer of an excuse to say, Stuff might change when you come play this game.
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CGM: Do you think thats necessary?

SS: I dont think its necessary, actually. I think that whatever protection and forgiveness it gives us has worn away. People have bought in, theyve invested, they have hundreds or thousands of hours in there, and the beta tag doesnt give any relief when we nerf their favourite gun or bring out something thats broken. Were definitely questioning the state of that.

CGM: For Warframe, you do everything internally; voice acting, servers, and QA. Is that preferable?
SS: Oh yeah, absolutely. Its like back to the garage days of development. Its like, I have an idea. It goes in the game and its done, and the bureaucracy is done, and because youre working on such a compressed schedule, you dont have time to second-guess yourself. When you have too much time to work with, you end up redoing things where the diminishing returns kicks in, and it ends up losing some of its spark. I absolutely love working on Warframe because of the frantic pace. We just go with it, and if it doesnt work, our players know and trust that were going to make it right. I love working this way.

CGM: When things are down to the wire, documentation sometimes suffers. How much of that is acceptable, and how do you handle these issues?
SS: Weve been fortunate that the scale of the game has grown so much that tens of thousands of people are playing it every second, concurrently. In the old console days, you would say this is what I like that would go through the filter of 10 to 15 people, and that might go through testing with 25, maybe 30 people if youre lucky. But when you make assumptions on behalf of hundreds of thousands of people, your assumptions are often wrong. The amount of effort you put into that design versus just getting a simple version and testing it is a much faster way and much more pleasurable way of arriving upon the solution. That lack of documentation doesnt affect me at all. In fact, the documentation has always been proven to be wrong or shortsighted or blind in some way. Maybe its about focus testing. If youre Activision, absolutely you know that theres thousands of people coming through the doors. A good example is the focus testing they did for the Halo game. When I read about that, I thought wow, thats the lifestyles of the rich and famous. They push through 500 people a day and theyre able to really look at a broad section. With the games weve worked on in the past, we havent had that. With Warframe, we tend to say lets get this idea out there, lets polish it a little bit,
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Warframe typically ranks in the top twenty most played games on Steam. It was also released on the PS4 at launch. and see what people respond to, and we use that response and we use the communitys engagement with us to emphasize the good and reduce the sucky parts. If I was working in a garage on a Unity game, I wouldnt spend two years on it and ship it. Id ship something in three months and see what works and see what doesnt. force and the power of publishers. I think they will continue to use their economies of scale to move into other markets and squeeze out smaller players. Three years ago, a couple guys could bang out a game and do really well, but now theres so many titles and the competition is so fierce, that you see larger publishers spending their way into the top of those charts, and outspending and marketing in a way that smaller publishers cant. I think they will continue to do well and protect their interests, but I think that if youre a small group of girls and guys and you want to make a cool game and you have an interesting idea, absolutely I would try to get it out with Kickstarter or put it out on Steam for yourself. Although it has its own stresses, the upsides are much better.

CGM: So is the studio working on anything else besides Warframe? Are you still doing standard titles.
SS: We are not. All our chips are on the table on Warframe right now. Its really exciting. Weve worked on Halo map packs for Halo 4, weve worked on other peoples IPs, but once Warframe got onto Steam and it kept growing and growing, we realized that the best use of our designers was to add more diversity and more content to Warframe. If there was going to be anything new, Id think it would be something that DE would do internally, and come with themselves. I dont think well work on publisher IP soon; at least I hope not, because I think the situation were in now is really awesome.

CGM: Where does Warframe stand in between the big-name titles and the smaller casual games?
SS: I would say it was definitely the smallest, most minimal thing we ever could have shipped when we were in beta with Steam. But with every update, weve grown the amount of level, scene, and character diversity beyond anything weve done with our console games. I think we have a hundred and fifteen weapons in the game now. As the game has grown far beyond what weve ever done, all that stuff starts to break.
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CGM: So do you think theres no need for publishers?

SS: I think it depends on what youre going to do. It really depends on the scope of what youre trying to accomplish. I think those big 100 million dollar games need the

Chris Avellone

Fall Out: New Vegas

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BY THE PEOPLE
Kickstarting RPGs With Chris Avellone
Words by Alexander Leach

Chris Avellone might be best known for the more recent release of Fall Out: New Vegas. His most recent adventure - Tides of Numenera is shaping up to be completely different.

Western RPG fans are often aware of games like Planescape: Torment and Baldurs Gate, and the recently supported Kickstarter investments for spiritual descendants such as Torment: Tides of Numenera and Project Eternity. Our writer Alexander Leach caught up with Creative Director and co-owner of Obsidian, Chris Avellone, at MIGS 2013, and asked questions about the various crowd funded games hes been involved in and the direction the genres are taking. Baldurs Gate, developed by BioWare and published by Black Isle in 1998, won several RPG of the year and Game of the Year awards, met with critical acclaim for its writing, isometric realtime gameplay, and wide variety of quests and events to pursue. Planescape: Torment, a similar RPG developed by Black Isle and set in the Dungeons and Dragons Planescape setting, followed an immortal beings search for his memories. It proved that story and narrative could carry a game, with dialogue greatly outstripping combat instances over the games length. Chris Avellone still works with Obsidian Entertainment, which fully funded their Kickstarter for Project Eternity, a spiritual successor to the line of games similar to Baldurs Gate. They also created Fallout: New Vegas, and most of its DLCs. Torment: Tides of Numenera (whose setting is developed by Monte Cook, who wrote Planescapes setting) is being developed by InXile Entertainment, with Chris Avellone assisting in production. This interview continues from the video portion, located on CGMs YouTube page. The rest of the interview is available online at CGMs website, www.cgmagonline.com.

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Comics Gaming Magazine: You said the Kickstarter model gets players involved in the process. Could it be a stepping stone for players to see what they need to know and what they need to do?
Chris Avellone: Absolutely. One of the best parts about the Kickstarter process is that not only does it give an insight into the process, like you mention, but there are a number of Kickstarters that involve the player in the development process. With Wastleland 2, they actually sent out concepts for various props they needed for the game. They actually invited 3D artists to create things like rocks and stuff that helps populate the world and make it more alive, and give people all across the world the chance to contribute, to put their assets up on the Unity store for sale and get official Wasteland 2 credit. That stuff just looks great on a resume when youre applying for a game company. Youre like: Hey, I did a lot of prop work for Wasteland 2. You can even see it up on the Unity store. Thats an opportunity that would not normally be possible for a AAA or mainstream title. They wouldnt want to contract out things like that or open up the gates for people to contribute. Kickstarters a lot more freeing about that, and I think thats been really important for people wanting to get into the industry.

the world, where theres this Gene Wolf tone, all these remnants of this technology are still around, but nobody quite fully understands how this technology works, so it seems very magical to everyone is just a really intriguing concept for a quote-unquote fantasy game. Being able to play off of that is really interesting.

CGM: What have you been doing for ToN?

CA: Ive been reviewing a lot of the design documentation for game mechanics, how the tides work in the game. The tides are kind of the alignment system for the computer game Tides of Numenera. Also Ive been reviewing the story arc for the game many times over. Were trying iterate to make sure it feels right, it feels solid. Obviously, doing a spiritual successor to [Planescape] Torment, you want to make sure you get that great narrative experience. Thats been a big focus for the team. Also, Ive been working on companion design and companion feedback for the game, because Im slated to write one of the companions for the Kickstarter. Im really enjoying the process so far, its a lot of fun.

CGM: One interesting thing is that the tides arent present in the pen-and-paper game. Is that correct?
CA: Thats correct. To all perspectives of people in the world, it seems that the tides are a localized phenomenon the area where the computer game takes place. The interesting thing about Numenera is that its very hard to quantify a lot of elements about the world, so nobodys quite sure why that is.

CGM: Have you played the pen-and-paper game of Numenera?

CA: Yeah, InXile ran a few session using characters that will be present in the game itself. So I was able to play a session of that, and that was a lot of fun. The entire game world of Numenera is a creation from Monte Cooks brilliant mind. Hes done a lot of great roleplaying game stuff over the years, including work on the original Planescape license. That whole context of

CGM: And thats a really interesting idea, to put that in and use the universe to do that. Why is the alignment system so important to the experience?

NUMBER OF STRETCH GOALS MET:

17

$4,188,927 USD $$$$$$$$ 17

AMOUNT RAISED BY TIDES OF NUMENERA:
NUMBER OF STRETCH GOALS MET:

APRIL 5, 2013
MONTHS OF WORLD OF WARCRAFT SUBSCRIPTIONS YOU CAN BUY WITH AMOUNT RAISED:

THE CAMPAIGN WAS FUNDED ON:

$900,000 USD
TOTAL NUMBER OF BACKERS:

GOAL AMOUNT SET BY INXILE ENTERTAINMENT:

APRIL 5, 20

THE CAMPA WAS FUNDED

YOU COULD BUY

279,448

3,520,106 VALUE MENU TACOS

FROM TACO BELL

AMOUNT RAISED IS EQUIVALENT TO

279,448 TWO ISLANDS IN THE CARIBBEAN

FOR $4.1 MILLION USD

74,405

MONTHS OF WORLD OF WARCRAFT SUBSCRIPTIONS YOU CAN BUY WITH AMOUNT RAISED:

AMOUNT RAISE

3,520,106 VA

FROM TACO BEL

BY HOSTING THE TIDE OF NUMENERA CAMPAIGN

$209,446 USD

KICKSTARTER MADE

88 BILLION VIETNAMESE DONG

WITH $4.1 MILLION USD

BY HOSTING THE TIDE OF NUMENERA C OR YOU COULD BUY

$209,446 U

KICKSTART

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Project Eternity

CA: I think its one of the things that Planescape originally was known for. The fact that the consequences and actions you could do in the game affected your alignment in the first game was such a central part of the experience, that they wanted to have another morality and alignment system present in Tides of Numenera. It felt so true to the first game to do that. Its an interesting way seeing the effects of your consequences through a game mechanic and a game system and not just reactivity in the environment. Seeing it as a game mechanic as well felt like an important part of the game experience.

CGM: I also have a few questions about Project Eternity, the (Obsidian) RPG in the vein of Baldurs Gate. Is that correct?

CA: That is correct. In Eternity our goal was to bring back the feel of those Infinity engine games that we made back in Black Isle, using BioWares Infinity Engine. Bring back some of the dungeon crawling that was present Icewind Dale with the really cool locales. We wanted to do a lot of the story and character development that was present in Planescape: Torment. Because Baldurs Gate was the pinnacle of that whole package, Project Eternity is our Hey, we really want to do another isometric RPG. We want to do something that feels a lot like Baldurs Gate because we enjoyed those games so much, and the public certainly did, too. Being able to do that through the Kickstarter has been really great. Using Unity to construct a lot of the 2D/3D environments we have in Eternity, some of the locales weve been able to do with the engine have been absolutely beautiful.
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CGM: Its a completely original universe?

CA: Yeah, and its been a nice change of pace. Usually with a lot of games we do weve inherited a franchise or a world, but being able to build one from scratch and sort of play around with the elements there and explore some new themes has been really excited for us as a studio. Its such a rare opportunity for us, and were really glad to have the opportunity.

CGM: Do we know anything about the themes that will be pursued in Project: Eternity?
CA: There is the importance of the consequences of one persons actions in Eternity, but in terms of the storylines and how those develop over the course of the game, that were keeping close to our chest right now.

CGM: And how concerned are you with common fantasy conventions, like common races in Eternity? Are you departing from that or are you building on those?
CA: No, we actually have dwarves and elves, and a lot of the quote-unquote standard fantasy races in Eternity, but a lot of them have a lot of a different cultural spin to them, so when you actually encounter them in the game, they actually depart from their traditional counterparts. For example, we have dwarves that have a sort of Eskimo theme to them. Thats a cool thing to explore. We have dwarven rangers, and elements about that takes the standard tropes and sort of play around with them a bit. Weve been having fun with that.

CGM: Its going to be one character with a party of companions?

CA: Yep. Like with Baldurs Gate and with Torment, we wanted to make sure you do create your own specific character. You can journey with a number of colourful companions with their own agendas and personalities. Eternity, however, also has an option where we have an Adventurers Hall, so if you dont like any of the companionsdespite how hard we may have worked on themyou can just go to the Adventurers Hall and round out your party however you want with NPCs you can just gather from there.

CGM: Now the companions you did build, how involved are their backstories and personal arcs?
CA: Its comparable to Baldurs Gate and Torment. We recognize that in a lot of the games that Obsidian does, one of the pillars is the level of companion interaction that you can have. Theyre pretty closely woven with the storyline in Eternity, and that was pretty important to us because companions that journey with you are the best ways of being a sounding board or reinforcing the theme of whats going on, or giving you immediate reactivity to whats going on, and thats really important to us.

CGM: Is that preferable to an established universe?

CA: I think theres benefits to both. With an established universe they give you the bookends, so you can play around within that and that answers a lot of questions for you right from the outset. But I prefer creating a brand new world, because it gives you a lot more freedom to explore in all sorts of directions without having those limitations. I think I prefer that a lot more.
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Minimal Story Telling

Left Unsaid
Minimalist Narrative in Videogames
Words By Alexander Leach

Theres an old adage in writing that advises storytellers to show, dont tell. Its a basic lesson that teaches the value in letting the audience experience a story, rather than just have it explained to them. In games, this expresses itself in the most surprising and unique ways. And it reinforces another old adage. Sometimes, less really is more.

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The original Dark Souls plot is, in a word, bare. The game starts with a CG video explaining the creation of the world (Dragons light cigarettes and a bunch of guys killed them all smoking kills). Following that, the player is dropped off in a Northern asylum, where the Undead are corralled to rot. Your escape cumulates with your ascending a tall cliff and being snatched up by a giant crow, to be carried away. This is about as descriptive as it gets. The rest of the universe and story is told through brief dialogues and the descriptive text on items very little details are given, even about the main story. You can miss entire sections of the plot, simply because of the order in which you explored; entire NPC arcs can happen off-screen. And strangely enough, thats okay. Minimalist game stories are a tricky thing to pin down, because conventional narratives have a modicum of completeness. What Im talking about isnt a game where the story is a bare, clich excuse to move around, although that argument could possibly be made for Dark Souls. I disagree,

however, because of how the story is portrayed aspects of the games plot are revealed entirely through exploration and discovery, and your choices throughout the game. That, coupled with random items and spells appearing on the loading screen, it seems like a deliberate decision. Journey, Jenova Chens travelling/exploration game, makes use of minimalism. In an interview with IGN, he said, The players interactions are the focus imagine if Journey takes place in downtown New York, or maybe the Amazon jungle. Its too busy. The desert, bright and desolate as it is, does little to detract from the player moving around. The lore, what little of it there is, is only revealed through semi-animated pictographs that players can only find if they stray far from the suggested path. Even then, the cryptic nature of the images leave any final interpretations open to debate. This style of storytelling, I have to admit, takes some getting used to. When youre taking RPGs like Baldurs Gate or Planescape: Torment to be benchmarks of game storytelling, you create an

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Pictured from left to right: Braid, Ryse: Son of Rome, Journey

expectation that there will be lots of details to fill out your motivations. Dialogue trees, in-game books, cutscenes; these things all paint a story clearly. On the other hand, consider Braid, the indie platformer. Its plot is told entirely through small excerpts found at the beginning of levels, which are tied into the level mechanics. Puzzles with suggestive pictures, and level design itself are used to tell a story; and its a story thats never quite put in our face. Or The Binding of Isaac, whose crude humour and bizarre or disturbing items suggest several things about Isaacs plight, ranging from a Norman Bates-style obsession with his mother to possibly being the son of the Devil. Or Shadow of the Colossus, with its ruined cities and towering giants that clearly have some connection and importance to these places, but are never truly explained. These games arent particularly exposition or character-heavy. The game mechanics tell a greater story, by suggesting that theres something else going on here. In some ways, thats more effective than just telling.

Why?
Because it makes the player feel clever for having
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discovered something that hints at the greater picture. There is a sense of mystery to these minimalist games plots unlike most RPGs, theres no guarantee that everything will be discovered in the end. Youre only seeing part of a greater plot and even if you try and push deeper, you might never be able to see further. When you first find a mysterious underground lake in Dark Souls, or locate an unsettling text piece in Braid, theres a sense that you found it yourself, that youre solving the mystery rather than just reading along the page. Games like Journey put the player in the foreground, leaving it up to them to discover the world and locate whats going on. They engage the player more by forcing them to do the brain work. Now, there are limits to this. The examples Ive mentioned are the good ones, that actually know whats important to know and whats better unsaid. Minimalism bears the risk of obscurity if you dont drop the right hints; the player should never feel like theres a dead end, or something is entirely gone, never to be hinted at again. Ryse: Son of Rome failed to use these effectively, leaving elements that make no sense. But with good writing, you can tell more of the story.

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Origins: Swamp Thing

FIFTY SHADES OF GREEN

The Story Behind the Enigmatic Swamp Thing
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Words by Phil Brown

Anytime someone throws down the gauntlet of naming their favourite Alan Moore book, it tends to be one of three choices: Watchmen, V For Vendetta, or From Hell (clearly, these are Hollywoods three favourites as well). While all three books are certainly masterpieces, there is one other chapter in Alan Moores history that deserves to be ranked right alongside the three obvious classics; his remarkable run on Swamp Thing. Normally that character brings to mind the horrendously campy Wes Craven film from 1982 and the even worse sequel and TV series that followed. While those Swamp Thing products are definitely good for an unintentional laugh, they have permanently marred the legacy of DCs premiere horror comic, especially Moores Saga Of The Swamp Thing. It was his first dalliance in American comics. It was the beginning of the British comics invasion. It ended the reign of the Comics Code rating system. It started DCs line of 80s supernatural and adultcentred comics. It redefined the artistic possibilities of mainstream comics. It lasted for almost four years and 1,066 pages. Within those pages lies some of the finest writing of Moores career, writing that touches on all of his major themes and provides countless genuine scares. In other words, its a masterpiece. One of the most important runs any writer ever achieved. Yet, its all but forgotten

amongst most readers these days. Well folks, its time to change that. Ironically, it was the very Wes Craven movie that taints the Swamp Thing legacy that was responsible for Moore getting his prestigious hands and monumental beard on the project. Convinced that the Swamp Thing movie would be a massive success, DC relaunched the cancelled comic series in 1982 as a tie-in. Obviously the flick didnt set the world on fire, so the Swamp Thing series hardly proved to be a best-seller. However, none other than Swamp Thing creator Len Wein was in charge of DC at the time, so he decided to take a risk and hire that talented British writer from 2000 AD and Warrior who was all the rage to take over his baby. At the time, no one had successfully made the leap from cult British comics success to a mainstream gig at one of the major comics publishers, so Moore understandably jumped at the chance. He wasnt particularly a fan of the current Swamp Thing run, but enjoyed Weins original concept and was a longtime lover of H.P. Lovecrafts peculiar brand of horror fantasy, which he thought could be brought to Swamp Thing. So, after his first issue lit a gasoline fire on all current Swamp Thing continuity, Moore kicked off his run with one of the most influential single issues in the history of comics.
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[ALaN MOORES] SWamP THING LOOKED LIKE NOtHING ELSE ON tHE RaCKS aND COmBINED mORE GROUND BREaKING tECHNIQUES, IDEaS, aND ImaGES IN ItS 23 PaGES tHaN aLL OF tHE COmPEtItION COmBINED.

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Anyone who picked up a copy of Saga Of The Swamp Thing #21 in 1984 was in for quite a shock. Dubbed The Anatomy Lesson, the issue redefined the narrative, thematic, and structural possibilities of a superhero comic. The story reinvented Swamp Thing so that he was no longer a man bonded with plants to become a monster, but a sentient plant who had absorbed the remains of Alec Hollands body/mind and convinced itself that it was once a man. Thats pretty heady stuff, but beyond that Moore fractured the narrative so that it was told as flashbacks within flashbacks within a scientific study, leading to a gut punch horror finale as potent as anything in ECs troubled legacy. Then to top it off, he employed the same use of unconventional and cinematic comic book framing from his British comics work. The book looked like nothing else on the racks and combined more ground breaking techniques, ideas, and images in its 23 pages than all of the competition combined. Its a stunning issue, one of the greatest of Moores career, and the best part was that he was only getting started. From there Moore expanded and explored the possibilities of Swamp Things powers. He turned the character into an elemental who could control all plant life around him. For villains, Moore incorporated demons; some drawn from forgotten DC lore like Jack Kirbys rhyming

Etrigan and others of his own creation. A love interest came in the white haired Abby, a strong, independent, contemporary female character with whom Swamp Thing would form one of the most twisted love stories in comics. The first year of stories built up to Swamp Thing battling for Abbys soul in Hell in a double sized annual issue that would clean up all the available comic book awards. However, it was a single image three issues earlier that would make the biggest impact on the comics industry. In the early 80s, comic books were still forced to follow the Comics Code ratings system. It was set up in the 50s to abolish gory horror comics, but as time went on, readers got older, and tastes changed, it had become hilariously outdated. One of the silly incidental rules of the Comics Code was that zombies were in no way, shape, or form to appear in comics (dont tell Robert Kirkman). Moore had included them and gotten away with it because the zombies in question were corpses moving because they were filled with possessed flies. However, the ratings board had enough of Moores zombie semantics and refused to pass issue 29 because of a gorgeously gruesome image of the undead in the final spread. Then DC did the unthinkable they published the issue anyway. It was a small thing at the time that only insiders and hardcore fans even noticed. However, it changed everything. Suddenly mainstream books were no longer indebted to an outdated ratings system. By the end of the decade, DC would have an entire line of adult-driven comics that would

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Cover art from the February 1984 issue of The Saga of The Swamp Thing #21 The Anatomy Lesson. Alan Moores Swamp Thing was born out of this issue.

soon become the new Vertigo imprint. However, at the time, the only writer working without limits was Moore on his little Swamp Thing project and he quickly went nuts with the newfound freedom. After wrapping up his hellbound narrative, he unleashed an oddly erotic comic in which Abby and Swamp Thing consummated their love. Abby ate some of the hallucinogenic fruit sprouting from Swamp Things body, which sent her on an orgasmic vision quest that made her one with both her mossy lover and the entire plant ecosystem. It sounds gross and weird, which it is, but its also an oddly beautiful story with deep philosophical resonance. It opened up sex in comics unlike anything to come before and turned Moore onto the erotic possibilities of the medium, which would eventually peak with his outright pornographic book Lost Girls. But before the big beard with a bigger intellect got pervy, he turned his attentions to pure horror in Swamp Thing. Liberated from the Comics Code, Moore then turned Swamp Thing into the most terrifying horror comic since the 1950s. He created the chain-smoking, demonfighting, Sting look-alike John Constantine to send Swamp Thing on a horrific cross-country journey to prevent the apocalypse. The series known as American Gothic essentially gave Moore the chance to revamp all the classic horror archetypes in his perverse image without concerns about content limits. In Moores hands

vampires became Lovecraftian sea monsters, the werewolf was used as a metaphor for societal female repression itching to burst out, and he even brought in the American horrors of slavery when former slave zombies rose from the grave to prevent the filming of an exploitative Roots-lite mini-series. Its a stunning and genuinely terrifying run of comics that also includes a fascinating all-POV serial killer tale that barely even features Swamp Thing. Eventually the story culminated in an apocalypse battle that was admittedly a slight anti-climax and rehash of his Hell annual, but it didnt matter. Moores American Gothic run was a game changer that cemented the series as a classic. The character John Constantine would of course be spun off into the beloved Hellblazer series that lasted 300 issues, but the impact of the American Gothic storyline was deeper than that. The storyline essentially created supernatural superhero comics genre that would define DC and launch the career of writers like Garth Ennis, Scott Snyder, and Neil Gaiman. After that, Moore was the toast of DC. He started cranking out stories for marquee characters like Superman, Green Arrow, and Batman while keeping Swamp Thing kicking. It has to be said that the quality of the Swamp Thing issues started to dip as his workload increased, but there was still one more solid year of issues to come. Moore furthered his interested in superhero sexuality in a story that saw Abby arrested when photos of her making love to Swamp Thing surfaced, eventually leading to her being put on trial in Gotham City for a showdown with Batman that is often forgotten as one of Moores finest pieces of writing with a DC superstar. He also expanded the elemental component of Swamp Thing, turning him into a vital force of nature with a deep mythology. Those changes made a permanent mark on the character and furthered the possibilities of deep thematic exploration in mainstream comic books that other authors like Grant
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Morrison and Neil Gaiman would soon base careers around. The last year of Swamp Thing is admittedly a disappointment given that Moore unwisely decided to send the character to space for sci-fi stories leading to two brilliant think piece sci-fi tales (one involving a lonely blue planet and the other involving a sentient space ship) and a bunch of filler issues created only so Moore could dabble with characters like Hawkman and the Green Lantern Corps. Eventually, it all ended with a walk into the sunset for Swamp Thing and Abby, with the character and comic now one of the pillars of the DC universe. The quality drop in the last year of Swamp Thing books was forgivable since Moore was preoccupied by writing Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow, The Killing Joke, and a little book called Watchmen at the same time. Hed moved on, but stuck out a final year for love of the character. Since those other three comics are among the finest ever written, its worth giving Moore a pass for the final year of Swamp Thing and doesnt detract from the previous three years of ground breaking work. Moores Swamp Thing run is easily one of the most
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important runs any writer has ever had on a single comic. It removed the Comics Code, revitalized the character, brought back horror comics, and kicked off the age of comics for adults. There was also one other important trailblazing aspect of the book. It marked the first time that a young buck writer was able to take a neglected character and completely transform it into the creators image. DC would go on to repeat the formula to introduce the star writers of the 80s and 90s and the trend continues to this day. Without Moores transformative work on Swamp Thing, its unlikely that readers would ever experience the joys of Neil Gaimans Sandman, Grant Morrisons Animal Man and Doom Patrol, or even the current reinventions of Hawkeye and Deadpool currently selling big numbers for Marvel. Its not an exaggeration to state that Alan Moores Saga Of Swamp Thing single-handedly changed the artistic possibilities and business model of mainstream comics forever while also launching the career of the most prestigious author in the history of the medium. Not bad for a comic book about a big scary vegetable, huh?

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90s Comic Resurgence

CR A SH COURSE
The 90s are back in a big way. Camouflage prints, overalls, grunge, its all back in vogue. Of course the fashion sense isnt the only thing seeing a resurgence, but some corporations have decided, probably against their better judgement, that the 90s are a decade they want to emulate. The industry? Comic books. For those who arent familiar with the boom and crash of the comic book industry, one neednt look far to see just what people are talking about. During the late 80s and early 90s, the comic industry saw its biggest ever boom in sales. A combination of factors came

Laura thinks the 90s are back - for better or for worse. Spawn (pictured) hopes shes right.

Can THe cOmic indUsTrY aVOid anOTHer crasH?

Word by Laura Thomas
together to create a surge and new consumers and the entire industry took note of this blossoming trend. Now, twenty years later, were seeing the edge of the bubble and one cant help but wonder how long it will take to burst. The comic trend of the 80s actually began in the late 70s when people started taking note of how much old comics could be worth. When the mile-high collection was discovered in 1977 the world took note of the huge values some of the old books had begun to sell for. People wanted a piece of the pie and Marvel and DC

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were happy to oblige. They began to turn their focus to niche comic shops rather than mom and pop corner stores, and new lines of issue ones began to hit the market, prompting people to snap them up in hopes they would be worth big bucks down the road. The big two also began to realize that their customers werent just little kids. Adults enjoyed comics and by not catering to that market they could be losing huge sources of revenues. More adult comics began to find their way into the market and titles like Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen proved that comics were valid forms of storytelling and deserved our attention. Crossover events began to take hold of the market in earnest with the releases of titles like Crisis on Infinite Earths, Invasion!, Secret Wars, Fall of the Mutants, and more began to capture readers attention and they were a way to pique interest in their tie in series with new readers. New readers were a driving force in the boom and many found their way from the movies that had been based on popular franchises, most notably, Batman and Batman: Returns. The movies reminded people that Batman wasnt about dancing and silly catchphrases, but that he was the dark detective and he wasnt for kids. The late 80s and early 90s also saw some less memorable films like Howard the Duck, Captain America, The Punisher, and a single season of a TV show based on The Flash. When Superman #75 rolled around in October 1992 it seemed like nothing could stop the comic juggernaut. With Death of Superman came the hoards of casual speculators; people who thought they could buy ten copies of a modern book and flip it a few years later to buy a house. If the first Superman comic was worth a million, then surely the last Superman comic had to be worth something too! Speculation had become big business and people were buying comics like it was the stock market. Marvel and DC did little to curb this, instead publishing a stream of
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Cover of Superman #75

number one issues that often came with holographic covers, variant covers, polybagged editions, special inserts, anything they could think of to continue to drive sales up and up. Throw in the huge boom that was Image Comics and all its number ones and it seemed that there was no limit to how many comics retailers could sell. Of course, there was a limit and when the industry crashed, it crashed hard. Sales plummeted, collectors began to realize the high mark-ups theyd paid for new issues were now worth a fraction of the cover price, and retailers were losing their grip on the huge revenues theyd seen leading up to the crash. Two-thirds of all comic specialty shops closed their door during the crash, along with many publishers and distributors. Even the giant that is Marvel had to tuck its tail between its legs and cry bankruptcy, though it was their own actions that led them there. While Image cranked out speculator book after speculator book, and DC focused on lacklustre events like Trinity and Zero Hour, Marvel was busy expanding their line much further than the market could support. Their attention was on poorly received titles and events like Clone Saga, Heroes Reborn, and 2099 while every successful property needed four or five different series for readers to buy, and people got sick of it. As the industry limped into 1998 and beyond the survivors worked hard to bring in new talent, new ideas, and essentially hold on to what they had left. Sales numbers were lower than they had been in the 1980s, but soon things began to turn around. New Marvel movies like X-Men and SpiderMan got people to pay attention. Good events started popping up, events like Avengers: Disassembled and Identity Crisis helped a renewed interest come around. The mid-00s looked like things were turning around and the industry again began to boom. Twenty years almost to the day that the first boom began, 2005 saw renewed interest in comics begin to bud.

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Renewed interest isnt the problem; it helps the industry. Its what the publishers chose to do with that renewed revenue that makes us worry that were in for another bust. After the success of Civil War and Infinite Crisis, Marvel and DC both saw the supposed merits of event crossovers and over the past seven years the number of event titles from both publishers have exploded. Between 1985 and 1993 DC produced 10 crossover events while Marvel shipped 17 different crossover titles. Today? DC is sitting at 27 event titles since 2005 while Marvel has a whopping 29, and thats if you dont include their Ultimate line. This would be fine if people were enjoying these events, but save a few standout titles the response from readers has been a resounding meh. With these events has come death after death of popular characters. Peter Parker (in both regular and Ultimate Marvel!), Steve Rogers, Bruce Wayne, and many more. So many that people have stopped believing in any finality of the death of a character. There is no intensity, no gravity when a character dies and most people have finally begun to ask, So what? when a character dies and often it is the part-time speculator who drives the sales numbers of these issues up, not the readers. Those sales numbers are an interesting thing to take note of. Marvel boasts huge sales numbers, but what they neglect to mention is the deep discounts they give retailers when it comes to ordering their books. They offer retailers insane incentives, if you increase your order by 35 per cent, well discount it by more! Its often cheaper for a retailer to order 200 copies of a comic than it is 150, or even 100. What happens to the 50 or so copies of a fifth Wolverine series that they couldnt sell? Storage, basements, recycling. They rarely sell out, but Marvel still brags that they sell more comics than the actual numbers represent. To increase sales, companies are again relying on cover gimmicks to sell their books and reach a wider

The Walking Dead

audience. Marvel offers a cavalcade of variants to retailers every week, and in the last few years several of their books have been released in polybags, but nothing so far compares to DCs September event, Villains Month. Every single DC comic came with a 3D lenticular cover and sales went through the roof both in stores and in the secondary market. Day of release full sets of week four comics were hitting 70 dollars and more on eBay. Its been only a few weeks, but the sales have already cooled while the industry moves on to the next hot item. Image Comics cant avoid the spotlight either, but it might not be a bad thing on their part. While they still churn out number ones every week, the vast majority of them are good. This is the first key difference between 1993 and 2003. Image Comics is releasing well received, well reviewed comics that are met with strong sales numbers. They arent to blame that speculators are clamouring for the next Walking Dead, and so long as they continue to produce high calibre works, the industry is lucky to have them around. The biggest difference were seeing is the comic industry when its not in comic form. Movies from Marvel and DC have been both commercial and critical successes with very few missteps. The Walking Dead is the highest rated cable TV program and comic licenses are getting bought up before books even hit the shelves. Continued success outside of the physical comics themselves could keep the industry afloat even if a crash does happen. Even if a comic like Avengers Now hits a sales slump it doesnt mean it will affect the success of the upcoming Avengers: Age of Ultron film. Its long been said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Despite such good and well known advice, people arent always apt to listen. If current trends continue we may soon be seeing a mirror image of the big comic crash of the nineties, with very few differences to distinguish them.
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Star Citizen

Star Citizen concept art

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FLY ME TO THE MOON

With $35 Million in Crowdfunding, Chris Roberts is Clear For Take-Off
Words by Bryan Calhoun
These are the stories of Chris Roberts, the man behind the crowdfunding record breaking Star Citizen. There are many different comparisons you can make to trying to describe Star Citizen to someone who has never heard of the project. With highly detailed and interactive spaceship models, which include above average polygon counts and multiple moving sub-components per ship, you could call it spaceship porn. With open ended gameplay, that is supposed to allow players to explore or roleplay in whatever capacity they wish, you could call it an intergalactic sandbox. However, you could also describe it as a bet. In an industry that is extremely focused on iterative franchises and relatively cheap mobile hits (like Angry Birds or Draw Something), Star Citizen is a bet that the PC gaming is still interested in spaceship simulations. With a record breaking $35 million in crowd-funding collected, and over 330,000 backers, its hard to argue that Star Citizen lost that bet. Star Citizen is also the brain child of Chris Roberts, a videogame designer and programmer who has worked on various entertainment projects for almost three decades. His videogame credits include the creation of a number of high profile space simulators, like Wing Commander and Freelancer (whose main character was voiced by Ian Ziering of Beverly Hills 90210 fame).
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Raising over $35 million in crowdfunding, with over $6 million coming from Kickstarter alone - Star Citizen is a record holder for most money earned by a videogame using the service.

Star Citizen, when completed, is supposed to be an evolution of the space simulation genre. It can be described as a first person space combat, exploration and trade game broken into two main parts. The first part comes in the form of a branching campaign that will see your virtual avatar volunteer for military service as a pilot in Squadron 42. The other part is a persistent online multiplayer universe that allows you to take on the role of explorer, trader, mercenary, and many other roles in order to make your fortune and generally have fun flying around in cool spaceships. For those who havent been following the development of Star Citizen, the game is being released in pieces that Chris Roberts and his team are calling modules. The concept with the modules is really just to allow (backers) to have early preview builds of different components of the game. The hangar module has been out and updated a few times since it was released in August of 2013. The Dogfighting and Planetside/ social modules are expected to arrive at some point in early 2014. The single-player Squadron 42 Alpha and the persistent multiplayer universe beta should be out in late 2014. The final commercial release of the full product is expected at some point in early 2015. From our standpoint it forces us to get our assets polished earlier than you would normally have to in game development, explains Chris about his teams work on the modules. The idea with having these micro goals (or deadlines) was to actually force people to deal with all the little issues you have when you fix bugs or polish items. Despite having to put forth final material on a quicker timeline with these modules, Chris doesnt find crowdfunding any more difficult than a traditional development model. Its much easier to work for 330,000 bossesor backerswhen they are really all about having a really cool game. Whereas a lot of time with publisher and investors you get the impression that the game has to be really good, but all they really care about is profit. Chris went on to say, Obviously its a little more work because you have to constantly be communicating with this large group of people; whereas, you wouldnt have to do as much communication with just a publisher or investor. I enjoy that contact with the community because I think ultimately it will make a better game. I can share my ideas and hear their fears and issues at a much earlier stage, and I can better react to them. Now this doesnt mean that Chris is no longer interested in working with publishers or investors in the future, but just that he doesnt need to work with them on this project. I actually had some [investors] lined up, but once the demand was so strong it was pretty obvious that I wouldnt need the extra funds. So I said thanks for the interest, but well be OK with whats going on with the crowdfunding front. Specifically on Star Citizen were not having any
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With $35 million in support, Star Citizen can be treated as a AAA franchise.

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 The difference between now and what I was doing in the 90s-2000s is the power of the machines. The fidelity of the situation.
Chris Roberts
Star Citizen Creator

conversation with publishers because were building an online game, so its not really the same set up as if you were going into retail and needed someone like EA or Microsoft to get you into retailers. Although, Chris does hope that the industry has learned something from the crowdfunding records that Star Citizen has broken. I do think the industry itself has taken notice, and maybe on some other projects and games they wont be as quick to dismiss a sci-fi game, or a space sim game, or a PC game. Since Star Citizen could be described as a bet with the videogame industry, there was a chance that Chris Roberts could have lost. I asked him what he thought of the support his game has earned to date. Its impressive to have this many people [backing us] earlier, and it is certainly impressive to have raised this much money. It means I can build the game at the highest level possible. The money weve raised now, especially considering were not part of a big publisher so we dont have any overhead, is pretty much on par with most big publisher games. Now while crowdfunding has changed the way Chris Roberts is releasing this game, it hasnt changed the actual work that happens in the videogame development trenches. Ive been making these kinds of games since 1990, Chris told me. I would say Star Citizen is the evolution of that. The different between now and what I was doing in the 90s-2000s is the power of the machines. The fidelity of the situation. The aspects you can simulate are just more detailed.

Although, Chris did take some time to remind me that, as with every space simulation made to date, current technology means the limit is just before the sky. Now of course were not building the whole universe. You cant just go to any planet, or any corner of that planet and something cool happens. Were still painting pretty broad strokes. Chris continued to explain his design plan. Yes we have a 100+ star systems, and each star system has multiple planets, and you can land on those planets. But we really only build and design the places you can land on and the rest is a bit of an open canvas. Thanks to the $35 million in crowd-funding support, Star Citizen can already be treated as a AAA videogame franchise. Although if it is handled properly it could also become one of the highest grossing franchises of all time. You see, Chris Roberts is not just an accomplished videogame developer, but he also spent a decade making Hollywood films. He was the director on the Wing Commander film starring Freddie Prinze Jr. as Christopher Maverick Blair, a producer on Lord of War with Nicholas Cage, and also produced The Punisher film that starred Thomas Jane. Chris explained that he would be very eager to expand the Star Citizen universe once the game was ready. Well definitely be doing that down the road, but not right now because were still trying to build the initial world in the game. I would probably be doing that with a fair amount of control from my side just because Ive have experience in all those [industries].
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Indie Comics

Going your own way is tough in any medium, whether its games, movies or comics. But its also a space where the bravest, most interesting ideas come from. Indie comics have been with us for a while now, but in recent years theyve moved out of the fringe and become one of the most exciting aspects of modern comics.

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A New Age of Comics

The Rise of the Indie Comic Creator
Words by Laura Thomas
Independent isnt really a new idea. Wherever you find big brand names dominating an industry youll find people who are dedicated to doing things their own way, producing their own work, and striving to fill the holes that big corporate leaves empty. Weve seen huge strides in the quality and quantity of independent gaming and the same can be said about the comic industry as well. Independent comics have been an important part of the industry for as long as there has been an industry, if not longer. From the first wave of popular indie creators like Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton, whose works one would more often find in a head shop than on the racks beside Fantastic Four and Batman, to the later rise of Image Comics in the 90s and the huge names that began that publisher, independent comics have been a huge part of the industry. In the last couple years the independent comic industry has seen a huge boom in sales, and a large part of that falls squarely on the shoulders of Image Comics and the juggernaut that is The Walking Dead. The series itself began in 2003, and like most independent comics at the time it had a small print run, limited promotion, and a dedicated creative team trying to get their idea to the public. It wasnt until years later, after small single issue comic sales, but growing graphic novel sales, that the series really began to turn into the sales monster that it is today. For the past several years the first graphic
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The Walking Dead routinely ranks among the top 20 comics sold each month. When your competition is the likes of Batman and The Avengers, thats serious business.

novel has been consistently been the top selling graphic novel across all genres and publishers, often followed closely by whatever the latest release has been. Its only been recently that other graphic novels have started to catch up, but the exciting thing is that those have been independent as well. Since its inception in 1992, Image Comics has been the place to go for an independent creator or team. The same is true today with not only new comic creators such as rising starts like Michael Walsh and Ed Brisson, the creative team of Comeback, getting their big start there, but a new trend is already commercially successful writers and artists heading over to Image to have the freedom to retain the copyrights to their own ideas and being met with huge sales numbers. Arguably the first of these new creative teams to head to Image and release a greatly hyped new series is the team of Brian K. Vaughn ( X-Men, Lost) and Fiona Staples ( Jonah Hex), who together released Saga #1 on March 14, 2012. The series was anticipated with heavy collector speculation and was an almost instant sell-out, despite a large first print run. While new independent comics have been speculator fodder for years, Saga issued in a new wave of casual readers and collectors clamouring for a copy of the book. Why? Because it was good, very good. In the year and a half since Saga launched there have been almost weekly new releases of independent books with heavy hitting creative teams and print runs that would make executives at Marvel jealous. Big name talents like Jonathan Hickman and Matt Fraction have seen huge success with their series East of West and Sex Criminals, respectively.

Even with strong sales numbers on single issue comics, where indie books really shine is in graphic novel collections. Even books with smaller sales numbers in single issue format have larger and extended lives once collected. A perfect example of this is Revival, an interesting supernatural rural noir by Tim Seeley (Hack/Slash) and Mike Norton (Green Arrow/Black Canary). Sales were decent in single issue, but the graphic novel versions of the series have been consistent, strong sellers with a shelf life that far outlasts most of what the Big Two publishers could ever hope for on a character that isnt Batman. With Marvel and DC continuing to push universe spanning event titles like Infinity and Trinity War, many comic readers are starting to grow tired of repetitive events that often leave them feeling disappointed. Each event bleeds into the next with no clear resolution and readers are beginning, slowly but surely, to show the dominant publishers that theyre tired of it by choosing an indie book like Velvet, Rat Queens, or Jupiters Legacy. While most still dont have the selling power of Batman or Spider-Man, many of them are selling as well or better than Superman and Wolverine, and thats really saying something. Though most independent books are still largely overlooked, a trend is certainly brewing and its worth taking note of the growing sales of independent books, and why many big name creators like Mark Miller, Frank Quitely, and Ed Brubaker are publishing their books through Image, rather than going to Marvel or DC. Take into account that Hollywood has started snapping up rights to books beyond The Walking Dead and in the next few years we may see the industry turned on its head.

While most dont have the of Batman or many of them are better than Wolverine, really saying

[comics] selling power Spider-Man, selling as well or Superman and and thats something.

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Dark Souls II

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YOU ARE ALREADY DEAD

CGM T alks to Dark Souls II Global Producer T ak Miyazoe
Words by Wayne Santos

Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote in Beyond Good & Evil, When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you. He was talking about the tendency for people who struggle against something to become what they were fighting. However, the people at From Software, creators of the Souls series of games interpreted this in an entirely different way. They thought when you looked at any literal abyss, it actually did look back, thinking up more gruesome, brutal ways to kill you, then reached out before you could change your mind, to drag you kicking and screaming into the darkness where you would die, again and again, and again.

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That is the legacy that Dark Souls II has to live up to, the latest instalment in a series now infamous for a rewarding, but unmerciful style of action-role playing. The Souls series, which began with the smaller, PS3 exclusive Demons Souls has grown into an ambassador for old school, hardcore gaming, where the emphasis is on danger, difficulty, and slowly learning (through repeated death) how to overcome the odds with strategy, preparation and skill. Now Dark Souls II is being frantically prepared for a March 2014 release, and things are quite a bit different for this series that started out niche, but is now a sizable gaming phenomenon amongst the hardcore gaming circles of the world.

Challenge In Design
One of the defining aspects of the Souls series for fans is the difficulty, which is now legendary in the medium. In a world where the typical first person shooter makes the player feel like an unstoppable killing machine, Dark Souls II makes players feel like the odds are stacked against them. Monsters throughout the game are powerful and can kill players easily. Death traps abound, and even something as seemingly harmless as darkness can kill, with bottomless pits and other dangers looming into range too quickly to react to for players that insist on leaping without looking. Tak Miyazoe, global producer on Dark Souls II explains it this way. As much as the game provides a high level of difficulty, the players have the chance to learn from their mistakes, try out different strategies, and learn how to overcome the hurdles. When tuning the game,
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As much as the game provides a high level of difficulty, the players have the chance to learn from their mistakes, try out different strategies, and learn how to overcome the hurdles. When tuning the game, the dev team puts priority on making sure that the failures are based on the player actions and choices that they make.
the dev-team puts priority on making sure that the failures are based on the player actions and choices that they make. By doing this, players will hopefully strive to continue trying and challenging to conquer the challenges that exist. That reputation for difficulty is a double edged sword. It has garnered a lot of critical praise from experienced gamers that find modern games too easy. But this tends to discourage more mainstream gamers that might enjoy an interactive experience where they dominate the field. Miyazoe, however, seems to be at peace with this. As publishers, one of our goals is obviously to

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have more players pick up the game and enjoy, he says. However, we do understand that the core elements of the Dark Souls world are hardcore and we do not necessarily intend to force this game into the mass market space. Dark Souls II is not just a difficult, mean game. The challenges can be conquered by careful, patient strategizing, and not giving up. With this philosophy in hand, players will eventually fully understand the sense of accomplishment that the core fans enjoy. Its not a common design philosophy these days, especially in light of Call of Dutys surgical exploitation of the male power fantasy, and the massive profits that were the result. Most Western developers have followed suit, but many Japanese developers follow a path similar to the Souls series. Is this a difference in culture playing out? Im not sure if its a Japanese way of game development, says Miyazoe. But I feel that the high challenges allow players to sense the high sense of satisfaction when overcoming said challenges because the success in the game is based on the choices the players make. Of course, the other thing that determines success in the game is one element beyond player control; other players.

Tenuous Connections
There are two phrases that are thrown around a lot when the developers of From Software talk about Dark Souls II; loose connections, and accessible. That latter word has been cause of concern for dedicated fans of the series. Accessible has often been used by developers to describe the process of making a game easier to play, something that is in direct opposition to the core concept of the Souls series. But Tak Miyazoe was quick to allay fears that one of the hardest games of the last generation was going soft. We first understand and feel that satisfying the core fans is something very important to the franchise, and we have no intentions of drifting from our core concepts, Miyazoe says.

He explains the concerns further. Our use of the word accessible was not intended to express the difficulty or the challenges in the game. We meant the streamlining process of the tediousness that hindered players from experiencing the core elements of Dark Souls. We wanted to express the process of carving away the fat that existed in order to more directly communicate what we want players to experience from playing the game. The games level of challenge and difficulty will be enhanced for a more immersive, in-depth Dark Souls experience. One thing that isnt changing is the amount of communication available to players in the game, and this is where the loose connection concept comes from. Unlike other games that incorporate co-op or competitive multiplayer and encourage people to use headsets and other means of explicit communication, the Souls games have always been more nebulous, allowing players to enter the gamespace of otherswithout permissionand help or hinder their efforts without any means of communication. More traditional players have asked for this to change, requesting things like lobbies and means for friends to quickly meet up, but that doesnt look like its going to happen. Dark Souls II will still maintain the loose connections with other players and will not incorporate any means of directly playing with friends, Miyazoe confirmed. We will not be implementing any sort of direct communication, chatting in the game. But while central concepts of the games systems arent going to be seeing any radical changes, that doesnt mean everything is will be same.

You Are Never, Ever Safe

In previous Souls games, players could continue to play regardless of whether they died or not. Death, aside from transporting a player back to a starting point, would penalize a player, making them weaker, but it compensated for this by rendering them immune to attack from other invading players. This will not be the case in Dark Souls II.
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Concept art for Dark Souls II showing off what sort of environments the players will have to contend with. One of the goals for Dark Souls II is to have players want to remain as a living soul in the game, Miyazoe explains. The characters in the game begin cursed and are on their journey in search of the cure. During this, we want the players to want to remain living. Therefore, being undead will not be protection against other players, however being enrolled in covenants will allow players to seek protection if necessary. Of course, players bound and determined to have a solo experience can simply disconnect from the Internet, but Miyazoe describes the uncertainty of invasion and defence as the true essence of the game, and urges players not to go offline to avoid this component. Part of the reason for that are covenants, which are being further refined. In the original Dark Souls, players could find NPCs that allowed them to join a covenant, which rewarded them for following the covenants agenda, whether that was invading the games of other players to kill them, or collecting an in-game currency called Humanity. According to Miyazoe, this is even more elaborate in Dark Souls II. There will be several covenants, including those for invaders and protectors. Players will take on their roles and responsibilities in the world through the covenant system. Enrolling in a covenant will also afford players a certain amount of protection from other players, depending on which group they join. Its all part of a more elaborate integration of onlineincluding dedicated servers play for the latest game. We intend for players to take on their own roles within the world, Miyazoe explains.
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And utilize the covenant system to enjoy a different level in the network space. Another big change coming with Dark Souls II is the traditional pacing of levels. In most games, players traverse the environment, fighting normal enemies along the way, ultimately leading to some kind of boss fight, which, upon defeat, opens up a new level so the cycle can begin again. Miyazoe states that things are going to be different this time. It is difficult to fully explain how this will function, Miyazoe starts. But one goal of Dark Souls II is to try and give players more freedom in how they attempt to conquer the game. There will obviously be areas that are more difficult than others, but it will be up to the players to determine what routes to take and decide how they explore the different areas. Further, in order to change the classic rhythm, there may be areas where the bosses will be encountered in an earlier part of the level, and players may have the chance to defeat bosses in areas other than the end of the level. Dark Souls II is still on track for a March,11, 2014 release date, and in the meantime anticipation continues to build. Theres now even a comic book, published by Dark Horse to bring the dread of the game to fans in a new way. The Souls series may not be the best selling franchise on the market, but for those with deep appreciation for challenge and uncompromising game design, its certainly one of the most infamous. It wont be much longer before everyone preparing to die gets the chance to do so, again and again.

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Dark Souls II: Into The Light

Dark Souls II: Into the Light

PRAISING THE SUN

THe sTOrY BeHind giVing Dark SOULs mOre OF a sTOrY
Words by Alex Coop
You will often notice the frustration on peoples faces when they talk about Dark Souls. Memories of constant death suddenly resurface, and the conversation frequently ends with I stopped playing there. Its not a game for everyone, but theres no denying the interesting universe surrounding the traps, monsters, and other bizarre characters you come across. It oozes with atmosphere, and its brought to life with a dark gothic vibe that complements the games focal theme of death. If youve never had the chance to complete the game, and you fear Dark Souls II will be laying the smack down again youre probably correct in that assumption, the promo for the series after all is prepare to die then Dark Souls II: Into the Light, a graphic novel based on the upcoming RPG, will serve as an appropriate substitute. The formula for the books story closely resembles the story-telling methods of the dark and deadly game series. Looking back at Dark Souls, the focus was undoubtedly on the world that surrounded you, and the bosses, who on a regular basis pummelled your health bar down to zero. There were no complex side quests that developed secondary characters, or complicated plot twists, so if you appreciated the minimal narrative aspects of the game, you will enjoy Into the Light. Even if youve never heard of Dark Souls before, the graphic novel is worth a look because it will ease you into its engrossing universe without shoving all of its lore down your throat.

Namco-Bandai will be releasing a couple of pages of Into the Light every two weeks until the launch of Dark Souls II on PS3 on March 11, 2014.

[Into the Light] oozes with atmosphere, and its brought to life with a dark gothic vibe that complements the games focal theme of death.

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We had confines of where we could and couldnt go. That probably helped us, considering the wide breadth of the games world, explained British comic book writer Rob Williams (Ghost Rider, Deadpool), who is one half of the writing talent behind Into the Light. We werent told a lot of the lore, so we concentrated on getting across the feel of the game, and ticking some boxes that players of the game would enjoy. Plus we were given sneak peeks of some of the bosses from the new game, and some of the environments, so we included them. In a scenario like this, you may assume its difficult to transfer to a comic a main character from a game, which didnt really have a voice, and had the potential to be any number of character classes with different abilities. Williams and his writing partner, British author Andi Ewington (Forty-Five), decided to go with a nameless warrior, who, like the players created avatar, develops over time as he endures the wrath of his deadly surroundings. The challenge is the same in any story you write. Try and get to the heart of this character and engage the emotions of the reader, Williams said. According to him, this unnamed warrior, initially has none of those pesky emotions like fear and doubt getting in the way of his adventures. Interestingly enough, players usually feel the opposite with their selected character at the beginning of Dark Souls. Fear and doubt reign supreme [The Dark Souls universe] has that extra layer during early portions of a playthrough, yet of desolation, decay and despair - which pushes despite these differences in how the main character is introduced to readers, the imporit to a whole other level. Simply put, the chance tance of development remains the same. to create a story where the possibility of the You give the character an arc, and strip character dying at every turn was pure nirvana away his machismo bit by bit as the challenges he faces increase in fear and difficulty. Hes not the same guy by the end of the story, Williams said. Without an interesting universe to work with, a genuine narrative such as this would buckle under the lack of established structure. With so many unique landscapes to expand upon, combined with the long list of available monsters including a bloody big dragon, according to Williams the decision to pitch the initial concept to Namco Bandai was an exciting chance for writer Andi Ewington to explore, and ultimately enrich the Dark Souls universe with a brand new story. [The Dark Souls universe] has that extra layer of desolation, decay and despair -which pushes it to a whole other level. Simply put, the chance to create a story where the possibility of the character dying at every turn was pure nirvana, explained Ewington, who also admitted to being a fan of the punishing RPG. I have a serious respect for any gamer that doesnt give up and beats that bad ass game. The merging of two writers for the purpose of creating a story is not uncommon, and in this case, its an experience Ewington described as intense. After enlisting the help of Williams and artist Simon Coleby ( Judge Dredd), the two writers co-wrote the first draft, edited each others work, and 20 drafts later the fantasy adventure was complete - on paper anyway. Then it was a matter of keeping in touch with Coleby to ensure the visu-

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als reflected the narrative. Aside from the challenge of living up to the aesthetic standards established by the game designers, Coleby said he felt quite at home within the design choices for Into the Light, and maintained a process he believes is crucial to the creation of an eerie, gothic atmosphere. We all know that the scariest monsters are the ones which lurk in our imaginations, and frequently thats something which can be translated directly into this kind of artwork. Although I tried very hard to visually depict the various monsters and characters in a way which is faithful to the game, I also aimed to shroud them in as much shadow as possible. Coleby said he regularly sets the scene in a silhouette, and adds many elements in the foreground and background of panels to add to the overall atmosphere of confinement and imminent doom. While working, I very often listen to music which reflects the atmosphere of whatever Im trying to visually create. For Dark Souls, my studio was filled with an awful lot of black metal, as well as plenty of very dark ambient music. Gojira, Katatonia, Opeth, Skinny Puppy and Witchman, among others, were rarely off my studio stereo. It may have been familiar territory for Coleby, however both Williams and Ewington were middling with an unfamiliar genre in Dark Souls II: Into the Light. Ive not written in the sword and sorcery genre before. It was fun, actually, admitted Williams. Id like to do more in that sort of world. Ive worked with Coleby before several times and hes mentioned fancying a pop at a Conan type of book. Maybe we should revisit that.
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Ewingtons recent work is heavily geared towards the more grounded, realistic super hero stories, but a recent project of his he said provided him with a lot of experience with dungeon crawling escapades. I just recently adapted Ian Livingstones Deathtrap Dungeon that Im hoping will get published. Thats a trap filled adventure with plenty of deadly foes and gory deaths, so fans should rest easy that I have the experience and love of the genre to do it justice. The pool of ideas writers and artists can find and expand upon from the video game world are practically limitless. The concept of creating a comic out of a game is nothing new, and is steadily increasing in popularity, however its not as popular as one may think it is. Im genuinely surprised there arent more [video game related comics]. There seems such a natural crossover between the two audiences and the types of worlds these games inhabit really lend themselves to comics. Plus, from a purely commercial standpoint, the audience for games is enormous. Any comic based on one of the leading game franchises would, youd imagine, do very well indeed, said Williams. The transition from videogame to comic appears to have been inevitable, and with an approachable premise thats sure to please even newcomers to the series, Dark Souls II: Into the Light will likely thrive among comic book audiences. For those who are familiar with the games, the graphic novel will still be an enjoyable Dark Souls experience, just without the impending threat of all your hard-earned souls vanishing into thin air every time you turn a corner.

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The Sandman

Vertigo Comics

DELIRIOUS HEIGHTS
A Brief History Of The Vertigo Imprint
Comics have changed.
For a long time, they didnt. For over 30 years through the 50s up to the 80s, they were safe. Sanitized. Pablum. They were stories designed to coddle the innocent, strictly enforced to present childrens entertainment through the Comics Code Authority. But as the readers grew up, so did their tastes, and with the rise of specialist comic book shops as well as a new generation of writers stepping into the industry, comics themselves were ready to grow up. Vertigo was the face and voice of this new, more mature medium that was ready to live up to the potential it had carried for decades, and this is the story of how this unlikely publishing imprint from DC came to be.
Hellblazer

Words By Wayne Santos

DMZ

Alan Moore: The Harbinger

Despite the fact that Alan Moore is often associated with the Vertigo line, he never officially worked for the imprint. He was, however, instrumental in changing the tone of comics at DC so muchalong with Frank Millerthat eventually the comic publisher saw tangible, profitable benefits to abandoning the Comics Code and telling edgier, more mature stories. Beginning with his run on Swamp Thing and culminating with his seminal mini-series The Watchmen, Alan Moore proved that there was an older, affluent audience of comic book readers that was willing to spend money on comics again if those comics catered to their adult sensibilities. In October of 1984, DC took a definitive stand against the Comics Code Authority that had put so many limitations on what was an acceptable narrative for comic readers. The CCA had rejected issue #29 of Saga of the Swamp Thing on the grounds that it featured zombies in a state of decay that was too disturbing for readers, as well as implied hints of incest amongst villains portrayed in the story. DC, rather than changing the story to appease the CCA, took Alan Moores side, and published the story anyway, without the traditional Comics Code stamp of approval that meant the comic could be distributed wholesale to traditional outlets. Instead, DC put a tag on the cover reading Suggested For Mature Readers, and accepted that the comic would only be sold via direct distribution at specialist comic book stores, rather than convenience stores, newsstands and other general outlets. By this point, DC had realized the majority of their income for the series had been coming from comic book stores anyway. That was the snowball that rolled down the mountain and started many things. It began DCs increasing defiance of the Comics Code; it signalled the start of a British Invasion of comics, spearheaded by DC editor Karen Berger as she sought a different, darker, edgier, less juvenile style of storytelling in UK writers. Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis and Neil Gaiman were just a few of the names from the United Kingdom that began to grace a whole series of existing and new DC titles, all with the label of Suggested For Mature Readers placed on the cover. Alan Moore continued on Saga of the Swamp Thing for a few more years, creating an important protoVertigo ambassador in the form of John Constantine,
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Vertigo shook things up. Drugs, incest, old age, gender equality, questions of consciousness, political and social satire, the nature of religion, even revisionist fairy tales all of these themes had homes at Vertigo.
V For Vendetta

but it was in 1989 that Vertigo got its cornerstone. Karen Berger indulged Neil Gaiman, and allowed him to have a series of his own. That series, based on an obscure, no longer active DC character, was called The Sandman, and it made everything else possible.

Vertigo Arrives
Throughout the late 80s, a lot of changes occurred at DC Comics. Alan Moore, once the star writer of the company, had a serious falling out and walked away. Meanwhile, the more obscure, less mainstream heroes and titles such as Animal Man and The Sandman were doing the unthinkable; they were attracting new readers from outside comics, even the coveted female demographic that traditional super heroes had failed to appeal to in any significant number. By the time the decade ended and a new one began, it became clear that DC was now a house divided. On the one hand, there were still the pillars of the company, like Superman and Batman, holding their own along with the rest of the Justice League. But there was also Morpheus the Sandman, the Swamp Thing, and John Constantine, the Hellblazer. The upper management of DC held a meeting, to which Karen Berger was invited, and it was decided that she would head a new imprint, dubbed Vertigo, which would continue this new direction for DC, integrating many of these new, weird titles into the imprint and expanding with new, creatorowned titles. The first of the pure Vertigo publications was Death: The High Cost of Living, while other brands such as The Saga of the Swamp Thing, Doom Patrol, John Constantine: Hellblazer and of course, The Sandman traded the DC logo on the top left corner of their covers for a Vertigo one. Vertigo was in ascension. Over the years, Vertigo would make a huge, critical
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impact with its titles, tackling issues and subject matter that traditional superhero comicstied as they were to decades of continuity and audience expectation could never hope to broach. Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughn, for instance, dealt with a world in which all but one male died, as the society of surviving women struggled to adjust to this new life. The Invisibles, by Grant Morrison, allowed the highly lateral Scottish writer to finally take off the leash and write one of the most drugaddled, conspiracy laden series in the history of comics. Vertigo wasnt for people that liked comics just the way they were. The imprint seemed tailor made for the lapsed reader; the one that stopped reading comics because they felt they were more grown up than the material they were reading. Where the mainstream comics of both Marvel and DC were rigidly stuck in the world of superheroes, where people regularly died and came back, where the status quo was periodically upset and then restored, Vertigo shook things up. Drugs, incest, old age, gender equality, questions of consciousness, political and social satire, the nature of religion, even revisionist fairy tales all of these themesand subsequent anarchic characterization had homes at Vertigo. It was during this time that Vertigo also did the one thing that comics regularly failed to do; get taken seriously and critically by the media. Of course, writers such as Alan Moore and Frank Miller had managed to garner the occasional spotlight with their work, but the rest of comics were often regarded as inhabiting a cultural ghetto. Vertigo was not. The challenging nature of the work published by Vertigo regularly brought these works into literary discussions that normally excluded comics. The Sandman is regularly hailed as a great literary work regardless of medium and has won

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That was DC Comics, now we have DC Entertainment. It is a different beast, being run by different people.
Neil Gaiman on the shift in Vertigos priorities, which played a part in prompting Bergers split with the publisher.
Karen Berger

Bram Stoker, Hugo and World Fantasy awards. Commercially, Vertigo also expanded the range where comics could be found. Thanks to the mainstream success of The Sandman and the strong demand for the collected issues as trade paperbacks, Vertigo books were sold not just in comic shops, but bookstores, acting as the vanguard for the comic/ graphic novel section of numerous chains such as Barnes & Noble, Chapters and the old Borders chain before its untimely demise in 2010. But of course, like any story, the golden age can never last forever. And despite the fact that Vertigo as a publisher is still with us today, its not the same Vertigo that disrupted the marketplace throughout the 90s and turn of the century.

The Price Of Success

In December of 2012, Karen Berger, who had now been a part of Vertigo for nearly 20 years, announced she would be leaving the imprint she had created. In March of 2013, her departure took place. In an interview with the New York Times, Berger said, of her decision, Its time to ply my storytelling skills elsewhere. Shelly Bond, her protg holding an editors position at Vertigo, moved up the ladder to succeed her as Executive Editor. Bond was a safe choice for upholding the Vertigo vision. She understands Vertigo, given her past track record, discovering and supporting Bill Willingham for his Fables series, for example. But even if Shelly Bond is a suitable heir to the Berger throne, that doesnt mean the kingdom is going to remain the same. Neil Gaiman, one of Bergers most celebrated finds, pointed out the key difference in the same New York Times interview, That was DC Comics, now we have DC Entertainment. It is a different beast, being run by different people.

Berger herself was all too aware of the fact that both her former employer and its rival are no longer self-owned comics publishers with the same sense of experimentation from earlier decades. Ive found that theyre really more focused on the company-owned characters, she said. Of both her former employer and its rival Marvel, she noted they are superhero companies owned by movie studios. The big difference for Vertigo is the industry landscape it now inhabits. When Vertigo first broke onto the scene, companies like Image were busy dismantling the industry with short-sighted practices like emphasizing cover variants and placing more importance on dynamic, two page spreads rather than quality story telling. Super hero movies were still a niche market, and comics were only just starting to be taken seriously by people outside the fanbase. Today, Image is a force to be reckoned with, having learned its lessons about storytelling versus marketing, and is the proud publisher of critical series like The Walking Dead. Even Marvel has jumped on the creatorowned bandwagon with Icon, an imprint that lets Marvel creators own their work, rather than jumping off to Vertigo or Image to retain ownership. Digital publishing and consumption are also changing the way comics are made and consumed, and so, rather than being a maverick publisher of mature, creator owned content, Vertigo is now one of many, with its peers having taken the best practices of Vertigo itself, and made them their own. Vertigo Comics is, at least for the foreseeable future, not going anywhere. But with Berger gone, DCs own position as an asset of Warner Films, and the continuing uncertainty of print in the digital era, it should come as no surprise that Vertigo will have to change with the times.
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Alan Moore

LANCE PARKINS ON ALAN MOORE AND HIS OFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY

Words by Phil Brown

MAGIC WOR[L]DS
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Alan Moore has been many things throughout his life. He was a master of British underground comics through 2000 A.D. and of course V For Vendetta. He also reinvented the superhero comic through iconic DC works like Swamp Thing, The Killing Joke, and of course the comic that created the graphic novel: Watchmen. All of that happened in the 80s. After that, Moore cut all ties with mainstream comics and turned himself into a crafter of bizarrely brilliant indie comics like From Hell, Promethea, and the artfully pornographic Lost Girls. In his private life, Moore has been a cantankerous comics critic, a political activist, a performance artist, a massive beard enthusiast, and a magician. In short, hes the most fascinating mind in the comic book world.

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All of which brings us to Magic Words intriguing and amusing biography/analysis of Alan Moore by Lance Parkin. The author is a longtime Moore enthusiast who has written about the comic guru in the past and embarked on this project as an unauthorized biography from an adoring fan. Then the unthinkable happened. Somehow he got the notoriously combative Alan Moore to endorse it. So, Magic Words turned into simultaneously authorized and unauthorized Moore biography and fortunately its a strong enough piece of work to support that odd classification. CGM recently got a chance to chat with Parkin about his experience reading and writing about the work of Alan Moore.

interviews, but sometimes it feels like he manipulates how hes presented as much as he opens up. Do you think thats the case or am I being too cynical?
LP: I know what you mean. Hes aware that hes Alan Moore, this larger than life figure, and there are plainly ways he plays up on that. He genuinely doesnt have an Internet connection though, and I think hes, at best, only dimly aware whenever theres a fuss on Twitter. I dont think its deceptive. There are famous people who adopt a media persona thats not really like them as a private person. Their work tends to become rather easy-to-swallow product that matches their public persona. Moores work really has shifted the other way, into almost incomprehensibly personal territory at times. I think if theres a fake Alan Moore out there, its the one you read about online, whos apparently always burning with anger about the movie versions. Or the Alan Moore a lot of American creators and editors

Comics Gaming Magazine: Youve got a glowing endorsement from Moore on the cover of your book. How did you pull that off? Flat out bribery?
Lance Parkin: When the book was finished, my editor sent him a manuscript and Moore phoned back a couple of days later saying he loved it. I tried to give a fair account of events. Other people who were there, and often ones who were on the other side of the dispute, have said they liked it, too. I know that if Im writing a book about Alan Moore that Moore becomes what things revolve around. I had a full draft of the book at the start of this year, but I worried it was dominated by Moores version of events. It needed strong counterweights. Luckily, the people Moores fallen out with are strong personalities in their own right, like Dez Skinn, his editor on Warrior and Don Murphy, who produced films based on Moores work. I didnt seek them out to start a fight, but I knew I could rely on them to put their point of view across without pussyfooting. The books still unauthorized. Its just that the subject of the book likes it, and was extraordinarily kind enough to show that support by giving an endorsement.

Lance Parkins
talk about. The one whos sore because of some bad financial deals in the past. I dont think theres even really an element of truth in either of those. Moores always had a healthy sense of his own importance. One thing perhaps he doesnt appreciate is there is a difference between his irreverence and harsh words towards other creators as a hungry young artist on his way up, when hes sat on his throne looking down at the mortal world. Back in the eighties, it was a dialogue: Moore was spurring people on and they in turn would spur him on. That dynamic no longer exists. So its easy to read as Moore bullying people.

CGM: What is it about Alan Moore and his work that resonates with you?
LP: Moore surprises me. Thats what Ive always liked about his work. Youll turn the page and the story will suddenly present the very last thing youd expect a giant blue naked man, a double spread in the shape of a mbius strip. Comics are formulaic, its in the nature of a running series with quite simple characters. Theres that old advice for Batman writers that if someone doesnt crash through a window at some point, youre doing it wrong. Moore works within those conventions a lot of the time, but hes never lazy, he seldom pulls some off the peg sequence out.

CGM: After reading your book I feel like Alan Moores greatest creation might be the image of himself in the media. Hes always up for

CGM: Moore recently did an interview with The Guardian in which he was particularly harsh about superheroes and their fans. Do you think he genuinely hates the genre now?
LP: I dont think he was misquoted, but I think the remark was given a prominence in the article that

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 Comics are formulaic, its in the nature of a running series with quite simple characters.
- LANCE PARKIN

Moore himself would not have given it. Hes been saying, pretty much the same thing for 25 years. Its not a recent development for him to say that he thinks theres more to life than superheroes or that graphic novels that collect up monthly comics are just a way to make grown-ups feel good about reading some fairly adolescent work. Personally, I think what people often miss is that Watchmen and Killing Joke were created as out-of-continuity, deliberately extreme takes on the genre. They were meant to test the concepts to destruction, not act as a blueprint for every superhero comic. The recent Man of Steel movie took a lot of cues from that grim and gritty aesthetic (and it is very close to Moores Marvelman run in places). For me, it just missed the point of the character. Its a mistake Moore himself never made with Superman. Theres a line from Charlie Brooker, who knows his comics: Theres a

reason Postman Pat never went postal. There are many and exciting things that you can do with superheroes, but for me an adult take would have to be an exploration of the nature of heroism, not just watching them rip each other apart and seeing all the guts flying around.

CGM: Where do you fall on Moores claims of being a magician?

LP: As I wrote that chapter, I realized that Moore was, in many ways, still on the same quest Id found myself on: to come up with the words that summed up what he meant by magic. He had some experiences that he found very difficult to explain, and as he looked into it, he came to understand that many occult writers had had experiences very like his, so there might be some
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underlyingor overlayingtruth to it. So hes continued to think about it, to create art around it as he tries to figure it out. Now, its easy to dismiss all that and say that if you take hallucinogenic drugs, youre going to hallucinate, but that does Moore a huge disservice. Its hard to talk about it without resorting to pop psychoanalysis. Very tempting to see it as a type of mid-life crisis, or a reaction to the fact that hed swiftly achieved all his professional goals as a writer and was looking for something new. Or even as a way to strengthen his friendship with Steve Moore, a long-time magician. The magic chapter is the longest in my book, and I think its the shortest description I could write. Moores magic is a very nuanced, complex system he has for addressing issues like consciousness and creativity. I think hes sincere, but I think there are plenty of people in this world who are sincere but also wrong. I didnt convert to Glyconism, but it did make me think about big issues like the nature and limits of art in new ways. Its a belief that encourages Moore to take risks and produce weird projects. Id much rather he did that than write a Killing Joke sequel every ten years.

Hes fallen out with some of his artists, but its always been over business. He likes collaborating. I think the problem is purely that even a cheap movie is expensive, its inevitably driven by demographics. That compromises things. His Jimmys End series is one way to square that circle crowdfunded, low budget work. But its never going to be a cinematic version of Promethea, a no holds barred, lavish vision. The superhero movies weve seen have pretty much all been quite straightforward summer blockbuster stuff. I think thats the mistake the Watchmen movie makes: Moore and Gibbons created something cinematic, but its art house cinema. It should be cut together like a Nicolas Roeg film, but thats not going to make two hundred million dollars.

CGM: Did you come out of this project with a different impression of Alan Moore than when you came in?
LP: Thats an interesting question. Its a literary biography, its about his work and career. Im not the person to write some intimate portrait of his personal life. I think, probably like most people, that I started out thinking the centre of gravity for Moores career is that landmark work for DC, but that really looks more like a blip now. Theres a hugely interesting time for him creatively after he leaves DC, with work like Brought to Light and Big Numbers. I think if Big Numbers had been finished, it would have been his masterpiece. I didnt come to the book with a huge agenda about Alan Moore, the man. I came to it with the belief that in an argument, it takes two to tango. In pretty much every case, I can see both points of view. DC is right, in DCs terms, in their dispute with Moore. They are also the ones with a wider responsibility. A lot of the time, neither side is being malicious. DC was caught out by the success of Watchmen. Dez Skinn was caught out when the Warrior creators themselves became the marketable asset, not their characters. Above all, Id resist the idea that Alan Moore is somehow unique, or single-handedly responsible for the changes in comics. Its also 50 years too early to work out what his impact is, or where he stands in the literary pantheon of literature. I obviously think hes noteworthy.

CGM: I highlighted an interesting reoccurring pattern in Moores career in which he inevitably fought every publisher as part of an antiauthoritarian stance (whether justified or not) and tended to hold grudges forever. Do you think hes aware of this in any way and would ever relent? At this point I feel like he could do anything he wanted for DC or Marvel and probably even get a film made if he were willing to approach people and make amends.
LP: It is interesting to see Neil Gaiman, Mark Millar and Frank Miller move into cinema with relative ease. I think youre right that an Alan Moore who wanted to do that could have done so. He seemed to be heading that way in the late eighties when he wrote Fashion Beast and turned down a Robocop sequel. A lot of current movie producers, directors and writers love his work. Despite his reputation, he does play well with other creative types.
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PC Gaming

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Theres a PlayStation 4 on my shelf. It looks pretty nice, it runs the few games installed on it quite well, but, aside from its unique user interface and controller, it also feels very familiar. This is likely because I also play a good number of videogames on my computer. Now, Im not about to suggest that a desktop PC and a current generation console are exactly the same thing because theyre not. But the blending of personal computer and the branded machines put out by the likes of Microsoft and Sony has reached the point where marking a clear difference between them is fairly tough.

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The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are both, in their own way, attempts to streamline the many functions of a PC. By shrinking down form factors and running minimalist operating systems, consoles offer much of the same experience as playing on a desktop, only conveniently packaged for maximum approachability. This is starting to change. Consoles have traditionally served as a way to make computer gaming more approachable, reliable, and, supposedly, less expensive. In the brave new world of 2014, though, these distinctions are crumbling away. Regular software patches, increasingly complex user interfaces, and multimedia features have become console mainstays. When these two supposedly different sides console and PC come to resemble one another so closely it makes it hard to see why computers are still considered a somewhat niche gaming platform. So, why dont videogame fans talk about the PC more? While there are websites and magazines devoted entirely to computer gaming,
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the platform is still regarded as fairly niche, home to simulation fanatics and those obsessed more with technical performance than an enjoyment of gameplay. The computer doesnt get nearly as much coverage as Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendos systems, and that seems like a shame. Since no single company manufacturers computers and because the kind of generational leaps that mark console upgrades are not as readily apparent (outside of the launch of new graphics card series) nobody has any reason to market the PC. A lack of advertisement and the prevalence of outdated myths have put the gaming computer in a strange position. Theres no reason why this should be the case anymore. Personal computers may not benefit from the hype cycle generated by the big console manufacturers, but there are plenty of reasons to pay them just as much attention as is typically given to the Xbox One, Wii U, and PlayStation 4.

***

One of the PCs greatest strengths also used to be the reason I was so afraid of playing games on a computer in the first place. The extremely high level of customization afforded by a personal computer is wonderful, but can also be extremely intimidating. Is it better to spend money on a cutting edge processor or an awesome graphics card? What kind of power supply do you need for a powerful machine? And, oh god, does any of the stuff you just spent an afternoon researching even work with the motherboard you budgeted for? Its easy to see how the factors that go into putting together a PC can scare off potential buyers. Fortunately, there are extraordinarily helpful online communities that are more than happy to help look over a parts list before you pull the trigger. If thats not enough, buying a preassembled PC will increase price, but can be worth the expense for those who would rather not deal with the stress of going it alone. If all of this makes it seem like buying

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The increasingly eXpansive Steam makes it possible for computer players interested in non-traditional eXperiences to find a wealth of strange and interesting games.
a console is a far easier choice, its worth remembering that the potential headaches involved with actually constructing a PC pays off in long-term flexibility. Where the hardware inside a PS4, Xbox One, or Wii U is set in stone (except for potential increases in hard drive size and small changes to appearance of the case) a PC can be painlessly upgraded over time. With a good enough foundation, its possible to drastically extend the life of a computer with graphics card replacements, hard drive swaps, and other improvements. This level of flexibility means that investing in a quality computer can allow players to run current games for far longer than a console. An argument in favour of PC gaming wouldnt be complete without addressing the issue of cost, though. Aside from the supposed difficulty of putting together the right computer, the expense involved with getting into
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PC games is the most common complaint. Luckily, this is a bit of a myth. Its completely possible to drop upwards of two thousand dollars while building a state-ofthe-art system, but, with a little research, a high quality computer can be bought at a price that is comparable to one of the current generation consoles. Because computer components are constantly being improved and upgraded versions are released at an incredibly quick pace, the range of prices attached to parts like processors and graphics cards can stretch from very low to extremely expensive. A graphics card that costs $600 now can drop to less than $200 during the lifespan of a console. For those of us interested in using a PC to play current games it isnt necessary to construct a machine out of top of the line components and the constant price reduction of parts makes building a high quality system affordable. Adjustable

graphics options allow PC games to scale to a wide variety of setups as well. Outside of pre-set options (low, medium, high, and the increasingly common ultra), computer games can be tweaked in order to provide the best performance possible on a players unique setup. Playing a game on medium settings often matches the visual performance of the same title running on a console, but, depending on the strengths and weaknesses of a given computer, theres usually room for further optimization. The high cost of building a computer is an assumption based on browsing gaming PCs and believing that in order to play current releases its necessary to buy a top of the line machine. Instead of spending a fortune, though, its cheaper (and probably smarter) to put money towards a mid-range machine thats built with quality components. This approach allows for future upgrades and

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Papers, Please, Kentucky Route Zero, Gone Home

may actually be more affordable than picking up an Xbox One or PlayStation 4 in the long term.

***
Of course, no videogame platform means much of anything without excellent titles. This is where the PC shines. Not only do nonexclusive games typically run and control well on the computer, but an enormous number of experimental and independent titles are only available on PC . The ease of digital distribution via personal websites, indie friendly storefronts like Desura, and the increasingly expansive Steam makes it possible for computer players interested in non-traditional experiences to find a wealth of strange and interesting games. 2013 alone saw fantastic, unorthodox titles like Papers, Please; Gone Home; Kentucky Route Zero; and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs release exclusively for computer. In the past, games such

A library of PC games can include titles from more than two decades of releases, all playable from the same machine.

as Hotline Miami, The Binding of Isaac, and Dont Starve have come to the PC before new versions made their way to consoles. Theres also the issue of videogame preservation and the realization that backwards compatibility can no longer be taken for granted on consoles like the Xbox One and PS4. While the PC certainly isnt perfect at running every game from the past, ardent fans and digital stores like GOG. com have made it easy to play old titles on modern operating systems. And not only is it possible to download obscure games from the early 1990s and have them run perfectly well with a current PC, but also to easily play multi-platform titles from relatively recent console generations without much of any fuss. Revisiting games from the nearly 13 year old Grand Theft Auto III to last years BioShock Infinite doesnt have to require pulling out an old console. A library of PC
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The PC has always been a great way to play games and this will still be the case in the future.
games can include titles from more than two decades of releases, all playable from the same machine.

***
If the current generation of consoles feel more like streamlined gaming PCs than ever before, this tendency only looks to become further exaggerated in the near future. After seemingly endless rumours that publisher/ Steam founder/occasional game developer Valve was preparing to enter the console market with a system of its own, the company announced that 2014 would see the debut of living room-ready PCs called Steam Machines. Rather than manufacture the Machines itself, Valve has made the (pretty clever) move of outlining ideal hardware specifications, crafting its own open source operating system, and allowing third parties to make their own products. Despite substantial differences in price and power, Steam Machines will all have important elements in common. They will run on Valves own SteamOS and be able to run games purchased through the Steam digital distribution storefront. This could end up being a very big deal. Steam Machines represent a balance between the intimidating level of freedom offered through personal computer building and the ease of use represented by consoles. It will soon be possible to buy a Steam Machine at a pre-determined price point then upgrade it later, extending the lifetime of, what is in essence an unorthodox console, by slotting in a new graphics card, extra RAM, or a bigger hard drive. The sea change this
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could lead to is worth thinking about. Valve and the companies planning to manufacture their own Steam Machines are set to offer a gaming PC that provides all the advantages of a computer while simultaneously overcoming disadvantages like the confusion that surrounds parts compatibility. Given the uproar that accompanied the Xbox Ones plans to require online connections and ban used games (a plan that was thankfully reversed), the PlayStation 4s removal of media streaming functionality, and both consoles loss of backwards compatibility, the PC begins to look a lot more desirable. Steam Machines will offer a wide range of features while still being packaged as a shiny, easyto-use console with standardized price points. This combination of freedom and accessibility could do a lot to upset the path of the current console generation. The current trend in videogames seems focused on limiting the players ability to take control of the hardware and software theyve purchased. While these problems still exist in computer games, the open nature of the PC platform makes it easier to circumvent them. It remains to be seen whether or not Steam Machines will be a major success, but it seems likely that, if they are, the idea of the home videogame console is set to change in a drastic manner. The PC has always been a great way to play games and this will still be the case in the future. The only question is if personal computers are about to transition from a relatively niche gaming platform to the dominant one. As of right now it seems likely.

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DEAd RISING 3

REVIEW BY ALEXANDER LEACH

PLAYED ON: Xbox One DEVELOPER: Capcom Vancouver PUBLISHER: Microsoft Game Studios ESRB: M

/10

Entertainment can be mindless. A lot of old horror movies are silly as hell, relying on over-the-top gore and melodrama as much as suspense and unsettling subjects. Dead Rising 3 is an old-school, silly zombie movie, like its predecessors, and revelling in that keeps it relevant, for a while. But, unfortunately, not quite long enough, as it lacks some details that would the core kill-fest relevant and interesting. Dead Rising 3 takes the zombie apocalypse, and expands it out of a shopping mall and into a small city. The result is wider areas, and more zombies, as well as the importance of vehicles in order to travel between the four different islands the city covers. Theres a thrill to exploration there, and thats what keeps it going beyond its initial offering. Hordes of zombies, while intimidating, dont make for the most diverse of threats, and the game would have grown boring without an incentive to explore the restaurants, movie theatres, and other stores. That combat is satisfying, especially with the range of strange combination weapons. There are tons of zombies on the screen at any time, especially on the highways where the open areas are loaded with gigantic herds of rotting dead. The engine holds up quite well, even under a horizon of undead, and the models themselves look quite good, with a hint of cartoonish exaggeration even in the human characters. The

weapons and combination are dementedly imaginative, and reach mind-boggling silliness (my favourite was the steamroller-motorcycle hybrid covered in flamethrowers). Whats more, the actual stat upgrades feel useful and helpful, actively making it easier to deal with the larger hordes nearing the endgame. I never tried the Smartglass functions, but the game works fine without a Kinect (replacing some of the well-used button prompts with simply shaking the controller). By the end, however, I found myself getting bored with the content as theres really very little variation in what youre doing. Discovering a new weapon combo or new vehicle was interesting, but the other collectables feel somewhat forced, and I lacked incentive to pursue them for their own sake. The night sections, where zombies apparently get more aggressive, doesnt seem particularly different from the daytime, and dont do anything to add to the games urgency, nor do the different varieties of enemies, human and zombie. The side missions to help survivors rarely amount to anything involved, and are merely an excuse to keep exploring, among many. There seems to be no real reason to use your arsenal, beyond the visceral catharsis of slaughtering hordes of former humans in an acceptable context (the core of all zombie works). While I understand you need reasons to explore the ruined urban environment, they have to be compelling reasons, and just because this is a comedic game
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doesnt mean they cant be gripping. The other people, a critical part of any zombie story, dont help particularly much. Actually teaming up with survivors is pointless, as they never seem to actually help even when Ive given them the best weapons. Fortunately, escorting them seems to be less of a pain than it is in most games, and survivors survive quite well on their own, unless to leave them to fight a giant horde. Its not painful to have allies, but saving people could have a greater impact on the gameplay, and have more benefits than mere points in order to make you fell like it matters. One of the games main features the Psycho missions, where you fight a boss in the form of a ridiculously over-the-top human enemy lacks some of the charm of previous entries. Im not sure I got them all, but most of them seemed rushed in their execution. The actual fights are quite easy, with a readily-apparent gimmick that you can exploit. Protagonist Nick isnt really a snarky guy, and so the exchanges are pretty one-sided in the opening and closing cutscene. I breezed through the bosses with little strategy, often completely ignoring the unique mechanics present in their stages unless absolutely forced to use them, just by using some of the combo weapons (the final boss succumbed to repeated Dragon headbutts, the single most broken thing in the entire game. And I never even upgraded it with the extra claws and flame-throwing elements). The previous games tried to establish a reasoning behind the boss madness, and while some in Dead Rising 3 get this treatment, most feel like empty archetypes. Ive left the plot to the end, because there really isnt too much of one off the start. You play a mechanic named Nick Ramos, looking for a way out of the city of Los Perdidos, before the military firebombs the city in six days. The actual story ties into the narrative of previous games, but it takes too long to get to this the new characters arent particularly interesting, particularly Nick, who lacks presence in most scenes. The dialogue ranges from delightfully cheesy to just boring. It doesnt really hurt, but it doesnt help, either. This middling quality is tied into flaws like the boring boss narratives and afterthought-like elements like Tragic Endings (finding a person crushed by a bus would feel more satisfying if there was some kind of narrative attached, making you feel the tragedy). Its a decent Xbox One title, and I found it enjoyable up until the last few days. But a game needs to be consistently full through its entire length, and I didnt feel that it was, with the boss fights and limited story detracting from what is a cool-looking zombie grinder. When you play a game and feel its too long, this is a problem, especially in this day and age when single player experiences boil down to a couple of hours. Some more reason to kill would have given this game a strong place in the Xbox One library something which the system desperately needs.
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EDITOR'S CHOICE

THE BANNER SAGA

REVIEW BY REID MCCARTER

/10

PLAYED ON: PC DEVELOPER: Stoic PUBLISHER: Versus Evil ESRB: NR

The Banner Saga, like the ancient epics and legends it draws inspiration from, is about journeys. Just as Odysseus sailed home from the Trojan War, Tripitaka journeyed west from China, and Gilgamesh ventured to the Cedar Forest to fight a giant, Stoics fictionalized take on Scandinavian myth is a larger-than-life tale of perilous quests and arduous travel. This focus on reinvigorating the past of inventing a whole new epic for the modern age is what makes The Banner Saga unique, and what makes its characters, combat, and plot feel bigger and, ultimately, more important than they would otherwise seem. From the very beginning of the game, The Banner Saga is grandiose. A group of giant men called varl, huge horns jutting from their heads and enormous hands clutching axes, arrive in a frozen city off the coast of an imagined Nordic landscape. Theyve come to link up with a band of human royalty and finally cement an alliance between their two mutually distrustful races. Though the story starts in linear fashion, the narrative moving forward through beautiful, hand-drawn scenes of conversation between the wide cast of characters, it quickly introduces a level of player choice that impacts what follows. Shortly after the humans and varl form a caravan and set off on their journey, The Banner Saga introduces situations where the player must decide how to handle events like bandit attacks, group infighting,

and encounters with strangers met while on the road. Depending on the approach taken, people including playable characters may die, the groups morale may lower or increase, and renown (the currency used to buy skills, items, and supplies) may be gained. While the main storyline will always unfold in a fairly specific manner, The Banner Sagas emphasis on player choice makes an already engrossing narrative feel extremely personal. The tough decisions that must be made throughout the game wouldnt be nearly as interesting if it wasnt for Stoics excellent character work, however. The games story, with its invented place names and allusions to events that have taken place before its beginning, is initially confusing, but the cast of wonderfully illustrated and well-written characters anchors the plot. By the time the pieces have started to fall into place and the stakes are made clear an invasion of stone monsters and the threat posed by a mysterious, mountain-cracking serpent the audience has come to know the people living in The Banner Sagas world and care about their wellbeing. While the game doesnt permanently remove characters once theyve been killed in battle, watching a favourite cast member being taken out by a vicious bandit or injured due to a bad dialogue choice carries almost the same amount of weight as more hardnosed strategy titles like Fire Emblem and XCOM.
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This is in large part due to great characterization, but also because of the life breathed into each battle through Stoics top-notch audiovisual design. The Banner Sagas battles are turn-based and see opposing troops wearing down one anothers colour-coded armour and strength/health metres in order to win. Each soldier has a unique fighting style that, once upgraded through an RPG-style statistics screen, allows players to create a specialized team of warriors that fits their preferred combat approach. A giant varl can swing his axe in a wide arc, hitting multiple opponents; the lone, wizardly mender is capable of calling down lightning bolts; and a nimble archer can leave traps that cause damage when an enemy walks through them. Despite a combat system that appears like a series of math puzzles at first glance the effectiveness of each attack involves a bit of quick arithmetic involving the sum of each warriors health/ strength and armour rating numbers The Banner Sagas extremely different character classes encourage strategic experimentation.

THE BANNER SAGAS PRESENTATION IS EXCEPTIONAL DURING THE ENTIRE GAME, BUT ITS ABILITY TO MAKE COMBAT THAT COULD HAVE EASILY RESEMBLED A SPREADSHEET FEEL TRULY ALIVE IS OUTSTANDING.
At first blush the rows of battlefield movement tiles, floating numbers, and menu descriptions may make combat sequences seem like relatively sterile affairs in contrast to the minimalist user interface shown during travel and dialogue sequences. Fortunately, the crisp art style found throughout the rest of the game lends itself well to turn-based fights, too. Weapons thunk into enemies with a real sense of weight, the characters move through attack animations with impressive fluidity, and a score full of pounding drums lends a sense of urgency to each encounter. The Banner Sagas presentation is exceptional during the entire game, but its ability to make combat that could have easily resembled a spreadsheet feel truly alive is outstanding. Despite a consistently great aesthetic, problems do begin to arise during the last third of the campaign.

The deliberate pacing that helps propel the characters through the narrative for much of the game begins to lose its footing toward the end. The storyline, while never dull, eventually seems rushed, as if it became necessary for the characters to reach the final plot points at a flat-out run in place of the slower and more methodical walk that constituted the game to that point. Highlighting this point is an ending that rather unexpectedly reaches an emotionally resounding peak before immediately jumping to credits. The Banner Saga is obviously intended as the first part of a larger work, but without any way of knowing this before the arrival of its very sudden ending, the conclusion feels extremely abrupt. This is unfortunate because the closing minutes are so satisfying in their own right. Players who werent left confused as to when the many loose ends still dangling from the plot were going to be tied up would have had a far easier time allowing themselves to be affected by a substantial turn in the story, powerfully presented. These pacing problems were made worse, in my own time with the game, by an unexpected bug that further diminished the ending. During the last few hours of the game, the caravan menu typically displayed on the top of the screen during travel sections vanished entirely, only reappearing just before the finale and spoiling the dramatic stakes of a tense end sequence involving supply management. Though this was the only technical problem I encountered during the campaign, it was glaring enough to make the dialogue choices that previously made travel sections so interesting feel inconsequential. Without the stakes of maintaining caravan supplies and group morale present it was difficult to care quite as much about how specific decisions would pan out. When mechanics inform narrative, as they do in the rest of the game, their absence causes the experience to fall apart. Its testament to how successful the rest of The Banner Saga is that a few significant problems like these seem so minor when the game is looked at as a whole. The talent and care that has gone into the portrayal of Stoics characters and setting is substantial enough that the its failings are overshadowed by its accomplishments. The Banner Saga, in the end, comes across as a forgotten epic from our collective past. And because it achieves this kind of timelessness so well, it makes it easy for players to lose themselves in the journey of its imagined legends.

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Thisis .Heknows it'shisjobtoteachhissonScotty whatthiswholegamingthingisabout. Theageratinghelpshimpicktheright games,butbeingagooddadmeans healwayswantstoknowmore. ThatsexactlywhattheESRBs ratingsummariesarefor. Searchforagamesrating summaryatESRB.org.

Richard

Lafayette,IN

THE NOVELISt

REVIEW BY REID MCCARTER

/10

PC

PLAYED ON: PC DEVELOPER: Orthogonal Games PUBLISHER: Orthogonal Games ESRB: NR

Some of the best stories are concerned with fairly mundane subject matter. A good film can be about the summer job somebody works before heading off to university. A great book can involve a single person walking around their city for a day, encountering interesting people. Videogames as the excellent Gone Home; Papers, Please; and Cart Life have illustrated can also tell engaging stories within the framework of real-life situations. Rather than inject swords, robots, or gunfights into plots by default, a new wave of developers (typically independent and self-publishing) want players to feel the same kind of tension in a grounded setting that they would in a more fantastic one. This is very much the aim of The Novelist, a game that makes the difficulties of maintaining a proper work/life balance feel as dramatically important as any of the worldaltering choices made in a blockbuster science fiction or fantasy title. Kent Hudson, the founder of Orthogonal Games and creator of The Novelist, left a career in mainstream game development to pursue a more personal type of gameplay experience. The end result is the story of Dan, Linda, and Tommy Kaplan, an ordinary family trying to hold itself together amidst a number of completely relatable, everyday crises. Dan, the eponymous novelist, is struggling to write his next book while simultaneously attempting to salvage a rocky marriage
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and tend to the educational and emotional needs of his young son. The time demands of being a good father, husband, and artist are The Novelists primary concern, Hudson stressing the near impossibility of following a dream, earning a steady income, and being a good family member all at the same time. The Kaplans vacation home is haunted by a ghost the games sole and fortunately understated supernatural element who is capable of influencing the familys future throughout the length of their summer stay. As the ghost, players can explore the house by either walking around or flitting from lamp to lamp, all the while hiding from the familys view and secretly reading their diary entries, letters, and thoughts. The ghost may read Tommys mind and see that he badly wants to spend time playing with his dad, pick up a letter written by Linda to a friend explaining her desire to further her painting career, or peruse a memory in which Dan is worried about the quality of his work in progress. After finding every clue possible, the player must decide which issue most deserves attention and guides the ghost to a sleeping Dan to whisper the ultimate choice in his ear. The Novelist wouldnt be very interesting if these decisions didnt feel important, but, fortunately, Hudson makes prioritizing which of the familys needs are most pressing a difficult (and ultimately dramatic) process. Each of the games chapters concludes with the Kaplan

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family making some progress against the challenges of their lives while also clearly demonstrating what has been lost as a side effect of the players choices. Its tough to see that by spending time sharing a bottle of wine and strengthening the bonds of their relationship, Linda and Dan have let down a son who desperately wanted attention from his parents. Although some of the later chapters feature outcomes that seem unnecessarily severe the marriage can weaken substantially if Dan, finally having found his stride in writing his novel, compromises with a family bonfire instead of a three-day camping trip The Novelist is excellent in crafting a narrative that makes each branching story path feel both weighty and, most importantly, understandable. The relatable challenges and heart-rending choices that must be made within Dans family are diminished somewhat by The Novelists lacklustre presentation, though. The games visual style cel-shaded objects, environments, and characters is unique and its tone is consistent, but the writing in the notes and letters is choppy and the voice actors dont seem up to the task of compensating for weaker text passages. This becomes difficult to ignore in the context of a script that frequently features monologues detailing frustration and profound sadness. An extremely melancholy tone, established through a sparse piano score, grey-soaked chapter endings, and monotone line readings, becomes overly oppres-

The overbearing tone and presentational issues make The Novelist feel like a better proof of concept than a game in its own right.
sive with time and exacerbates this problem as well. For all the strength of its overarching plot, The Novelist contains a good deal of melodramatic moments that try for an unearned level of pathos. The end result is a game that feels a good deal more spirit-crushing than may have been intended. There is simply too much of an emphasis placed on anxiety and despair and very little attention given to the inherent joys of family life and creative work in The Novelist. Sure, the negative aspects of balancing relationship and career needs are the main subject matter that the game is concerned with, but rarely showing Dans joy in playing with his son or nailing a plot moment in his book makes the moments of triumph that do occur feel hollow. The minimalist piano sound track takes the oppressive tone of the writing one step further, its lack of variation casting a funereal pall
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over every moment of the game. Its already difficult enough when players best efforts at making the family happy lead to a character feeling emotionally wounded. Refusing to balance these small tragedies with occasional bits of levity drag the game down unnecessarily and minimize the sense that helping the Kaplans with their problems is a worthwhile endeavour. Ultimately, its overbearing tone and presentational issues make The Novelist feel like a better proof of concept than a game in its own right. Kent Hudson and Orthogonal Games discovered an exceptional premise in the story of a man trying to balance the needs of his family with that of his art, but havent quite managed

Playing Hudsons independent debut provides a worthwhile exploration of not only interesting life questions, but the future possibilities of making realistic videogame narratives engaging as well.
to deliver on the concept with the type of experience it deserves. The choices presented throughout the plot are well imagined and mostly well executed, and the conceit of a helpful ghost makes for clever gameplay mechanic, but its harder than it should be to appreciate everything The Novelist does well when its still so rough around the edges. Playing Hudsons independent debut provides a worthwhile exploration of not only interesting life questions, but the future possibilities of making realistic videogame narratives engaging as well. Its only a bit of a shame that the entire experience couldnt have compensated for its occasional deficiencies to come together a little better than it has.

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DONT STARVE

REVIEW BY KHARI TAYLOR

PLAYED ON: PS4 DEVELOPER: Klei Entertainment PUBLISHER: Klei Entertainment ESRB: E10

/10

Dont Starve: Console Edition is the first PS4 offering from developer Klei Entertainment, the team behind the critically-acclaimed Shank, Shank 2 and most recently Mark of the Ninja, the latter of which was published exclusively by Microsoft Studios for Xbox 360 and PC platforms. This time around, Sonys PlayStation 4 has nabbed Dont Starve console exclusivity, and with the game being absolutely free for PlayStation Plus subscribers in the month of January, Dont Starve is no doubt a welcome sight (and in the case of Plus members an absolute steal) for Klei fans who managed to purchase a PS4 during the holiday season. Unfortunately, those who are expecting more of the tight, side-scrolling action and/or stealth gameplay of Kleis previous hits are likely to be a bit disappointed at first as once the whimsical art style and humour that are the studios hallmarks are put aside, Dont Starve is a completely different beast, despite being just as compelling as its predecessors. In Dont Starve, players initially take on the role of gentleman scientist Wilson, who for reasons unknown is duped by a mysterious demon named Maxwell into building a teleportation machine that transports him to a primitive otherworld filled with dangerous creatures. Wilson must use his intellect, wits, crafting and invention skills to survive long enough in this ancient world to find a way to return to his own dimension, but only if starvation and insanity dont do him in first. As

the title of the game suggests, players must hunt and forage for food, materials and other resources to keep Wilson alive and sane for as long as they can until they can effectively escape, but in addition to this concern is the recurring threat of nightfall, in which Wilson has no chance of surviving against the creatures that lurk within its darkness without a campfire. Thus, the gameplay in Dont Starve involves a delicate balancing act between collecting resources through hunting, gathering and farming during the day, camping and eating during the night, and whenever possible exploring unknown territory in order to find the key to returning home a task that becomes more difficult as the nights become longer and the winter cold sets in. Oh, and did I mention that the game is a dyed-in-the-wool roguelike? As a roguelike, Dont Starve is enchantingly obtuse and as difficult as they come. Players only get one life, and while the game can mercifully be saved at any point and resumed at a later time, once the player-character dies the save point is deleted as well, leaving the player no choice but to start over again from the beginning. The only things permanently gained from death are experience points, which are awarded in proportion to the number of days the player has managed to survive. Instead of strengthening Wilson or granting him new abilities however, upon death all XP is accumulated and used to unlock a new alternative character each time the player levels up, which the player can then use to
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take into the game on his or her next attempt. Naturally, each new character has his or her own set of strengths, weaknesses and peculiar abilities, and its up to the players to weigh the pros and cons as to whether the character they choose to take into the wilderness will be a help or hindrance, not to mention appropriate to their play style. Its a completely new roll of the dice. Another element that makes Dont Starve feel like a total crapshoot is that the worlds are procedurally generated each time a new game is started, so the map layout and location of monsters, resources, and special items will be different every single time. Furthermore, some items and resources that players seem to easily stumble across in one session may be near impossible to uncover in the next, even after extensive exploration. The only guarantees one can expect is that the materials needed to survive the first few days are always nearby, and that adventurous players who travel far beyond their comfort zone will uncover some fascinating, dangerous, hilarious and useful things... though exactly in what combination is a mystery. Quickly learning to adapt ones survival strategies on the fly using the items and resources available are key to a long run, and its the sense of risk, reward and delightful discovery gained from perilous exploration that are at the heart of Dont Starves genius. Unfortunately, there are several times during the game where Kleis enthusiasm in going hardcore roguelike feels as though it is getting in the way of that genius. Putting it bluntly, the way in which important information is communicated to the player is intention-

ally vague. The player can walk their character up to an object, item or creature and inspect it, which will result in the character making a comment about the thing in question, but more often than not, these comments will be just flippant or sarcastic opinions that fail to provide any useful hints or information beyond the obvious. Players are simply expected to learn everything by experimentation, either by selecting each item and looking at what can be done with it, or sticking their neck out in front of strange creatures, jumping into tooth-filled wormholes and risking their fragile health eating strange flora and fauna in the desperate hope it will keep them alive long enough until they can find something more substantial. Unless one is an extremely keen observer with incredible luck, or committed to spending an inordinate number of hours and character deaths learning the hard way, the average Dont Starve player will inevitably have to cheat on occasion by looking at an online FAQ, a YouTube video walkthrough or other players broadcasting their own gameplay on PSN if they ever hope to get past certain impasses in the game (e.g. insanity). Beyond the difficulty however, Dont Starve: Console Edition offers outstanding entertainment value, even at its $15 price tag for non-PS Plus members. It provides just the sort of challenge and stress-filled fun that roguelike fans, OCD gamers and general gluttons for punishment tend to enjoy, but is also charming and rewarding enough that any core gamer worth his or her salt can appreciate it. If youve got the time and the patience, Dont Starves got your moneys worth.

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Adventure games are enjoying something of a comeback now. We have to thank the efforts studios as varied as Telltalewith The Walking Deadand far less conventional groups like the Fullbright Company with Gone Home. But the genre is a survivor. Its been here almost since the beginning of videogames, and despite its marginalization for many years, it refuses to die. One of the reasons for that is because adventure games are more about stories and ideas than many other genres. And a perfect example of this is LucasArts Loom, a game created by none other than Brian Moriarty, who appears elsewhere in this issue. My own time with Loom is one of those rare experiences with gaming; I started it in the evening and simply did not stop until I was finished, several hours later, as the sun was rising. It was an adventure game that grabbed me and simply would not let go. To this day, years later, the memory of playing that game is a fond one. Loom, even by the standards
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WAYNE SANTOS
of LucasArts, was an unusual adventure game. Up until this pointand even beyond itLucasArts had an unofficial policy of avoiding conventional fantasy. Their games could be science fiction, comedy, even historical to a degree, but they shied away from swords, sorcery, dungeons and dragons. Loom changed that by being their firstand onlygame to take place in a world that wasnt our own, as a wizard of sorts used the power of weaving reality to try and save his world. Loom, despite being a single game, had an enormously complex lore. It was so complicated that a 30 minute radio drama was included on a cassette for people that bought the game. It told the tale of a world where magic was a fact of life, and the humble weavers, who initially worked only with fabric, learned to apply their art to reality itself, and the resultant fear from others caused them to isolate themselves on an island. Bobbin, the hero, inadvertently becomes key to saving the world when a literal embodiment of chaos threatens existence.

Brian Moriarty did many different things with this game. It was one of the first adventure games to remove death as a penalty for failure. It had a unique system of magic that was based on the playing of simple notes, and it did away entirely with the big inventory pile of past point n click adventures, and basing the solving puzzles entirely on Bobbinsand the playersability to remember and play drafts the melodies required by Weavers to alter the fabric of reality. It told a more serious story that didnt have the signature humour that was becoming the trademark of LucasArts adventure games. And, despite the fact that only game ever got made, it carried within it the seeds of a series, with big hints like drafts that clearly had a function but no apparent use in the game, and visions that foreshadowed future events. Unfortunately, Moriarty never got his chance to follow up on the original Loom. The team at LucasArts was small, and there were always other projects going on. Loom, not being a high priorityespecially as LucasArts moved onto Star Wars-based gamesgot left by the wayside, which is unfortunate, considering the

first game set the stage for an intriguing story that left the world divided and waiting for some drastic action to pull it from the abyss. In the end, Loom became an oddity in the LucasArts adventure family. It was neither funny nor snappy. It took a high fantasy approach in a company that preferred the modern day, the pirate era, or even WWII. And it ended not inconclusively, but with a clear indication that there was far more story to tell and that fans should stay tuned. It was, in many ways, an interesting experiment from LucasArts that allowed Brian Moriarty to stretch his graphical adventure legs after his tenure with Wishbringer and Trinity at Infocom. Its a missed opportunity for both Moriarty and adventure fans that he came at a time when the staff at LucasArts really didnt have the luxury of pursuing these smaller passion projects. Loom could have been a small but very original fan favourite series for LucasArts. In some ways, it already is, but its an incomplete one. Like many other tales that came before it, there was a promise of more, but we never got it. What we did get, however, engaging, original and charming.

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LETTERS TO CGMAGAZINE
Send your letters to Letters@CGMagonline.com to have them answered by our editorial staff.

Should I take the plunge and start reading comics in digital?

- RyukoMatoi

That depends on how much youre willing to give up in exchange for convenience. A few of us over at CGM have taken the plunge and consume comics on digital platforms like Comixology, and this has some pros and cons. On the pro side, its nice to have your comics bookmarked and available to read on your PC, tablet or smartphone where ever you go, and you can pinch and zoom to make the font size as large as you like. Its also nice if youre running out of storage space since this means your box is now unlimited. On the con side, if you treasure the physical act of reading a comic, youre losing that entirely, which is especially problematic for double age spreads, at least on mobile devices. Theres also a question of availability. If you want to read the latest books, or big classics like The Sandman or The Dark Knight Returns youre fine. If you want to read the entire collected run of Alan Moores The Swamp Thing, only books one and five are available on Comixology, so the selection is not quite there yet. In the end, its a convenient platform in many ways, but there are still problems that need to be addressed.

I just found out that Atlus has announced Persona 5 in late 2014 and Im upset. Why is it taking so long? Persona 4 came out in 2008, thats six years ago! What are they doing over there?
- SyphonF

Atlus is doing what Atlus always does; putting in their best effort with limited resources on a game that doesnt have a AAA production budget or manpower. Persona 4, if youll recall, was a PS2 release when the PS3 was already out. Its quite likely that Persona 5 will be on the PS3, with an unlikely (but not impossible) chance of a PS4 version. It all boils down to money. Atlus doesnt have a lot of it, and the Persona fanbase, while rabid, isnt as huge as the tens of millions that plonk down $60 for a new Call of Duty game every year. It takes hundredssometimes several hundredpeople to create a game in the span of two to three years. Atlus cant match that, and theyre trying to create a game with catchy music, voice acting, HD graphics and, of course, the twists and turns that fans want from a Persona game. Youll just have to be patient, but itll probably be worth it.

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