PYRAMID_HEAD'S PROFILE

I was going to post this on 'what videogames are you playing right now', but I figured I'd post it here instead.


One thing that I just can't get out of my head upon finishing The Surge 2 is just how disappointing the story was. A lot of people gave The Surge flak but I think it was wonderful, and I really liked the hard sci-fi setting and story (me being a massive sci-fi fan). so obviously when The Surge 2 was released I was excited. The combat is certainly a step up form The Surge with the directional blocking and the energy and health system meaning you only really need to go back to a bonfire if you need to upgrade your gear. But I'm here to whine about the story of The Surge 2.

After the ending of The Surge the rocket from the Creo factory carrying the nanites that will restore the earth's atmosphere but kill off 95% of the population has launched and is now doing it's thing in the atmosphere. Around about this time a mysterious nanite plague known as D-Frag has started spreading. And some religious cult has started worshipping this thing called The Spark. In the midst of all this. A girl called Athena has become something of a vessel for the nanites and can carry out their will (even though in The Surge the nanites were perfectly capable of doing this by themselves as the last boss was a nanite cluster called the Rogue Process.

While all that is going on a member of the Cathedral of the Spark wants the power for the nanites for himself so he can 'reshape the world' and takes the power of The Spark battle Athena and transform himself into something resembling a Kingdom Hearts boss.

Now, my main gripe with the story is the fact that the first game was hard sci-fi, and it was great. And then The Surge 2 decided to go for a really generic and almost cliche story of one dude wanting to destroy the world thinking he's the only one to handle an unknown power. Which, if it was that by itself would have been ok if not for the fact that there was a prefectly good continuation of the hard sci-fi buried in the story; the D-frag virus, Athena, who the main character is and why we survived the events of the introduction. The massive nanite structure that hovers over the game world. We have the key ingredients to make a really good story. Maybe I'm just biased because I don't think religious cults and hard sci-fi go well together. Imagine how less of an impact 2001: A Space Odyssey would have made if during the chapter where Frank Poole and Dave Bowman are in the discovery one and intercut were scenes of people on earth worshipping the monolith. It would have come across as silly. Or Imagine if the religious aspect in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep wormed its way into Blade Runner it just wouldn't have meshed with the film at all.

What are your thoughts on The Surge 2? I know it's not the greatest release of late 2019. But maybe I'm just wrong and need to shut up.

Though I make games, at my heart I'm a writer. And looking over all my notes and story ideas I've written down over the years one thing I've noticed is that the ages of my main characters has increased over the years. When I first started writing, all my main characters were spunky teenagers, but as I've gotten older I've grown to favour the old jaded veteran archetype.

And it got me thinking: What age range for your main characters do you prefer, and why?

I'm working on a custom status screen for a side project I'm working on. The reason I'm working on a custom status screen is to show how many Ability Points the heroes have as well as other stats (Ability Points being used to strengthen the heroes weapons and purchase skills). What I would like to know is how to separate variables into tens and units

Me again. I'm working on a project for RMXP, and I'm using the 'Custom Message Script by Hodgeelmf', and whenever I try to run a parallel process event includes messages. I get this error:


I don't get this error if the event is anything but a parallel process.

So I have this silly idea in my head that I want to be an author. And in between writing my best selling sci-fi novel. I occasionally write short horror stories. I'd like to share little snippets of my writing with you folk. This first excerpt is from a planned anthology of stories collectively called 'The Black Shapes of Space'

Since mankind had developed the intelligence to use tools, we have often said many times in jest that we would bring about our own destruction. The two world wars in the 20th century was a nudge on the right direction, and the 2nd Cold War of 2383 nearly brought us to the brink. I suppose one could surmise that we never took our destruction seriously because we always thought it would come from within the blackest of human souls. We never believed that our end would come from a far more insidious place; it never occurred to us that our end would come from the deepest depths of space. When you were a child, and you’d look up to the night sky, did it fill you with romantic wonder? Were you reminded of enthralling space expeditions of the 21st and 22nd century? Or was your mind cast you back to memories of your childhood, of your mother singing ‘twinkle twinkle little star’ to you sank into a peaceful sleep? Well, if you are reading this, then drink deep from what I have to say. Space is nothing one can get romantic over. Space is full of wonderment and awe. If the doomed voyage of the Cargo Tug Ulysses taught me one thing, it taught me that all our assumptions of the universe, and our place in it, were wrong.