I have a history of letting small commitments snowball into massive undertakings. OH JOES! was a 2-month project that took 2 years. My YouTube playthroughs of the NES Mega Man games were a 3-week project that took 3 years. More recently, Make a Good 48 Hour Mega Man Level (MaG48MML for short) was a 2-day project that has lasted over 3 years and counting.

MaG48HMML (48H for short) was conceived as a shakedown cruise for Megamix Engine, the game engine that would be the basis for the larger and more involved Make a Good Mega Man Level 3 (MaGMML3 for short). The plan was to hold a small level design contest during the summer of 2018, get the levels judged quickly, and crank out a simple game showcasing those levels. When submissions for MaGMML3 opened in the fall, the judge feedback and technical improvements from 48H would help participants make better levels. I was already a judge and devteam member for MaGMML3; I had no time or intention to get involved with 48H beyond submitting a level.

However, those plans fell apart. 48H attracted more contestants than MaGMML1 and 2 combined, the levels took years to judge (well overshooting the submission period for MaGMML3), and the final game was hardly simple. I became massively involved: I wrote ~75% of the non-cutscene dialogue; designed a weapon tutorial and a section of the fortress; provided extensive playtesting and proofreading; fixed (or attempted to fix) numerous glitches; made corrections or modifications to several art assets; programmed more things than I thought I was capable of, including what is arguably the biggest Easter egg of the game; conceived or helped plan countless major and minor aspects of the game; wrote copy, edited judge bios, commissioned artwork, and hosted downloads for the website; and helped revive the project when it was nearly dead—twice.

Also, I submitted a level.

Several weeks before the contest opened, I discovered that I had been added to the 48H devteam chat on Discord. I hadn't requested a devteam role, no one had asked me whether I was interested, and I knew basically nothing about the project. I didn't even have an official role; "any help you wanna offer would be appreciated" was the direction I got. I now appreciate what it's like to be a summoned monster in a Final Fantasy game. As long as I didn't have to do anything, I had no problem being on the devteam to discuss ideas. I spent enough time on Discord already; what difference would one more channel make?

The rapid-fire conversations that transpired over the next month were riotously funny, and they shaped the foundation of the game. Almost nothing had been planned at that point, aside from the premise of giving contestants mystery boxes full of randomized assets with which to build a level in 48 hours, and we had a field day shouting out ridiculous ideas that somehow stuck. Of course, several ideas didn't stick (aimable Spark Shock, a Wily Assist weapon that shoots out a flustered-looking Dr. Wily at a 90-degree angle, GIANT CARDBOARD BOX WILY MACHINE - FOR PHASE 2 HE UNFOLDS IT), but the ones that did stick were agreed upon quickly and amicably.

Mega Man wins a free cruise, but it's secretly a distraction so Dr. Wily can do evil deeds without Mega Man coming after him! (Unanimous agreement.) Let's name the ship the Elroy, after MaGMML community member Cruise Elroy! (Unanimous agreement.) Actually, forget Wily; the villain should be box-themed! (Dissenting suggestions of Crystal Man from Mega Man 5 embezzling money from Wily, then Clock Men from Challenger From the Future, then these characters as part of a series of fakeouts leading to the real villain). The single absolute worst level should be on some dingy old raft floating behind the cruise liner, circled by sharks! (This elicited a "lmao".) Even in their rawest state, our ideas weren't too far off from their final form.

Before long, we started discussing the contest rules. As a judge for MaGMML3, a soon-to-be contestant for 48H, and a professional editor, I felt a strong obligation to ensure the rules were as clear and comprehensive as possible. I volunteered to copyedit the rules document, which soon turned into me taking the lead on incorporating feedback and finalizing the rules. Once that was squared away, the contest opened and I got to work on my level. Regrettably, I forgot to pencil in a rule mandating that I win the contest, but that's hindsight for you.

To make the most of my 48 hours, I requested my mystery box on a Friday night after dinner. I had nothing planned for the weekend, I was in good health and good spirits, and I had a few friends on standby for playtesting. Conditions were perfect. My plan was to stick with the first box I was given (unless it was utterly unusable), wait to see what I got before starting work on the level (I felt like planning the architecture and aesthetics in advance was against the spirit of the contest), and craft a "normal" level that might feel at home in an official Mega Man game (not too long, not too wacky).

It was more like a 30-hour level, really. I slept at least 6 hours a night, lost 20-30 minutes every time I compiled a test build, was waylaid by a series of asset issues (eg, monkeys falling through floors) that required devteam intervention, and spent entirely too long futzing with a laser gimmick that was long on possibilities and short on documentation. I also didn't count on how long I'd spend trying to get Rain Flush to block lasers (to no avail); getting the volume balance and loop point right on the music; and fine-tuning so many precision-oriented puzzles that were fine on paper but messy in practice, due to the nature of the assets involved. Fortunately, the nature-themed enemies and military-themed gimmicks made it easy to decide on an overall visual theme; and it took no time at all to pick Dyna Man as the boss, given how well his vaguely military aesthetic, incessant hopping, and use of explosives fit with the rest of the level.

There's plenty more I could say here, but in light of everything else, my participation as a contestant is almost insignificant. Those 48 hours were fun and memorable for me, and I'm proud of what I accomplished in that time, but my level is 3 minutes of entertainment in a game that takes upward of 20 hours to complete. My level came in 18th place, neither anyone's favorite nor anyone's least favorite, not sufficiently noteworthy or contentious for people to ever bring it up in conversation—except to comment on the music. The real legacy of "Base in the Boondocks" is bringing "Portrait of a Ghost Ship" from Castlevania: Rondo of Blood to the 48H jukebox and inspiring one question for the music trivia sidequest.

After submitting my level, I stuck around the Discord server for another 8 months. I provided advice and playtesting for other entrants during the rest of the entry period, and I continued to weigh in on devteam matters, but planning discussions soon began to taper off. By the end of March 2019, I was so busy judging for MaGMML3 and so little was happening with 48H that I decided to leave the server, with a standing offer to return if anyone ever needed me for anything specific.

Ten months later, I reached out to ParmaJon, the contest host, to see if I could help out with anything for 48H—hub design, NPC dialogue, etc. I was nearly finished with judging for MaGMML3, so I figured I could spare some time to help push 48H along to the finish line. The answer was yes, so I rejoined the server and started skimming through devchat to get caught up.

48H was in almost exactly the same place I had left it.

Granted, one judge had almost finished judging, and another was relatively close behind. Planning had begun on the weapon tutorials, some important technical stuff had happened with the game engine, the map function was being developed, and a couple tier hubs were in the preliminary stage of design. There had been some changes to the composition of the devteam, too. But we're talking about a game whose main content was thrown together 18 months ago in the span of two days, and we still didn't have screenshots to put on the website. From the perspective of anyone on the outside, 48H was dead in the water.

Perhaps more accurately, 48H was rudderless and functioning with a skeleton crew. ParmaJon was a judge as well as the contest host, and judging was drawing focus from leading the project. Any planning that had been done was scattered across multiple Discord conversations and Google Docs. Several devteam members were simultaneously working on MaGMML: Episode Zero, which was nearing completion, and/or MaGMML3, which was still very much in progress. In short, hardly anyone was available to work on the game, and hardly anyone knew what to work on in the first place.

With ParmaJon's blessing, I started developing a master design document, pulling together everything that had already been planned or discussed and filling in any gaps with my own suggestions. (I've saved a copy here, if you're interested.) I also suggested that we designate someone to make day-to-day decisions in ParmaJon's stead. It took two weeks for us to iron out the design document and less than a day to get CSketch on board as game design lead.

Suddenly, 48H was back on course. Devchat was more active than it had been since the contest closed, and the project felt exciting and relevant again. Although a few of my favorite ideas from the design document didn't make it into the final game (namely, Mega Man's cabin being like the Sky Room from Command Mission, and BomBoy from the Battle Network games running a mystery box shop), I wasn't precious about my suggestions. The purpose of the design document was to organize past discussions, spark new discussions, and give us concrete tasks to work on, and that's exactly what it did.

Around that same time, I got a copy of the judge EXE and played through all the entry levels. If I was going to be involved in planning the game, it behooved me to know what the bulk of the game was going to be like.

It was going to be terrible.

In their submitted state, without Skip Teleporters or Beat or anything else that the final game offers to mitigate the difficulty, the entry levels were torturous. I could count on two, maybe three hands the number of levels I genuinely enjoyed. 48H's tight time limit amplified some of the pitfalls of amateur (and even professional) level design that annoy me most, and it didn't help that I was already pretty burned out on Mega Man after judging 170-odd levels for MaGMML3. Consequently, I was very vocal in devchat about introducing features that would sand off the rough edges and balance the difficulty of the entry levels.

One such feature, which we were already working on, was a series of weapon tutorials. What better way to give players an advantage than to help them fully understand the tools at their disposal? I called dibs on the tutorial for Homing Sniper—I had some ideas about how to elevate the training to something more than "mash the attack button to win"—and I made it a point to playtest all of the other tutorials as well. Aside from participating in all the usual devteam discussions (which now concerned the Box Cartel fights, possible postgame content, and whether to let players unlock extra checkpoints), my focus was entirely on the weapon tutorials during this period; everything else seemed to be under control and moving smoothly.

Once again, I decided to hang around the server for about 8 months (until mid-October 2020) before taking my leave. All the weapon tutorials were finished or just required finishing touches, and there wasn't really anything else I could help with. I was trying to cut back on Discord use and focus back on MaGMML3 as well. As before, I left an open invitation to call me back to the devteam if I could help with anything else in the future.

When I checked in with ParmaJon and CSketch a month later, it sounded like the game was almost finished, aside from judging. The devteam really only needed help with graphics and programming—two things that were best left to the experts. The only thing left that suited my skill set was NPC dialogue. It was still too early to start writing anything, but I could at least do some prep work.

Knowing that most of the NPCs were going to be regular stage enemies, I set up a sprawling spreadsheet so we could keep track of which NPCs were available, where in the game we wanted to put them, whether we needed to create custom sprites for them, and any notes or suggestions. By the time I was done trawling through the enemy/miniboss lists of every Mega Man game we were likely to pull from, there were well over 500 NPCs on the list, not to mention Duo, Reggae, and several other named characters who might show up. I even included Daidine, a spinning platform from Mega Man 5, because "The fact that this spinning platform has an actual name makes me want it to be able to talk".

Another month went by before I formally rejoined the team—not to write NPC dialogue, but to help design a section of the fortress at the end of the game. It's MaGMML tradition for each judge to make their own fortress level, but only ParmaJon was in a position to do so, and in a limited capacity at that. It fell to CSketch to design the first fortress level and co-design the second with ParmaJon. The third and final level was an independently collaborative effort involving the entire devteam, meaning that we all got to create our segments in isolation before smashing them together.

To start creating our segments, we selected one of the unused mystery boxes from the entry period—I picked mine at random from the master spreadsheet, but others chose the specific one they wanted. As development progressed, I started noticing a fair amount of overlap in the assets we all were using for our segments. In the interest of showcasing a wider variety of assets (and giving players a reprieve from too many segments where they were required to shoot the terrain), I set up a spreadsheet so we could keep track of our progress and which assets were used in which segments. I threw out my box and rerolled until I got something novel that I could work with.

First reroll: "Your choice of a destructible block". Pfft. I was trying to avoid shooting the terrain. Next.

Second reroll: Venus Waterfall Spawner. Ah yes. The janky gimmick that had become a running joke, on account of it showing up in an alarmingly high number of boxes and being the bane of the programmers' existence. NEXT.

Third reroll: Wave Man Jet Ski, Cricket, Bikky Bomb, Tamp, Nombrellan. I could work with this. And so I did.

Development of our so-called Final Box levels was slow but steady. I provided as much feedback on everyone else's levels as possible, going so far as to fire up Mega Man V for Game Boy and thoroughly examine the physics of the bubble floor gimmick, which was implemented differently in Megamix and causing playability issues. By the beginning of February 2021, my Final Box level was finalized. Two months later, I hadn't started any new projects, and I was having second thoughts about sticking around for that other thing I had offered to do.

"If we need dialogue for any of the weapon tutorials, I can help with that," I wrote. "If we reeeeeally need help with other NPC dialogue, I'll consider it, but I had previously mentioned the possibility of un-volunteering myself if we had enough people to cover everything. I'm not as confident in my ability to write snappy dialogue for random NPCs, and it's been very challenging lately to work up the energy to get back to my creative projects. But if it's the difference between the game launching on time and the game dragging on even longer, I can give it a shot."

After a little bit of discussion with the devteam and with my wife, I was persuaded to try my hand at NPC dialogue after all. Nothing had been written outside of the weapon tutorials, so I had my pick of every tier in the game. I started with Tier 5, the minigolf course—I enjoy minigolf and had been watching a lot of Holey Moley at the time, so that was the natural first choice. It took me all of four days to pick out and arrange the NPCs, write dialogue for them, and implement their sprites.

A little over a week later, I was ready to mute the 48H server and get back to working on MaGMML3 unless someone pinged me for something. Any last requests before I disappear again? Well...okay. I guess I can write a little more dialogue.

I gave the devteam a few options and let them decide which tier I should do next. They chose Tier 3, the dining hall, which was perfect because I love talking about food. This one took longer—slightly under a month—in part because I got a little more ambitious and asked for both programming help (for the Hologran gag) and custom NPC sprites for a few enemies from Mega Man 7 and 11 who needed to be redrawn in an 8-bit style.

Afterward, I announced that I had it in me to do one more tier. I went with Tier 9, the ice skating rink. I love ice and snow aesthetics; figure skating is one of my favorite sports to watch; and I thought it'd be good to break up my tier claims so that if someone didn't like my writing style, they weren't stuck with me for multiple tiers in a row. I started work toward the end of May but didn't finish until early July, due to life craziness and some unexpected graphical and programming needs.

As my work on Tier 9 was nearing completion, I realized I had finally hit my writing stride. I could probably manage one more tier, if not a few more tiers; despite how exhausted I was from multiple multi-year Mega Man projects, I was having fun. However, I wanted to balance "helping finish the game" with "hogging all the fun stuff," so I asked the devteam about who else actually had an inclination to write NPC dialogue. Half a dozen people were interested, but burnout and busyness were very apparent. Spade_Magnes was working on Tier 6 (ballroom) and had finished Tier 2 (cargo hold) after picking it up from snoruntpyro. The main deck and passenger cabins were at least partially reserved for CSketch and snoruntpyro. Otherwise, everything was up for grabs, and it really didn't matter who took what. We all just wanted to get the game out the door.

Spin Attaxx claimed Tier 10 (water park), and I put Tier 8 (library) and Tier 4 (engine room) in the queue for myself. My plan was to keep churning out NPCs until we ran out of tiers or someone told me to stop, whichever happened first. Tier 8 took me only three or four days, and I knocked out Tier 4 in a single weekend. I was bolstered by positive feedback from the team; they seemed to like what I was doing with the NPCs, and any critiques were basically always constructive and beneficial. This part of development was easily my favorite: the project had a sense of momentum; I was fully in my comfort zone; and I felt good about what I was doing, because of both personal satisfaction with my work and recognition from the devteam.

My next claim was Tier 1 (lifeboats), which was a one-day project. As with all the tiers, however, I would go back later to finesse the placement and creation code of the NPCs and polish the dialogue. Tier 1 was attached to the main hub, which was being updated frequently for one reason or another, so I had to make sure no one else was working on that Room file in GameMaker Studio when I was. The last thing I wanted was having my local changes overwritten in a dreaded merge conflict when pushing my work back to the master file, so I suggested we implement a system where anyone who wanted to work on the main hub had to announce it first, in case anyone had unpushed changes. This system mostly worked.

Now that I was mucking about in the main hub, I started thinking about what players' first impressions of 48H would be. After the intro cutscene, you step onto the deck of a gigantic cruise ship and have free reign to explore. Where do you start? Is the ship easy to navigate? What areas might you overlook? Player experience had already been on my mind (see: the Giant Telly in Tier 3 who checks in on your emotional state after playing "Megatroid", the Puyoyon in Tier 4 who subtly reminds you to visit the costume shop on your way out, all the NPCs in Tier 1 who try to prepare you for the disasters you're about to deal with), but this is where I started taking on focused projects to make the game more player-friendly.

We had discussed adding some info-oriented NPCs, so I created Iota to explain what 48H was all about, a Jamacy in Tier 2 to warn players about a level with broken ladders, and multiple NPCs to guide players around the ship. I created a Junk Golem NPC to provide hints about where to find new sidequests and how to complete them. To make the main deck less overwhelming to new players, I followed through on a plan to lock some of the cabin doors until later in the game.

Because ParmaJon didn't want a traditional shop, players needed ways to stock up on E/W/M-Tanks that didn't involve grinding in the entry levels. I added an emergency M-Tank dispenser to ensure players wouldn't get stuck on the Box Cartel fights, when the entry levels are blocked off. I also created a Mad Grinder who would supply free E-Tanks and W-Tanks based on sidequest progress and Energy Element collection, respectively. It's all too easy to chug E-Tanks instead of applying actual strategy, so I wanted to encourage players to try special weapons, pursue sidequests (and their rewards), and not get hung up on any one level in the early game, and then to shower them with tanks in time for the endgame and postgame.

Furthermore, I suggested we reinforce Joseph's explanation of Junk by stationing an NPC outside his cabin who would give you Junk to trade in. I also argued strongly against starting the game with a mandatory scavenger hunt to find Beat before accessing the levels; to me, that felt like a contrived and needlessly restrictive way of ensuring players would explore the ship and obtain a special weapon that the levels weren't designed around. Although I was overruled both times, I found other ways to influence the player experience. For the Beat search in particular, I moved the invisible barriers to more organic locations, and I revised the generic "I shouldn't go that way" message to a fairly blunt reminder/hint about what you should be doing.

I was more successful about suggesting changes to the sidequests, which were being developed relatively quietly—I didn't know they existed until May 2021, and there weren't any real opportunities to get involved with them until July. After I tried out the music quiz for Funky Fresh Beats, I pushed to include a screenshot with each question, to make the sidequest accessible to deaf players and to anyone playing with the volume off. Because screenshots were too much of a hassle to implement, we agreed on text hints, which I wrote. I also made a few suggestions that stuck for the Mutual Attraction and Poltergeist quests; for the latter, I even recolored the ghost sprite (being obligated to use a canonical color for the Rotom Pokémon it was based on) so that it wouldn't blend in with the background as much.

Love Survivor was the sidequest I influenced most. For a very long time, the cruise ship was going to have a casino, either as the location for Tier 7 or as a standalone area (in the space that the Kickboxing Club now occupies) with minigames to play. The original premise for sidequest, then dubbed "Red or Yellow", was to help fashion boutique co-proprietor Bol'o raise money to pay off an enormous debt to a mafioso called Don Loath (a tip of the hat to Lex Loath from The Misadventures of Tron Bonne). Doing so would require cheating at a casino game where the objective was to guess whether a light would turn red or yellow (an inside joke apparently inspired by a Vinesauce video poking fun at a game called Color Fun).

The casino was scrapped in January 2021 to reduce the devteam's workload, and it was several months before we discussed relocating and redesigning the sidequest. Tier 3 (dining hall) had some unused space that was inaccessible to the player, which could easily be remodeled to accommodate a quest. This inspired me to outline a new quest, which made it into the final game with only one change: Don Loath (who never even received a character design) became Master Reddorgold (whose name is not a reference to "Reddit Gold", but rather a nod to the sidequest's original title). A kitchen stealth mission wasn't my only suggestion, though; I also pitched a Donkey Kong Country–inspired level using dining carts in place of mine carts.

A week later, I formally committed to writing all remaining NPC dialogue in the game. I was the only person adding to the main hub, several passenger cabins were still vacant with nothing planned, and nobody else had claimed Tier 7 (art gallery) or Tier 11 (sky deck). I was least enthusiastic about Tier 7 and had been hoping someone else would take it, though. The tileset contained sculptures and paintings (by eviemaybe and Protty) that I wanted to acknowledge in the dialogue—except half of them referenced things I didn't recognize, and by that point it was taking all my brainpower to write what I knew, let alone what I didn't know. And there was a major deadline approaching: first test build of the whole game for our internal playtesters.

I had about one week to power through Tier 7 and add as many NPCs as possible to the main hub and cabins. Nothing said I had to rush, but the longer it took me to get my work loaded into a test build, the less likely it was that people would see it. This was especially relevant for the deck and cabin NPCs whose purpose was to guide the player. Tier 11 was still in the process of being tiled, so I didn't even bother with that one yet. I'm not entirely satisfied with the dialogue I produced during this time, but "not entirely satisfied" was to become my mantra for the duration of the crunch leading up to the game's initial public release.

By the beginning of August 2021, new playtesting builds were being released about once or twice a week (soon to become once a day), a release trailer was in development, and I was rapidly running out of time to finish everything on my to-do list. The team wanted to ensure a summer release, given the cruise ship theme. Summer, as I pointed out, would last until September 22. They wanted it by the end of August—when I would be unavailable for several days. Eventually we settled on end of August as our internal deadline, with a few days of buffer before the release date of September 4 that was ultimately announced to the public.

My eagerness to get this project out the door had finally caught up with me. Leading up to the crunch, I kept taking on small assignments to ease the burden of more specialized team members. The artists were busy, so I cleaned up the subtle color inconsistencies between the special weapon icons, and then loaded them into a tileset so I could add them above the weapon tutorial teleporters. The programmers were busy, so as much as possible, I tried to figure out how to code complex NPC behavior for myself. I was already spending all my free time on 48H before the deadline was announced; the only way I could crunch any harder was to start sacrificing sleep, aspirations, and quality—and I won't even go into the Big Life Stuff that started vying for my time. The weeks leading up to release were physically, mentally, and emotionally brutal, and they turned my experience with 48H extremely sour.

My key mistake was not communicating to the team just how much I actually had planned for the initial release. I wanted to bring my perspectives as a professional editor, MaGMML3 judge, and fangame designer to the parts of the game I hadn't yet seen. I kept coming back to seemingly finished projects to polish things up and incorporate playtester feedback. I was still working on NPCs for the main hub and cabins, but because I had added any NPCs in the first place, people assumed I was done already. I hadn't even started on Tier 11, which would end up taking over two weeks to finish. And that's to say nothing of all the Easter eggs I was working on, or the Butt Mode cheat that I got involved with at the last minute.

As we entered September, mere days away from release, show-stopping technical issues began to arise. A key devteam member's computer died at an incredibly inopportune time. We kept discovering game-breaking issues and applying fixes that we didn't have time to properly playtest. The only person who could set up the online leaderboards on our usual server was unexpectedly unavailable. On top of that, a couple sidequests and noteworthy cheats were still being developed, and I still had a lengthy to-do list. No way was this game getting done on time.

By September 1, the devteam was discussing the possibility of delaying the release. By September 3—late enough in the day that it was already release day in certain time zones—we came to an agreement that a delay was necessary; the question was, how long? A few devteam members—myself included—voted for "until it's ready", but the final decision was to not keep the public waiting, saving any nonessentials (which included most of my to-do list) for an eventual patch. Release was pushed from September 4 to September 6, just long enough to lock down the most pressing technical issues.

As the guy in charge of the MaGMML website, I did as much as I could to prepare in advance for release day, such as gradually adding screenshots to what would become the download page. As soon as the judge scores were finalized, I commissioned Phusion—who did website art for MaGMML1, 2, and 24H as well as intro cutscene art for OH JOES! and MaGMML1 Remastered—to once again create art celebrating the first-place level for the download page. Once the story was fully locked down and we knew exactly what features the game would have, I wrote copy for the download page for the devteam to review. By release day, all we really needed were download links and one final sanity check before going live.

Release day was hectic and exhausting, owing to miscellaneous setbacks and delays. After the download page went live, I waited just long enough to confirm that there were no immediate issues with the download links or the game itself, and then I dropped off the face of the planet for the rest of the day. While other devteam members were celebrating, I was taking all the time I could to decompress and recharge before getting back to work. For me, the crunch wasn't over.

Given the general public's tendency to quickly find ways to break a brand-new game, I correctly guessed that we'd need to release a patch to 1.01 almost immediately, and then another small patch to 1.02 within a few days. If I acted quickly enough, anything I had planned for initial release could still be a part of people's first experiences with the game. After that, there was no telling how often we'd release additional patches, if at all, so it behooved me to get everything done ASAP.

While I labored away at the rest of my to-do list, I checked in regularly to see what people in the MaGMML Discord server were saying about 48H. Compared with the initial public response to OH JOES!, it was a joy to discover that all my time and effort had apparently paid off. People were sharing screenshots of NPCs I made that they liked, posting video playthroughs containing positive feedback about my design contributions, and talking favorably about the game as a whole...at least, until they started discovering the sidequests.

"Where is Tomothy Daddy?" "What other level is spicy?" These kinds of questions started dominating the chat, and I had no idea what they meant. When I wrote the Junk Golem's sidequest hints, I often had to go off of secondhand information from the devteam and an outdated sidequest planning document; I had yet to play many of the quests for myself. A few days after release, I started playing through all 16 sidequests, and suddenly my priorities shifted. After playing Credit Where It's Due, a tricky scavenger hunt, it was clear to me that players needed more hints, better hints, and reminders of critical information that was given once and never repeated—and they needed them now.

Unbeknownst to me, the day I played Credit Where It's Due was the same day version 1.02 was slated to be released. After outlining my proposed changes to the devteam, I scrambled to implement them—the team wasn't expecting to address any scavenger hunt complaints until version 1.1, but they were happy to include my edits in this patch if I could finish in the next hour or two. The dialogue that I hammered out is serviceable, but there's minimal personality and no humor to it. The patch went live shortly after I pushed my changes, and I haven't heard a single question about Tomothy Daddy since.

Most of the team basically went on break after version 1.02. I kept crunching. I devoted almost every free minute of an entire weekend to Goody Two Shoes, a riddle-based scavenger hunt, first playing through it (which was exhausting) and then planning and implementing a complex network of hints and reminders about where to go next (which was beyond exhausting). I had to dig into the code to understand how each step of the quest was triggered, figure out which NPCs would supply hints, write appropriate hints for each step, program the hints to only show up at the right time, and then test all of that. I also tidied the existing dialogue for the quest and fixed up the black splotches that lead you to your destination—in "Running Down a Drain", for example, the trail inexplicably went cold for several screens, as though you overshot the target.

I pushed my changes on September 19, just over a week after 1.02 was released. Although I loosened my pace a little bit, I stayed focused on getting through the rest of my to-do list as fast as reasonably possible. I scrapped a few ideas that I was now too tired to bother with, touched up the weapon tutorials, added new NPCs and tinkered with old ones, implemented cabin numbers to help players navigate the main hub, and refined/expanded the Butt Mode script.

The farther we got from the release of 1.02, the more the 48H devteam server felt like a ghost ship. People were burned out, busy with other things, or no longer checking in because their obligations to the project had been fulfilled. A few others were working on updates alongside me, but by the end of November, it started to feel like the project was adrift again. I prodded CSketch for a time frame until the next patch, and that set into motion a flurry of activity, which ultimately led to me taking the lead on a couple rounds of targeted playtesting and getting the updated game ready for public release. Version 1.1 went live on December 18, 2021—which means we had been sitting on my changes to Goody Two Shoes for three months. I haven't heard a single question about any of the riddles since.

If you look back through my social media posts, you'll notice I didn't promote 48H until version 1.1 was released. As far as I'm concerned, 48H wasn't done until 1.1. I wasn't about to encourage the general public to play a game I was still actively helping to develop and beta test. It bothers me deeply that most people have experienced a version that was rushed and incomplete, and that the earliest iterations are the ones immortalized for future generations on YouTube and Twitch.

Now, though? I recommend 48H whenever there's an opportunity. I'm proud to share this game with others. I'm proud of the entire devteam for making this game happen in the first place, let alone making it look so professional and polished; proud of myself for the quantity, variety, and quality of work I contributed; and proud of my fellow entrants for pulling off over a hundred MaGMML-worthy levels within (or just barely over) the 48-hour time limit, even if I'm prone to complaining about them. I enjoy seeing people enjoy 48H.

As of this post, devteam discussions are infrequent and rarely pertain to the game itself, chatter about the game seems to have died down on Discord and YouTube, and bug reports have all but ceased. Effectively, this ship has sailed. Of course, no game is ever truly done, least of all one that can easily be patched. In fact, a modest number of changes have already been pushed to the GitHub repository in anticipation of another patch. I have one or two more Developer Diaries to follow this one, some updates I might like to add to the MaGMML wiki, and plans to start livestreaming the game once I can commit to a semi-regular streaming schedule. It's been a long voyage, and I expect it'll be awhile longer before I return to shore.

Like every other longtime Metroid fan, I've been waiting nearly two decades for a proper sequel to Metroid Fusion. When Metroid Dread became available for preorder, I went to great lengths to secure a copy of the Special Edition, and I began a hunt for the game's ever-elusive amiibo. I steered clear of previews, reviews, and anything else that might influence my opinion or spoil anything before I had a chance to play through the game. Once my copy arrived, I played as long and often as possible. If you didn't know any better, you might think I was excited about Dread.

The thing is, I was dreading Dread. Each new installment in the last 15 years has caused me to question more and more what Metroid is, where it's going, and whether or not I still belong in the fandom. Whereas the original Metroid, Metroid II, Super, Fusion, Zero Mission, Prime, Prime 2, and even Pinball are all games I love, like, or at least respect enough to have played a minimum of three times each—making sure to clear Hard Mode (if available) and get all the items and see all the endings—I haven't bothered beating any of the more recent games more than once. If I haven't truly enjoyed Metroid since the GameCube era, then how much longer can I complain about new installments before giving up on the franchise?

You may have noticed the title of this post.

I can no longer consider myself a Metroid fan.

Get comfortable; this is gonna be a long one.

I've played bad games before, and I've played good games that aren't my style. Dread, somehow, is both. If you strip away everything but the puzzles and upgrades, Dread has the foundation for a solid Metroid experience. However, every other aspect of the game contributes to a Metroid experience that I never want to repeat. I'm not playing Dread again, and based on what it tells me about where the franchise is headed, I'm not playing any future Metroid games, either.

It comes down to four key factors: accessibility, conveyance, difficulty, and storytelling. A fifth factor, which I wasn't expecting to be relevant in a direct sequel to Fusion, exacerbated the problems: not having played Samus Returns first. Until I get to the part where I discuss this fifth factor, I'm going to pretend like Samus Returns doesn't exist, so as not to muddy the waters with information I didn't have when playing Dread.

Major spoilers ahead for Dread, Fusion, and the rest of the Metroid series.

ACCESSIBILITY

There is no excuse for a game released in 2021 to have no customization options whatsoever, save for brightness. I wanted to crank up the music—an essential component of the Metroid experience—which I could barely hear over the sound effects. I wanted to adjust the Free Aim sensitivity so I could actually hit an E.M.M.I. in the face with the Omega Cannon; I had to be extra choosy about where to engage, because my aim kept snapping to odd angles that just missed the target.

I wanted to remap the controls to be logical and comfortable. I can't tell you how many times I got smacked around because I instinctively reached for the wrong button, or because it took me a hair too long to get my finger over to the button I needed. I wanted the option to change the "hold this button" buttons to be toggle switches instead; it's physically tiring to maintain pressure on buttons that aren't where I need them to be, and I had a hard time wrapping my brain around holding and releasing multiple buttons in the right sequence (seriously, taking down an E.M.M.I. was a nightmare).

Adding insult to injury, Dread's control "menu" assumes you're playing with the Switch in your hands, not on a television with a Pro Controller like I did. Having never played a Switch game before, I didn't appreciate the extra effort required to compare my controller against a diagram of a totally different one.

I found myself longing for the ability to toggle upgrades on and off at will, like in Super. When I'm attempting wacky acrobatics involving a series of ledge grabs, I don't want the Morph Ball to automatically roll me into the nooks I'm using as handholds. When I collect Super Missiles, I don't want them to replace my normal missiles entirely; the lower rate of fire forces me to aim every shot carefully, eliminating the option of a wild barrage when there's no time to be accurate. (This, in turn, makes collecting Missile Expansions less exciting—if I can't let loose on the bosses, then I'm never gonna need this much ammo.)

Moreover, I'm colorblind. Dread isn't the first video game to overlook my disability, nor is it the worst offender in the Metroid series (remember the final boss of Hunters?), but it's still disappointing. The map is harder to use than necessary because half the teleporter symbols look the same (why not use colors and shapes?). Unless they're on the same screen together, I can't tell a Charge Beam door from a Power Beam door (which doesn't sound like a big deal until there's an E.M.M.I. closing in and the door isn't opening).

Although I've never been formally diagnosed with OCD, I absolutely have some obsessive-compulsive tendencies. I'm the guy who jumps around the landing site in Super until every block of the map is filled in, including the tiny corners you can barely get into. So you can imagine my horror when discovering how excessively granular the map system is in Dread. Instead of splitting areas into chunks that mirror how much of the map you actually seen on your screen, it uses Samus as a paintbrush to color in the map one pixel at a time. Walk down a hallway that's barely taller than Samus is, and your map of that hallway is incomplete unless you're jumping into the low ceiling while you move. My undiagnosed OCD can't cope with that. It took me ~12.5 hours to reach the final boss, which feels absurd, and filling in my stupid map accounts for too much of that time.

Let me toggle the icons on and off so I can actually see the map. Give me textures instead of bright colors to distinguish water/lava regions from normal regions. Regardless of color-coding, my brain equates "dark vs light" as "unexplored vs explored"; I could never immediately tell what was a room I had fully explored that had water/lava on bottom, and what was a room I had only explored the bottom of. Similarly, I kept mistaking fully explored rooms with lots of platforms for partially explored rooms with shadow regions that just look like platforms. Filling in every inch of the map wasn't just a compulsion; it was necessary to simplify the map enough to make it usable. I've never had this much trouble with a map in a video game.

CONVEYANCE

If you're going to tell me how to play Metroid, give me a dedicated tutorial area that finds a narrative excuse to teach me everything I need to know (eg, Prime). Otherwise, don't pester me with things I could learn from the instruction manual. I don't mind a brief explanation of how to use new abilities as I unlock them (eg, Zero Mission), and I don't mind if gameplay tips are worked into the story somehow (eg, Fusion), as long as the information is communicated in a consistent and minimally intrusive fashion. What I do mind is the kind of scattershot approach taken by Dread.

In lieu of a dedicated tutorial area, the part of Artaria where the game begins is packed with challenges that call on a variety of skills and techniques, with tutorial popups along the way. But the tutorial popups have no rhythm. Dread swings awkwardly between back-to-back tutorial popups and stretches of filler that don't seem to teach anything specific. The path is cluttered with a Charge Beam door and a Morph Ball tunnel that only serve to distract the player. Interrupting the training is a visit to a Network Station, where Adam discusses some game mechanics that aren't immediately relevant. Some abilities (eg, grabbing onto ledges, crouching, wall-jumping) are never explained at all.

The tutorial makes a lot of weird assumptions about what does and doesn't need to be taught. It's not nearly thorough enough to be geared toward brand-new players, yet it provides too much information to be aimed at seasoned Metroid players who just need to know what's new in this installment.

The tutorial popups abruptly cease after defeating the first E.M.M.I. Unlike Super, the Prime games, Other M, and Federation Force, there's no obvious end to the warmup, no cutscene or vast new area making it clear that you're on your own now. (You're never really on your own, though; tutorial popups unexpectedly show up at later points in the game, still with no rhythm or consistency.) This is where I got stuck. Dread had trained me to watch for tutorial popups and not think for myself, so when I found a door I couldn't reach because of a pool of water impeding my movement, I naturally assumed that I wasn't supposed to be here yet—I probably needed the Gravity Suit or something.

Except...I didn't see anywhere else to go. I traveled all the way back to the start in search of another route I'd missed. Nothing. I wandered for what felt like 20 minutes in search of the way forward, until I determined it had to be that door. By complete accident, I blew a hole in the side of the pool, which drained the water and allowed me to proceed.

Here's where my colorblindness came into play again: I physically could not distinguish the destructible rock from the rocks around it. But equally importantly, Dread's messy approach to teaching the player got me thinking the wrong way about the game. When I ran into the same issue with a destructible rock in Burenia, it was because I had started relying on the Pulse Radar to reveal any and all "hidden blocks," which apparently didn't include the one right in front of me. Dread encouraged me to shut off my Metroid instincts and rely on guidance systems that weren't as helpful as they let on.

Perhaps because I had the brightness turned up, or perhaps because of the distracting amount of detail and animation in the backgrounds, I didn't immediately notice that interactive floor panels have a glow around them. Every other Metroid has raised circular platforms that are architecturally distinctive, even before you factor in any special effects; the ones in Dread are square and basically flush with the floor.

It's easy enough to notice a white glow in a dark, empty Network Station; not so much when frantically trying to escape from an E.M.M.I. in a brand-new area I haven't had time to properly explore—one with foggy monochrome backgrounds, a softly pulsating glow that affects the whole screen, glowy white fog rolling off the floor, a white ceiling light faintly illuminating an unassuming machine in the background, and a type of environmental puzzle I haven't been trained to expect. I didn't even spot the suspicious rectangle in the floor below the button—again, too busy looking for an escape route to soak in the scenery.

I also didn't realize until fairly late in the game that a flash of light is the universal signal to use a Melee Counter. The E.M.M.I. survival tutorial says to counter "at the exact moment of the flash," but the regular tutorial only says to counter "at the right moment." Word choice matters. If you're going to bombard me with tutorial popups, don't expect me to look for visual cues that you don't tell me about, especially in a game where basically every special effect is a flash of some sort. I got hurt way too many times trying to counter attacks that, in retrospect, couldn't be countered because they didn't have a flash.

To that end, Melee Counter would really benefit from being presented as an upgrade, not as a basic ability to be taken for granted. Collect it from a Chozo statue early in the game, solve a few puzzles requiring Melee Counter in order to leave the room, make sure the player really understands the mechanic. This would be a perfect place to teach the player that you can shoot and use Melee Counter in cutscenes, too. I, for one, am not accustomed to boss battles with interactive cinematic elements; getting punished for watching instead of playing the cutscenes in the fight with Corpius just made me feel stupid.

DIFFICULTY

Metroid is not a game series I associate with high difficulty. Individual challenges might be tough—Prime 2's infuriating Boost Guardian immediately comes to mind, as do a couple ludicrous item puzzles in Zero Mission—but by and large, the real difficulty is self-inflicted: speedrunning, Hard Mode, 100% completion, even minimalist runs (someday I might resume my 1% run of Fusion that's been stalled for years at the Yakuza boss, a solid two-thirds of the way through the game). As long as I'm simply trying to finish a Metroid game and not being reckless about it, I can usually count on having few or no Game Overs.

I died more times in Dread than I have ever died across every playthrough of every other Metroid game combined.

To be clear, I didn't even finish the game. I gave up on the second form of the final boss, put the Game Card back in the box, and made arrangements to sell it to a friend so I never had to look at it again.

Let's forget for a moment about the accessibility and conveyance issues that made Dread harder for me than it should have been. The gameplay isn't a logical evolution from Fusion; it's a leap toward the likes of Resident Evil, Dark Souls, and other games I have no desire to play. Dread falls outside my gaming comfort zone, and it breaks tradition in unwelcome ways.

Samus starts with three new abilities that weren't in Fusion: Free Aim, Slide, and Melee Counter. The first two are fine—Free Aim offers precision control of an ability that has been expanding since the first game; and Slide is functionally similar to the Morph Ball, almost like an on-demand Boost Ball from the Prime games. Melee Counter, however, is a serious problem for me. I don't play games with quick-time events, and my experience with counter mechanics extends only as far as Timed Hits in Super Mario RPG; our boy Roy in Super Smash Bros. Melee; and the SenseMove, Lethal Strike, and Overblast mechanics in Other M, which I struggled with tremendously and feel are inappropriate for Metroid anyhow.

Melee Counter reduces combat to a series of pass/fail tests: pass, and you do massive damage, earn power-ups, and feel awesome; fail, and you take significant damage, waste a vital opportunity to succeed, and feel like a dunce. Far more often than not, I failed. I wanted to ignore Melee Counter altogether, but that's not really an option; enemies routinely prompt you to use it, boss fights drag on without it, and some bosses require a Melee Counter before they'll die or move on to their next phase. I constantly had to choose between playing how I wanted to play, which usually got me killed, and playing how the game wanted me to play, which usually got me killed.

I cannot tell you how many times I died to random minions—all the self-preservation techniques I've learned over two decades of playing Metroid barely apply when Melee Counter is involved. However, I can tell you that I died to every single boss, repeatedly, often in a matter of seconds. The only exceptions were in two rematches with bosses whose patterns I'd already learned. I could never stay alive long enough to learn a pattern on the first (or second, or third) try; and even once I understood the pattern, the less-than-ideal controls and my ineptitude with Melee Counter usually got the better of me.

Furthermore, I could never tell how close I was to defeating a boss. All the 3D Metroid games give the bosses a health bar, and all the 2D ones since Super have the bosses change color and/or incur visible battle damage as they lose health. Dread does neither. I can't work out a good strategy if I can't gauge the impact of my attacks.

Every time I collected a major upgrade, I backtracked through the whole game in search of any place to use it, in the hopes of finding any advantage to keep me alive longer. This wrecked the pacing, and it also led to frequent disappointment: I kept discovering shortcuts I didn't care about, Missile Expansions I didn't need, Power Bombs I wasn't yet authorized to use, and rooms that suddenly dead-ended in a puzzle immune to sequence-breaking. On the off chance that I might find something useful, I willingly threw myself into lava pits and cold storage rooms without the Gravity Suit. Losing health in awkward increments, rather than continuously like in every other Metroid, usually made these excursions too unpredictable to survive.

It's an unspoken rule that you can only die in Metroid if you run out of energy or, in the case of an escape sequence, time. Nothing short of a planet or space station blowing up around Samus is inherently fatal (except in Hunters, where she can die for something as trivial as falling into an infinite abyss). If Dread were true to its roots, an E.M.M.I. would keep trying to impale Samus at regular intervals, dealing massive damage until the player got the timing right to escape. But no, you have one chance to survive—and the game flat-out tells you that success is virtually impossible (ie, don't even bother; just die).

Needless to say, I died every time I got caught by an E.M.M.I., which was at least once or twice (if not seven or eight times) for every foray into an E.M.M.I. Zone. In contrast with the SA-X encounters in Fusion and the stealth sections in Zero Mission, which are actual puzzles requiring a mix of clever thinking and quick reflexes, the E.M.M.I. Zones in Dread are sandboxes of death, allowing for a wide range of scenarios that aren't necessarily fair or fun. This lack of a curated experience gave the Zones a reverse difficulty curve—the more abilities I unlocked, the less I needed to bother with stealth tactics, so it became progressively easier to bumble through the Zones without demonstrating any real understanding of E.M.M.I. mechanics.

Metroid is all about starting virtually powerless and growing into a nigh-unstoppable juggernaut, with increasingly formidable foes and puzzles challenging your supremacy. The E.M.M.I. don't challenge your supremacy; they make you repeat what is fundamentally the same challenge at various points in the game, but each time, you're a bit less pathetic. You still need the Omega Cannon to win, and all it takes is merely touching an E.M.M.I. to lose, but at least it's gradually easier to keep your distance. And keeping your distance is basically the same challenge in the five E.M.M.I. Zones where it matters, which are all comparable in size and complexity—whatever strategy you use to survive the first one will probably work for the others, and for me, it was mostly trial and error. That's not satisfying, and it's not empowering.

After a while, I became numb to the game's attempts to instill a sense of dread in me. It's hard to feel tense and afraid when I know that whatever's around the next corner will kill me, and that I won't lose any progress because there's a checkpoint at the entrance. The "low health" alarm, which normally inspires panic and lights a fire under me to play better, loses its impact when I hear it all the time (or not at all, because the bosses killed me that quickly). Dread's difficulty interferes with its ability to create the atmosphere I look for in a Metroid game, including a feeling of triumph over adversity. All the power-ups in the galaxy can't save me when practically every boss fight hinges on the pass/fail Melee Counter system I haven't mastered.

For me, Dread was soul-crushing. I can only fail so many Melee Counters before I feel like a failure myself. I can only die so many times before I start dying inside, crushed by my beloved franchise painfully drilling it into me that I'm not good enough to play it anymore. I almost broke down in tears after my fourth or fifth attempt to defeat Experiment No. Z-57, who just wouldn't die. I left each and every play session feeling inadequate, defeated, depressed, and resentful. Dread singlehandedly ruined every day that I played it, and I've continued to live in that negative headspace over the weeks that it's taken me to write this colossal post.

STORYTELLING

Storytelling is more than just dialogue and cutscenes. Everything from music to graphics to level design can help tell a story, evoking an emotional response from the player that makes the game world feel more engaging and believable. Just imagine what the final escape sequence in Super would feel like without the blaring alarm, flashing lights, shaking screen, rampant explosions, and hectic music. Storytelling in Metroid is all about getting the player immersed in the atmosphere. For me, the absolute easiest way to break that immersion is to play fast and loose with story continuity.

Consider the ending of Fusion. Samus knows that the X Parasites are a threat to the entire galaxy and must be destroyed. The Galactic Federation knows that Samus is a threat to their secret plans to control and exploit the X Parasites. Adam, whose duty was to keep Samus locked in a room to prevent her from blowing up the station, is persuaded by Samus to unlock the doors and help her blow up the station, along with a whole planet for good measure. As these two newly minted fugitives escape the destruction, Samus ruminates on what lies ahead: she and Adam will be held responsible; there will be "tribunals and investigations"; and the "beings of the universe" likely won't understand what happened here, despite Adam's optimism that someone will understand.

Consider the beginning of Dread. An indeterminate amount of time after Fusion, but seemingly not long enough for those "tribunals and investigations" to have concluded or for any trust to have been rebuilt among any of the parties involved, Samus is off to find more X Parasites, apparently at the behest of the Federation. By all appearances, it's a perfectly normal mission. Samus is traveling with Adam (and some other AI who seems to be the ship's computer, despite Adam already being the ship's computer) in the same ship that the Federation gave her in Fusion (whose subtle redesign is on the border between "artistic license" and "disregard for visual continuity"). She's getting paid a bounty (which Adam complains is too low, despite knowing full well that Samus would sacrifice her career and herself for any chance to destroy the X Parasites). There are no suspicions, misgivings, or caveats of any kind. Anything about Fusion that might've upset the status quo is never mentioned.

Oh, and this is a small thing, but it says a lot: breaking from the tradition of the previous mainline games, the intro never tells us this is "METROID 5."

To top it off, Samus inexplicably has a brand-new suit that looks radically different from the one she wore in Fusion. I could accept that she acquired a new suit on another adventure between Fusion and Dread. I could also accept that her old suit, which had large pieces surgically removed at the start of Fusion, started to regrow into something new. But I find it hard to accept that enough time has passed for either option to be plausible.

Immediately, the game felt wrong. If you're going to selectively ignore continuity in order to return to business as usual, at least give me a larger time skip than "Just when it all seemed over." I didn't buy it. I couldn't suspend my disbelief.

Then things got worse. Samus is approaching planet ZDR, now she's unconscious, now she's riding an elevator, now she's landing the ship, now the elevator, now the ship, now the elevator, now she's fighting someone, now she's being choked, now she's fine, now let's go shoot stuff. Everything happened so quickly and jarringly that I had to rewatch the intro on YouTube to understand what was going on.

There's no reason to put those events out of order. Showing the outcome of the battle before the battle diminishes the drama. It's extremely confusing to have a series of flashbacks mere seconds into developing what the present looks like, especially when there are flashbacks within flashbacks. All the quick cuts and closeups make things even harder to parse. At one point, a massive blast is fired toward the elevator, but the camera doesn't zoom in or linger long enough to confirm whether our best escape route has been rendered completely unusable—because if it hasn't, then all Samus needs to do is grab the Flash Shift or Speed Booster or Space Jump, cross the broken bridge, and leave.

What's more, Samus's mission is never fully explained. What happens if she encounters the E.M.M.I. or the X? Should she destroy them? Bring them back to the Federation? Report her findings and wait for orders? Obviously it's not important, because once she arrives, her objective quickly changes to, "OK, go home now; this was a mistake." But there's no clear path to the surface—no central tunnel like in Metroid II, no conspicuous statue blocking her path like in Super; nothing that says, "this is the way to victory, but you've gotta do some work before you can pass." The split-second glimpse of Samus landing the ship isn't nearly enough to create a mental picture of where you need to go. All this makes the game feel aimless.

Ostensibly, checking in with Adam at the Network Stations should give the game direction. Except Adam mostly exists to explain game mechanics, reiterate plot details you already know, and tell you what the developers want you to do next. His dialogue is generic, devoid of the bluntness, efficiency, and wisdom that we see in Fusion and (I can't believe I'm acknowledging Other M) Other M. Because Adam never sounds like himself, not even in the intro cutscene, I honestly can't tell where he stopped being Adam and started being Raven Beak—so either their two voices are indistinguishable in the absence of obvious phrases such as "any objections, lady" or "fulfill your destiny," or it was Raven Beak the whole time and he's just the most generic-sounding villain ever, neither of which is indicative of good writing.

What's missing here is any input from Samus. Being attacked by a Chozo is the kind of thing Samus would absolutely have thoughts about. Considering Adam told her to "treat our lost assets with care," Samus should be pressing Adam for a way to disable the E.M.M.I., destroying them only as a last resort. She should definitely be arguing against trying to leave ZDR before determining the truth about the X. For a game that draws so much narrative influence from Fusion, it's striking that there are no exchanges between Samus and Adam or elevator monologues to help develop the characters and conflicts.

Samus's apparent indifference to her mission and circumstances takes away any sense of urgency or character agency. You're fighting bosses and searching for secrets because that's how the game works, not because it seems to matter to Samus. She's not a silent protagonist; she's an absentee protagonist. Compare her elevator rides in Prime, where she's alert and emotive, with her tram rides in Dread, where she's a faceless statue; it never quite feels like Samus is really there.

If Samus isn't there, then I'm not there. Dread kept finding ways to disengage me from the story, disrupt my immersion, and elicit the wrong emotional response from me. Sometimes it didn't even require dialogue and cutscenes to do so.

One of my favorite moments in Metroid II is at the very end of the game, when you finally escape the cramped, deadly labyrinth and return to the peaceful, spacious surface. There's a rush of freedom and relief that comes with seeing the open sky again, Space Jumping into the stratosphere, and knowing you made it out alive. When I reached the surface in Dread (after spending most of the game zig-zagging horizontally instead of really navigating upward like Adam said), I felt...nothing. The surface is just another enclosed area with a ceiling, no different from any other area in the game, and you're there for all of five minutes before being routed back down to Ferenia again.

There is a similar anticlimax before almost every boss fight. I think about my experience with the leadup to Kraid. Gnarly statue at the entrance. Spooky. Ammo refill. Secret path. Save point. Must be something big through this teleporter. Huge excursion that leads to the Varia Suit. Nice! Time for another huge excursion to a bunch of areas I couldn't access before. Is there anywhere I forgot? Lemme try this door. A couple lava pits, destructible walls, and a mix of large and small enemies. Typical stuff. A casual drop down to a door with a worm enemy attached to it. Behind it is...the room I just came from. Well, that was pointless. Oh, wait, there's a tiny shaft I can Morph Ball into. CUTSCENE! TENSION! OH BOY IT'S KRAID!

Compare this with the leadup to Kraid in Super. Gnarly statue at the entrance. Spooky. Weak enemies. A dead end? No, there's a secret path. Strong enemies. Another dead end? No, there's a save point. There must be a secret. Aha! Long hallway with strong enemies, foreboding architecture, a barrage of needles from offscreen, and then it's Kraid, just like in the original game! That wasn't too bad for a first boss. Now there's...another...foreboding room. With an insect-ridden corpse that looks eerily like Samus. And a creepy door guardian who seems to have infested the entire wall. Gulp. On the other side of the door is a dead-end with a pit of thorny spikes. The door locks. I'm trapped. And then...OH NO. BIG Kraid appears.

Dread, I don't care how fancy your graphics are; if you can't build and release tension well, you're not doing Metroid right.

I have several other complaints, but I'll keep them brief. The game starts with an infodump about Metroids and X Parasites, which easily could've been worked into the ensuing cutscene or dialogue elsewhere. I feel weird about the Chozo in this game, who seem less like sci-fi aliens vaguely influenced by the ancient Egyptians and more like stereotypes of Indigenous peoples. After several rewatches, I still don't understand what happened in the last E.M.M.I. cutscene, where Samus's hand starts glowing and the Central Unit just...gives up its power remotely, without a fight? Lastly, I was hoping for a nod to the Metroid project "Dread" referenced in Prime 3, which itself was a reference to an earlier, cancelled iteration of Dread.

Oh, and let's not forget the gigantic plot hole: Raven Beak lures Samus to ZDR to steal her Metroid DNA, right? He defeats her in combat, rendering her unconscious, and then...leaves her to die in any number of ways that might prevent him from extracting her DNA? Like, dude. Carry her to an E.M.M.I. Zone and claim your victory. You are just the worst.

Even the art book that comes with the Special Edition of Dread is deficient in its storytelling. Advertised as "spanning all 5 entries in the 2D Metroid saga" and styling itself as "Mission Logs" on the cover, the art book had me expecting a love letter to the whole series. Except there's no foreword or overarching narrative tying everything together as "Mission Logs." In fact, nothing is even labeled; it's just a collection of images with no context. Dread has a luxurious 128 pages to showcase novel and highly varied art of all kinds; the other four games (plus the two remakes) are crammed into 62 pages and represent a sampling of promotional art only. If you own the North American instruction manuals, you've seen most of this art already. Decent for a casual fan, but disappointing for a diehard. Call it a Dread art book with bonus content; don't get my hopes up.

NOT HAVING PLAYED SAMUS RETURNS FIRST

Normally, when a new Metroid is released, I play it as soon as I can get my hands on it. Samus Returns was the exception. I've been playing fewer platformers in recent years; and I wasn't ready to play another Metroid II remake so soon after playing AM2R (Another Metroid 2 Remake), which reassured me that at least the fans hadn't forgotten what makes Metroid good. By the time I was finally ready to start a new Metroid, preorders had opened for Dread. I opted to keep Samus Returns on the shelf a little while longer, figuring it would be a good palate cleanser if Dread ended up being terrible.

Biggest mistake of my Metroid career.

Given my fondness for the source material, and the fact that there was source material, I assumed Samus Returns would be a return to form—probably not as good as AM2R, but undoubtedly more engaging and Metroid-y than anything since 2006. I still believed that the last several installments were anomalies, despite the same issues cropping up: problematic storytelling (Prime 3, Other M), core elements that don't feel appropriate for Metroid (Hunters, Prime 3, Other M, Federation Force), and uncomfortable control schemes (Hunters, Prime 3, Prime Trilogy, Other M). I held out hope that the next traditional 2D installment would bring balance to the franchise.

What was that line from the Star Wars prequels? "You were supposed to destroy the Sith, not join them"?

Samus Returns isn't a return to form; it's an assertion that Metroid has been evolving this whole time into something I no longer recognize. Prime 3 was the Alpha, Other M was the Gamma, Federation Force was Arachnus, Samus Returns was the Zeta, and Dread was the Omega. I skipped a critical link in the evolutionary chain, one that would've dispelled the notion that Dread should have more in common with Fusion and Super than with the last 15 years of the franchise. When I learned that Samus Returns was made by MercurySteam, the same developer responsible for Dread, I found myself playing it not as a palate cleanser, but as an investigation of how many warning signs I missed.

I missed all of them. Accessibility, conveyance, difficulty, storytelling—every problem I had with Dread and with the last 15 years of the franchise were present in some form or another. If I had realized this sooner, I would've been wary of another Metroid by the same developer. Maybe I wouldn't have played Dread at all, choosing to drift away from the franchise instead of needing to forcibly and painfully cut ties with it. Or, I would've gone in with more accurate expectations, a better handle on Melee Counter, and an understanding that glowy floor panels operate everything. I would've waited to play Dread until tracking down the amiibo—the Reserve Tanks I unlocked in Samus Returns are the only reason I didn't give up on that game, too.

Either way, I'd still be walking away from the franchise. But at least some of the disappointment, confusion, frustration, and outrage that overwhelmed me in Dread would've been shifted to the game that laid the groundwork for it.

MISSION FINAL

In the weeks that it's taken me to write and organize these thoughts, I've been listening to Metroid music that makes me remember why I was ever a fan to begin with. Right now it's the title theme for Prime on 30-minute loop, which I've restarted multiple times now. I've needed to be reminded that Metroid—true Metroid—is a fabulously immersive experience that puts me in the Hi-Jump Boots of an awesome bounty hunter and lets me forget about my world for a while.

Dread, on the other hand, is merely a video game.

Whatever I might like about it—and there are things I like about it—is completely irrelevant in light of its flaws. It's poorly written; sloppily designed; dismissive of tradition; impossible to accept as canon; and inconsiderate, if not downright hostile, toward players like me. I am not the target audience. In fact, I haven't been the target audience for about 11 years, but that's never stopped me from taking a chance on the latest installment. Now I know better. There's only one link left in this evolutionary chain, and that's the Queen Metroid. I don't want to be anywhere near her when she takes the throne.

I'm weary of trying to keep up with a franchise that doesn't want me to be a part of it. I'm content to stick with the dozen Metroid games I still care about, especially the half-dozen of those that inspired me to stay with the franchise for as long as I did. Am I bitter about Dread? Absolutely. But I'm not going to let it ruin my mood or monopolize my time anymore. I've said what I needed to say in order to get the negativity out of my system. I've made peace with the last Metroid I'll ever play.

I am done with Dread, and I am done with this franchise. I won't see you next mission.

[Controls screenshot from the Metroid Dread controls guide by All Gamers. Game Over screenshot from a thread by martian717 on reddit. Metroid Mission Logs photo, Metroid screenshot, and Metroid II screenshot taken by me. All other screenshots taken by me from longplays of Metroid Dread, Metroid Fusion, Metroid: Samus Returns, and Super Metroid by LongplayArchive on YouTube. No Etecoons were harmed in the writing of this post.]

Can I ask you some questions about the COVID vaccine?

Sure! This is definitely something we should be talking about.

Have you gotten vaccinated?

Yes! I've received both shots of Moderna.

You fool! What if they injected you with a microchip?

Nevermind that this rumor has been debunked by ABC, the BBC, Business Insider, c|net, The New York Times, Reuters, Times of India, USA TODAY, and countless other news sources that didn't come up in a cursory Google search on the topic. The government already knows my address, age, marital status, income details, and political affiliation. They've got my fingerprints on file from when I was a student teacher. They can monitor my phone calls, texts, Internet use, and credit card charges. They can watch me through webcams, phone cameras, and security cameras; they can even track where my smartphone is (which, for all intents and purposes, is where I am). They don't need a microchip to keep tabs on me.

We don't know all the risks of the vaccine yet. Aren't you worried about long-term side effects?

Let me tell you what the side effects are of not being vaccinated: I know firsthand what COVID can do to a person, and it's one of the worst things I've experienced in my life. I've spent the last year hiding from my friends, family, and community because getting close to them might kill them. I've given up holiday get-togethers, movie marathons, birthday dinners, conventions, and anniversary trips, not to mention all the day-to-day excursions that keep life fun and interesting. Leaving the house for any reason involves so much more stress, anxiety, preparation, and mindfulness than ever before. I've fallen into unhealthy habits to cope with the fear of being around other people and the loneliness of being isolated from them.

People eagerly embrace new cars, smartphones, shampoos, packaged foods, etc, despite having no information about any consequences or defects that only become apparent with time. Why are we so much more cautious about rigorously tested and carefully regulated vaccines developed by some of the best experts in the world?

This pandemic has taken away so many freedoms that we used to take for granted, and we're not getting those freedoms back until everyday people step up, put aside their fears and excuses, and get vaccinated. I think about my grandfather, who enlisted to fight in World War II—despite knowing full well that he might be injured or killed—in order to protect his country and the people he cared about. Getting vaccinated to protect my country and the people I care about, even in the face of unknown risks, is a small act of patriotism that I hope would have made my grandfather proud.

Doesn't the vaccine make you sick?

If you're asking if the vaccine gives you COVID, the answer is no. It teaches your body how to fight COVID. But if you're asking about whether I felt awful for a little while after getting vaccinated, the answer is yes. After the first dose, I had two days of symptoms that reminded me of when I had COVID, followed by two days of general exhaustion. After the second dose, I experienced lethargy, headaches, and mild chills for one day before feeling totally normal again the next day. I never had any real pain at the injection site; my arm just felt heavy and tender if I tried to move it too much.

Everyone's body behaves differently when their immune system is hard at work, and I understand that people who've already been exposed to COVID have a worse reaction to the first dose, so your mileage may vary. The key is to plan ahead and let your past self take care of your future self. Finish all your errands and housework before getting vaccinated, and clear your schedule as best as possible for 1-2 days after your appointment. Plan to have food available that requires little or no effort to prepare, and try to stock things that are easy to eat—I recommend yogurt, pudding, and instant ramen.

I really hate needles. Can't I wait for them to make a pill or something?

Well, you don't have to have ramen, but—oh, wait; you said needles, not noodles. Fortunately, at least in my experience, injection technique has improved significantly among medical professionals in recent years. Both COVID shots felt like a quick punch to the arm, not unlike the kind of punch you might receive from a friend or family member after saying something embarrassing about them in public. Not that I know what that feels like.

How much does the vaccine cost?

For the recipient? Nothing. Getting vaccinated is absolutely free. There's no place for financial barriers when the goal is to reach herd immunity and ensure everyone can be protected. Even if you don't have medical insurance (or ID, for that matter), you can get the vaccine at no cost here in the United States—the Health & Human Services website has a lot of useful information about that on this page.

Was it difficult to schedule an appointment?

Actually, it was super easy, barely an inconvenience. My wife and I registered through VAMS. We started by submitting our basic contact info, then within 24 hours we received an e-mail to sign up for a vaccination appointment. This required filling out a simple online form (nothing we haven't disclosed to a doctor's office before) and then selecting where and when we wanted to get vaccinated. Each location on the list included the street address, the earliest date for a new appointment, and which specific vaccines (ie, Pfizer, Moderna, J&J) were available. The whole process took only a few minutes to complete, and we had an appointment only a few days later.

What was it like at the vaccination center?

We went to a popup clinic at a senior center. There was clear signage around the building that directed us where to go, and a volunteer was at the entrance to answer any questions. We queued up in the gymnasium, which had vaccination stations set up around the room in the same manner that voting booths would have been set up for an election. We showed our IDs, waited briefly in line, and then proceeded to the first available station. The person administering the shot asked us a few questions (eg, have we ever had an allergic reaction to an injection), gave us the shot on the upper part of whichever arm we preferred, and had us take a vaccine record card to fill out. Then we scheduled a follow-up appointment for a month later.

We were asked to stick around for 15 minutes (or 30 minutes, if we had a history of allergic reactions) just in case any bad reactions developed. We sat, socially distanced, in a waiting room down the hall, where another volunteer gave us the rundown of possible side effects in the next few days and how to handle them. One important tidbit was to use Tylenol (acetaminophen) rather than Advil (ibuprofen) for pain relief, because of some emerging scientific evidence that anti-inflammatories might reduce vaccine efficacy. Another important tidbit was to download our vaccine certificate from VAMS at our earliest convenience, because that documentation is more official than the vaccine card, and because it was unclear how long our VAMS accounts would remain active.

Every single volunteer, without exception, was friendly, patient, and good at the job they were doing. The atmosphere was very relaxed, and I actually felt comfortable being out in public for the first time since the pandemic started. I cannot tell you how refreshing and soul-soothing it was to be surrounded by people actively doing the work that's required to end this pandemic.

I have other concerns about the vaccine. Is there any legitimate reason why I shouldn't get vaccinated right now?

In all honesty, if you've done the research, discussed your concerns with a healthcare professional, gotten second opinions from a varied group of other people you trust, and decided that there is a genuinely compelling reason to remain unvaccinated despite the potentially fatal risk it poses to yourself and others...then yes, that reason is probably legitimate.

However, the onus is on you to keep following the safety procedures that have carried us through the pandemic—masking, social distancing, handwashing. If you truly care about the people around you, you'll be completely transparent with others about your vaccination status and your rationale for delaying or avoiding the shot. Transparency demonstrates that you're thinking about their wellbeing, and any legitimate rationale ought to hold up against criticism and peer pressure.

As strongly as I believe that everyone should get vaccinated, I feel that way because I care deeply about keeping everyone healthy and safe from this virus while we work to eradicate it. Getting vaccinated is a safe, free, easy way to demonstrate a basic respect for human life and a concern for the greater good in a time when breathing on someone might kill them.

I'm doing my part to keep you safe. Will you do the same for me?

When I promised my wife that I would grow my hair out to Thor length if I was ever allowed to work from home full-time, I was not expecting it to become a tangible reminder of how long I've been weathering a global pandemic. It's been over a year since my office made all its employees fully remote due to COVID concerns, and therefore over a year since my wife and I entered a state of voluntary lockdown to help keep the virus from spreading.

For the sake of future historians, anyone curious about my personal life, and anyone interested in comparing and contrasting their own personal experiences during this extraordinary time, here are some stories and observations about what it's been like to live as a shut-in this past year.

Incidentally, I look less like Thor and more like Grizzly Adams. Part of the reason I've opted to maintain the mountain man look, despite how much I truly hate its logistical and hygienic consequences, is that it makes me more physically intimidating to strangers in public. Social distancing is easier when people naturally want to stay at least six feet away from me. Grrr.

I take social distancing seriously because my wife and I got horrifically sick in March 2020. We experienced 10 of the 11 COVID symptoms that are now listed on the CDC website—and given that I've developed a ringing in my ears and that sour cream has started tasting weird to me in the months since then, I have to believe it was COVID.

We were never tested, however. That would have required exposing ourselves to other people for the sake of being told with partial certainty whether we had a virus that nobody actually knew how to treat. Better just to stay home and get the best care we could via telemedicine. And let me tell you, the two doctors I spoke with were fantastic, and I admired their ability to stay energized and attentive when being bombarded with calls like mine.

At the peak of my illness, I couldn't breathe while lying down, so I slept—or at least tried to, between coughing fits—in the reclining chair in the living room. Simply getting in and out of the chair required all the energy I could muster. Yogurt and pudding were about the only foods my throat could handle. I got a headache from looking at screens or basically having my eyes open at all. I'll spare you the gross details about the symptoms that ruined our favorite beach towel. About the only thing I was able to do was exist, and even that was a challenge. I was in pain, I was exhausted...and I was bored.

Fortunately, my mother is a children's librarian. She started reading to me on a regular basis over the phone, and for that I am so very grateful. I could scarcely do anything else, but I could listen to a chapter or two of Mike Rowe's The Way I Heard It every day. I also listened through my first audio book, Break Shot: My First 21 Years by James Taylor, my favorite music artist. Engaging stuff, and tremendously helpful for keeping my mind off being miserable.

It's funny; when I think about being sick, the first thing I remember is the happiness of people reading to me.

My wife and I took care of each other as best we could, but we were both sick, with my wife's symptom progression being about a day or two ahead of mine. The advice I've given to people who have tested positive for COVID or who think they've gotten it is as follows: Let your past self take care of your future self. While you're still feeling healthy, do everything right now that needs to get done—pay bills, write e-mails, whatever. Do all the laundry, dishes, and cooking you can, and try to save some leftovers. Make sure you've got medicine on hand for everything you can think of. Ask someone you know to drop off a care package with any essentials you can't go out and get. Plan to be incapacitated for the next two weeks; be pleasantly surprised if you're not.

Our bout with Pretty Definitely COVID occurred around the same time as the temporary closure of my office and the start of our self-isolation, both of which are still in effect. On the surface, my life hasn't changed dramatically from the Before Times (as my friends like to call it). I was already working from home twice a week, spending most of my free time indoors staring at a screen, and generally not going places or seeing people unless there was a compelling reason to give up my introvert time. Indeed, I've been handling self-isolation a lot better than most other people I know, to the point where I sometimes feel guilty that my worst breakdowns are just a regular day for everyone else.

To be clear, here's exactly what I mean by self-isolation: Staying inside the house at all times except for essential excursions (eg, checking the mailbox every few days, running to the grocery store every 1-3 weeks) or nonessential excursions where the boost to mental health outweighs the physical risk (eg, going for a walk at dusk, visiting a mostly empty park). We frequently order contactless delivery for lunch or dinner, which allows us to support our local businesses, put off the next grocery run for another day or two, and spend time that would be devoted to cooking and dishwashing on self-care instead. Plus, eating out at restaurants is one of life's greatest pleasures for me, so I'm able to reclaim a little slice of happiness by ordering in.

Food is one of my coping mechanisms, too. Want some feelgood fizz to calm the nerves? There's Coca-Cola chilling in the fridge, and there's grenadine and vanilla syrup in the cupboard. Had a rough work week? Treat yourself to some comfort food from the local barbecue joint. Need someone to hold you after an absolutely horrible day? Ben & Jerry are looking forward to some spooning.

Food works as a coping mechanism not just because it tastes good, but because it's reliable. When I order a Son of Baconator from Wendy's, I know exactly how I'm going to feel when I'm done eating. A deli sandwich with lettuce, onion, mustard, and mayo on a good-quality roll, with a side of chips, is guaranteed to cheer me up—even if it ends up being a mediocre sandwich. Living in such uncertain times, I need all the predictability and emotional control I can get. I fully understand that this is an unhealthy coping mechanism with long-term consequences, but after everything that's happened in this country over the last year, I don't have high expectations that my fellow Americans will let me live long enough for my pandemic eating habits to catch up with me. If the possibility of killing anyone you breathe on isn't enough incentive to pull your mask up over your nose, then I can only assume that my life means nothing to you.

I now have a zero-tolerance policy for businesses where the employees don't wear their masks properly. It's been a year; masks are now as much a part of the dress code as any other article of clothing. I've stopped patronizing or walked right out of shops and delis I used to frequent, and I'm not shy about (politely) complaining to the management or calling employees out. Half a dozen of my personal acquaintances have died from COVID, and I know firsthand what it can do to a person—you'll have to forgive me if I expect you to keep your face covered with a mask the same way I expect you to leave a bathroom with all appropriate body parts back inside your pants.

Half of me wants to have absolutely nothing to do with the outside world anymore. I'm content to spend every day at home with my wife—there's plenty to keep us occupied, we support each other, we make each other laugh, and our differing sleep patterns afford us both some time alone on a regular basis. If I can forget that there's a world beyond these four walls, then I won't be depressed about being cut off from all the people, places, and activities I want in my life.

But the other half of me needs the outside world. I'm an entertainer, a critical reviewer, a listening ear, a shoulder to cry on, a helping hand—everything that plays to my strengths and gives me purpose in life requires other people. Being an introvert makes this more difficult, because interacting with and performing for other people is draining, and I need ample time to myself to recharge.

One would think that a year of quarantine would offer plenty of time to recharge, but I've also been worrying about the outside world and trying to fend off all the negative feelings that accompany extended self-isolation. It's taken every coping mechanism I have just to get through certain days, and yet I've pushed myself to be social and keep up with side projects such as writing, recording, and game design. I beat myself up for not doing enough for other people during this time, but my wife is quick to remind me that I'm already doing so much, and that I deserve a break.

So maybe that's my cue to cap this post here and go play video games. I've been gravitating toward construction simulators that let me exercise my creativity, easy shooters and beat-em-ups that let me vent my aggression, low-stress strategy games that offer a blend of construction and destruction, intuitive adventure games that make me feel smart, and visual novels where I decide how the story ends. I can't handle pulse-pounding action unless the stakes are low and my odds of success are high. Life is challenging enough right now; I'm craving things that are calm, predictable, and uplifting—which has also informed my television and movie choices to some degree. Thank you, Japan, for the joy of Laid-Back Camp in this stressful time.

Yeah. I think I'm gonna go play video games.

I can no longer consider myself a Star Trek fan.

Here's the short-ish version: I'm a diehard fan of The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise, and the first ten movies (The Motion Picture through Nemesis). After several years of agonizing over the damage they did to the franchise, I can enjoy 2009's annoyingly titled Star Trek and its sequel Into Darkness as poorly written but well-executed sci-fi popcorn flicks that coincidentally borrow some ideas from The Original Series. By association, I can't accept Beyond as canon, but it's the honorary eleventh Star Trek film of which I'm a diehard fan.

I gave Discovery a generous nine episodes before my outrage and disgust got the better of me. The show was visually, tonally, and narratively incompatible with what I knew as Star Trek; and the gore, infighting, mistrust, incompetence, contrivances, and pessimism in those episodes made the show unpalatable to begin with. Moreover, I felt it was bad form to reboot the franchise in 2009 by returning to Kirk's era, only to re-reboot the franchise in 2017 by returning to Kirk's era in a different timeline. This franchise was boldly going out of its mind.

To wash the taste out of my mouth, I followed every episode of Discovery with an episode of The Orville—which, despite its imperfections, captures everything I love about Star Trek, from the broad strokes (eg, social commentary disguised as sci-fi) to the little details (eg, long, luxurious establishing shots of ships and planets).

I was wary of Picard, because I wanted the franchise to start looking forward rather than backward for inspiration, and because I fully expected to be outraged and disgusted again. The first episode of left me in tears—tears of joy, because for the first time in over a decade, Star Trek actually felt like Star Trek. Different, yes, but unquestionably welcome.

The rest of the season failed to live up to that standard. Despite how much I liked some of the concepts, and despite one truly superb episode ("Nepenthe"), I had so many problems with the planning, pacing, characterizations, gratuitous violence, and wild fluctuations in storytelling quality. I could suspend my disbelief just barely enough to accept it as canon, but I didn't really want to. I also wish I hadn't watched the Short Trek "Children of Mars," which gave me Discovery flashbacks and diminished the impact of Picard's second episode.

I was disheartened by the teaser trailer for Lower Decks, and I was unimpressed and then traumatized by a preview of the first 90 seconds of the first episode. I'm on board with a series featuring a diverse new crew with no apparent ties to any previous series, set sometime after Nemesis, with a unique slant that adds something new to the franchise (in this case, focusing on people other than the bridge crew)—however, this particular brand of humor is a hard sell for me, and I am not on board with sudden, unexpected gore. That makes three series in a row where my squeamishness, which was previously only relevant for a few specific episodes across the entire franchise, is a deterrent to watching Star Trek at all.

What's worse is that there's no end in sight. After Lower Decks, there's Section 31, Strange New Worlds, Prodigy, another season of Discovery, another season of Picard, and at least one yet-to-be-revealed series that I'm aware of, not to mention an R-rated movie originally slated to be directed by Quentin Tarantino. I'm still recovering from the fun but exhausting 11-year journey to Avengers: Endgame; I don't have it in me right now to invest in what is effectively another Marvel Cinematic Universe, let alone one so violent, disorganized, and averse to continuity despite being hung up on nostalgia!

It's reached the point where I physically can't keep up with my favorite franchise, nor do I want to. That is a no-win scenario. My little ship, the USS Fanboy, is in no shape to keep fighting, yet I can't retreat without feeling guilty. So I'm setting the auto-destruct and leaving the battle on my own terms.

Whatever Star Trek is right now, it is not for me. And as difficult as it is for me to admit this, that's okay. I've spent too much of my adult life arguing about what's authentic Star Trek, forcing myself to watch things I knew I wouldn't enjoy, and suffering at the hands of what is supposedly my favorite fandom. I don't need to do that anymore. In fact, I never needed to do that.

There are countless books and comics I haven't read, several games I haven't played, and a few fan-made productions I've been meaning to watch. Even if I ignore everything created from 2009 onward, there is no shortage of new Star Trek for me to experience. I don't have to rely on modern cinematic television, which I often don't enjoy anyhow, to get my fix.

They say all good things come to an end. But perhaps they don't have to. Perhaps what brings you joy is more important than what is canon. Perhaps your vision of a franchise—a vision you believe is in line with that of the person who created it—matters more than the vision of whoever happens to be calling the shots right now. Perhaps, in a universe where absolutely anything can happen, there's still a chance for the undesirable elements to redeem themselves.

I crave optimistic, collaborative, and philosophical stories that are reasonably believable and don't make me want to throw up. I don't mind if stories get dark and serious, as long as those elements serve a greater purpose than just making me depressed. I value the kind of narrative continuity that makes it easy to forgive or explain away the little mistakes and oversights that inevitably occur over the course of several decades. I like cool starships, futuristic gadgets, creative alien civilizations, and relatable characters.

For a good long while, Star Trek was exactly my kind of fiction. Now it isn't. It hasn't been for more than a decade, and I have no reason to believe it ever will be again. That means it's time to move on.

Live fast and prosper, Star Trek.

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On November 28, 2018, level submissions for Make a Good Mega Man Level Contest 3 (MaGMML3) came to a close. After a generous seven-day grace period for late entries, we had a total of 186 levels. That's almost twice the number of levels in MaGMML1 and 2 combined.

Our new contest motto was, "The judges are gonna die."

The devteam loaded the entry levels into a standalone executable "game" for the judges to play. This consisted of a small hub with a teleporter used to access the levels, a costume selector in case we didn't want to play as Mega Man (Flash Man was still in the works, so I picked Roll), NPCs of the judges for comic relief, and infinite E-/W-/M-Tank refills. To maintain blind judging, the levels were randomly numbered instead of identified by creator name, and any in-level material that obviously gave away the creator's identity (eg, self-insert NPCs) was temporarily redacted.

The devteam needed several weeks to load all the levels and test them for basic functionality. Two levels were cut before they even reached the judges, one for being irreparably broken in its construction and one for containing a note threatening the judges to give the level a good score. In an effort to get us judges playing and discussing as quickly as possible, the remaining levels were added to the judge EXE in batches of 30 or so, with each judge receiving a randomized playing order for each batch. Although I didn't argue it strongly, I was a proponent of waiting for all the levels to be loaded; I felt the benefits of playing in batches didn't outweigh the potential for bias inherent in all of us playing the levels in more or less the same order.

Still, I had a system in place to minimize bias on my end as much as possible. After playing all the levels in batches and seeing the best and worst the contest had to offer, I would go back and replay everything in a newly randomized order (ignoring batch divisions), scoring and reviewing as I went. Afterward, I'd compare scores to ensure everything felt correct and consistent, replaying individual levels again if necessary.

In terms of specific process, I knew I wanted to:

• Record my blind playthroughs for future reference and eventual upload to YouTube
• Approach my blind playthroughs as a regular player and any subsequent playthroughs as a playtester
• Jot down notes as I went, to supplement the observations captured in my recordings
• Go for 100% completion without asking for hints, unless I was hopelessly stumped

Playing as often as my schedule (and the batch release schedule) allowed, and taking breaks when I started feeling tired or cranky, it took me 50 hours and 48 minutes spread across 2 months to clear the first round of playthroughs. During that time, I continually fine-tuned my process.

In the beginning, I was recording multiple levels in a single video, being a little lax about revisiting levels right away to search for missed secrets, and playing mainly for my own enjoyment. By the end, I was recording each level separately (which made it MUCH easier to track down footage later), diligently verifying 100% completion before moving on, and playing with more critical intent—in addition to playing for fun, I was checking screen transitions and testing the feasibility of a buster-only run, saving myself the trouble of doing so on a replay.

Aiding my process were a couple quality-of-life improvements along the way. First, the implementation of a map feature in one of the later batches. Second, the realization that the cheat menu had an option to show invisible collision objects, saving me the trouble of leaping into every spike pit to determine whether the creator had pulled a Magnum Man and placed spike tiles but not spike objects. Third, the revelation that noclip mode had been accessible via a hotkey this whole time, which facilitated more efficient playtesting and relieved the burden of redoing sections I'd already played into the ground.

Despite my livestreaming, recording, and playtesting experience, going through these levels was unlike anything I'd ever done. It's one thing to play levels of varying quality and character in the context of a finalized MaGMML game—the level scores, tier placement, creator names, and nearby NPCs give you a sense of what you're in for, and it's fine to let your gut reactions define your opinions. It's another thing entirely to experience the levels completely blind, in a random order, relying solely on what the levels themselves tell you about their length, difficulty, stability, and so forth, all the while maintaining a consistent process to ensure fair and impartial judging.

I encountered plenty of difficulties. On more than one occasion, I set out to play "one more level" before taking a food or sleep break, only to discover 20 minutes later that the level was not going to end anytime soon. I'm not particularly photosensitive or subject to motion sickness, but a few levels made me queasy with their gimmicks and visual effects—not so much that I couldn't finish, but enough to make judging uncomfortable. Due to programming oversights in some of the contestants' custom objects, I triggered a handful of hard crashes and had to make up lost progress (usually before learning about noclip mode).

I had to switch my player avatar when I discovered at a most inopportune time that Roll didn't have any custom sprites created for Rush Bike, so she simply turned invisible. With the devteam making updates to the engine between batches, it wasn't always obvious which glitches were newly introduced and which should've been caught by the level creators, so I started a running list of issues to raise with the devteam so I could judge Functionality fairly. The FIRE button on my controller got progressively stickier as time went on, eventually spreading that stickiness to the JUMP button, effectively rendering the controller unusable.

Oh, and I was sick with an upper respiratory infection for almost the entire duration. I had already decided not to perform for an audience while recording my blind playthroughs—after all, these recordings were personal reference material first and public entertainment second—but I would've preferred not to sound like a plague beast when I talked. This didn't affect my playing ability, but there were a few mishaps early in the recording process where I muted my microphone in order to privately cough up a lung...and then forgot to unmute. I captured all the most important observations in my written notes, but I regret not having those initial audio reactions preserved for the level creators to hear.

Of course, my initial round of playthroughs wasn't all hardships. I actually had fun. Lots of fun. There's a reason why I'm so invested in this contest series, and a reason why I livestream Mega Man fangames: I am fascinated by the things people come up with when they set out to make a good (or deliberately mediocre, terrible, or ridiculous) Mega Man level.

I laughed at the sight gags and comedic dialogue. I marveled at the diversity of level concepts and the sheer amount of cleverness and creativity on display. I relished the sections that meaningfully put my platforming and problem-solving skills to the test. I lost myself in the immersive atmosphere created by the music and graphics. I was bemused by the zany, inexplicable design decisions and mind-bogglingly obvious playtesting oversights. I enjoyed trying to break people's levels—and sometimes, I enjoyed being denied that pleasure because the creators actually anticipated my nonsense.

Compared with any previous MaGMML, the highs were higher and the lows were much, much lower. I was proud of the levels that took to heart all the advice and feedback coming out of these contests, and I writhed in pain at the levels that clearly did not. Through it all, even when a play session wore me out, I remained excited to see what was next.

Of course, I knew what was next, in the "big picture" sense. Next was replaying, scoring, and reviewing these levels. This had been merely a warmup; the real judging was about to begin.

That's it for now! Once the contest results are announced, I'll upload my blind playthrough videos to YouTube and update this post with a link.

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​One of the first tasks that Mick Galbani, ACESpark (AKA Davwin), Shinryu, Pachy, and I undertook as a judge staff for Make a Good Mega Man Level Contest 3 (MaGMML3) was to test out the rubric we'd be using to rate the entries. This was the same rubric we'd used in the judge application process, but now the goal was to determine whether the categories were weighted properly. For this, a larger pool of levels would be needed.

The hosts (Mick and Davwin) selected two levels from each tier of MaGMML1, a game whose contest rubric is universally recognized as pants. If desired, we were allowed to play the MaGMML1 Remastered versions of those levels (same design; different game engine). Even though Remastered hadn't been released yet, the levels in question were in good enough shape to be loaded into a standalone executable. Five levels from MaGMML2's unrated Tier X (which sounds dirtier than it is) were also selected. To avoid bias, we opted to omit any levels made by one of us judges. We also excluded the entry levels from MaGMML2, given that Davwin was a judge for that contest and used a rubric that wasn't too far off from the new one.

We played and scored these levels according to the new rubric—but no reviews; just ratings. I shared my personal rubric breakdown (the one I used for the judge application) with the group, in case they found it useful. Together, we refined the subcategories as follows:
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Design - X/35
Introductions - X/5
Challenge design (deliberate, clear, meaningful, fair) - X/5
Challenge progression (↑ complexity/difficulty, challenge arcs, climax) - X/5
Focus (coherent theme, manageable roster, nothing over/underused) - X/5
Architecture (logical, efficient, unobtrusive) - X/5
Player consideration (length, layout, checkpoints, power-ups) - X/5
Ability Balance (abilities shine without destroying the challenge) - X/2
Name (does the level reflect the title) - X/2
Perfectible (no damage w/ buster only, or else with acceptable forced weapon use) - X/1
 
Fun - X/25
Totally subjective rating - X/10
Recommendable (would you recommend this to someone else) - X/5
Highs (do the best parts boost the level) - X/5
Lows (are the shortcomings forgivable) - X/5
 
Creativity - X/15
Originality (have I seen anything exactly like this, i.e. sections copied from other levels) - X/5
Novelty (does this offer a new gameplay experience, or does it feel similar to other stages) - X/5
Impressiveness (am I surprised or wowed) - X/5
 
Aesthetics - X/15
Graphics - X/5
Music/Sound - X/5
Atmosphere/theming - X/5
 
Functionality - 9/10
Stability (flawless construction; no glitches) - X/5
Feasibility (can the player reliably complete each challenge) - X/5


Armed with this updated rubric breakdown, I came up with some scores that should cause anyone who's played these levels to raise an eyebrow. As before, the numbers in parentheses represent the individual subcategory scores. Feel free to skip ahead; I won't stop you.

(That last one's a picture of the rarely seen MaGMML1 Remastered rubric test hub, in case you were wondering.)

​Organizing the total scores from lowest to highest (giving more priority to the level with the higher Design score, in the case of a tie), here's where everything placed:

(34) City War
(48) The Quickening 2
(52) Wily Combo
(58) Level
(58) Napalm Forest & Caves
(59) Midnight Snow
(60) Coyote Man
(62) Mega Man World
(64) Wily Fortress VR
(64) Thunderclyffe Plant
(65) Glass Man
(71) So Good
(72) Chroma Key
(74) Metallic Ocean
(83) Research Facility

Some questionable scores, to be sure. But I've seen some bad fan-made levels, so the bar is set pretty low for getting at least a couple points in any given category. Also, I tend to focus more on the things that ruin my Mega Man experience than the things that go above and beyond to make it superb. There are other factors influencing my scores, but these are the ones that most concisely explain how I came up with these numbers.

I have a vague recollection of us judges comparing notes and averaging all our scores to see where these levels would've placed in MaGMML3. Oddly, I can't find any record of this discussion in the Discord logs, so maybe it happened over voice chat. Whatever the case, we did establish that the main rubric was solid enough to use for the contest. Whether we used the more detailed breakdown was up to us.
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When it came time to start rating and reviewing MaGMML3 levels, it quickly became apparent to me that the more detailed breakdown needed more tweaking. I found myself agonizing over categories that were too specific to apply to less conventional levels, so broad that they overlapped unfairly with other categories, or simply no longer of great interest to me.

For one thing, my interpretation of Creativity inherently penalized levels such as Wily Combo and Napalm Forest & Caves, which are centered around callbacks to the official Mega Man games, and unfairly rewarded the likes of So Good and Mega Man World for using non–Mega Man assets. For another thing, the Recommendable subcategory of the Fun score was all too close to MaGMML1's wildly subjective Other Person Fun Factor score (ie, how much do you think other people would enjoy the level).

So, I tinkered with the subcategories until I had something that was (a) comfortably easy to fill out, (b) consistently applicable across all level types, and (c) more accurate to what I was actually looking for in these levels.

Design - X/35
Introductions (clear, appropriate) - X/5
Challenge design (deliberate, meaningful, fair, reasonably perfectible) - X/5
Challenge progression (↑ complexity/difficulty, challenge arcs, climax) - X/5
Focus (coherent vision, manageable roster, nothing over/underused) - X/5
Layout (logical/efficient architecture, obvious pits, safe transitions, sense of direction) - X/5
Player consideration (length, checkpoints, items, disability awareness, niceties) - X/5
Weapon consideration (balance of freedom and challenge, limitations inform the design) - X/3
Name (does the title fit the level) - X/2
 
Fun - X/25
Totally subjective rating - X/10
Highs (do the best parts boost the level) - X/5
Lows (are the shortcomings forgivable) - X/5
Contest appropriateness (should other people be expected to play this) - X/5
 
Creativity - X/15
Novelty (does the level offer new experiences, or present old experiences in new ways) - X/5
Potential (does the level adequately explore the potential of its various elements) - X/5
Impressiveness (am I surprised, charmed, impressed, or wowed) - X/5
 
Aesthetics - X/15
Audio (appropriate, enjoyable, tolerable, music looped and implemented properly) - X/5
Visuals (clear, legible, appealing, unobtrusive, polished) - X/5
Atmosphere (theming, story, overall feel) - X/5
 
Functionality - X/10
Construction (appropriate structural object use, polished programming, no surprises) - X/5
Feasibility (is the level beatable without risk of getting stuck or crashing the game) - X/5

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This proved to be a much better breakdown. There were still some oddball levels that threw me for a loop, but the total scores I was assigning finally felt right.

I originally had level layout under Player Consideration, but I realized that all the structural elements should be together in the same category. Proceeding safely and confidently through a level is a function of the architecture, layout, screen transitions, and graphics working together to guide the player. Player Consideration should be reserved for questions such as, "Did you remember that players with color blindness, motion sickness, epilepsy, or a hearing impairment may want to enjoy this level?", not, "Did you remember that players prefer not to die instantly when attempting to exit a room?"

Whereas the old Ability Balance category required me to pick apart the individual usefulness of every single weapon in a roster full of redundancy, and Perfectible required me to determine if it was technically possible to do a no-damage buster-only run (ugh), Weapon Consideration allowed me to step back and compare overall experiences with and without special weapons. Is the player allowed to try different strategies without being excessively rewarded or punished? This was also a way to score the appropriateness and intentionality of what weapons were enabled, disabled, unlockable, or infinite.

Recommendable morphed into ​Contest Appropriateness—essentially, a measure of how much the level deserves a skip teleporter. My rationale is that if a level is skippable, it's obviously not fun enough for a general audience to put up with whatever problems warranted the skip. Whereas MaGMML1's Other Person Fun Factor was a haphazard guess at what other people might like, this was a safeguard against my personal preferences allowing a level to reach the top tiers without being fully accessible to the average player.

Originality was unsustainable; I was spending entirely too much time analyzing every screen, testing my memory for any identical setups across hundreds upon hundreds of other levels. What I really cared about for Creativity was the overall experience, what the designer created with elements old and new. I replaced Originality with Potential, something that is hugely important to me—it's one thing to come up with new ideas; it's another thing entirely to go anywhere with them.

I wanted Functionality to pertain solely to the technical aspects of level design. When I initially worked out the category breakdowns, the glitchy spring platforms of Magnum Man were foremost in my mind for Feasibility. Realistically, whether the player can reliably complete each challenge is usually more of a Design question—and a question that can only be answered by more repeat testing than my schedule and sanity would ever allow. Thus, I recalibrated the breakdown to focus on easily quantifiable items in the same vein as glitches and collision object mishaps. Does the architecture line up safely across screen transitions? Are boss projectiles destroyed along with the boss? Is the level free of any and all softlock potential? Etc.

I came to realize that some overlap was inevitable. A low Player Consideration score, for instance, goes hand-in-hand with a low Contest Appropriateness score, because a long level with no checkpoints or power-ups is a prime candidate for a skip teleporter. A high Creativity score is almost guaranteed to secure a good number of Fun points from me. Good screen transitions are highly important to me, and different aspects of their use are covered under both Design and Functionality. And that's okay. The purpose of the rubric is to help the judges translate their complex opinions into a simple, quantifiable, universally applicable format, not to force apart certain elements that are inherently intertwined.

Besides, reorganizing my subcategories was only one part of the scoring process. The plan was always to compare scores at the very end and adjust as necessary, with or without a more detailed breakdown. If there were still problems with my interpretation of the rubric after 170+ levels, I'd have a chance to resolve them.

Fun, right? And this was just the first step in the judge process. Wait until I tell you about playing and writing reviews—after the results are announced, of course.

AnimeNEXT 2018 was the first time in years where I was fully able to unwind, relax, and enjoy myself on vacation, and it remains one of my all-time favorite convention experiences. I've seen enough sequels to know that the second time isn't guaranteed to measure up to the first, so I had no illusions that the 2019 convention would be anywhere near as magical. Still, my wife and I secured tickets and spent several months planning and getting psyched for AnimeNEXT 2019.

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Now, then. Convention stories!

LODGING

My wife and I have been staying at bed & breakfasts since our honeymoon. Usually we select a B&B based on some combination of unique character (eg, a castle built from found materials, Halloween decorations out the wazoo), scrumptious breakfast options (eg, a rotating menu prepared by a legit pastry chef), and fun perks (eg, cats on the premises, homemade shortbread at all hours). When my wife booked the Carisbrooke Inn, only three things mattered: it was close to the convention center, reasonably priced, and still available.

Had we not been conventioning, we would've gotten more out of our stay. But the designated breakfast times of either 8:30 or 9:30 AM didn't mesh well with our optimal timing for getting into costume and getting out the door. The paper-thin walls put a damper on coming back from the convention around midnight and discussing our plans for the next day at normal volume levels. And we certainly weren't around to take advantage of the free wine at 5 PM.

Our particular room met our needs: it had a comfortable bed, a full-length mirror for checking costumes, enough space for us to lay out all our stuff and maneuver around each other, and a place to sit. Parking was offsite in a tiny lot around the corner, but the neighborhood seemed safe enough and the weather was nice. Overall, our stay was fine, just not ideal for the weekend we had planned.

One anecdote worth sharing: We were showed to our room by a summer intern, who had some difficulty demonstrating how to turn on the TV. When it finally came on, there was some infomercial about—I swear I'm not making this up—butt surgery. With color diagrams. And either he didn't notice or was unsure how to turn it back off. My wife and I had to hold in our laughter for a good 2-3 minutes while he finished giving us the tour of our room with the TV on at full volume.

FOOD

Our meal planning at last year's convention is best described as "winging it." That is not to say we only ate chicken wings; nay, my vegetarian (now vegan) wife would have protested. Rather, we failed to scope out food options in advance—basically the opposite of how we normally plan our trips.

Last year's impromptu dining decisions took us to Tun Tavern (more my kind of place), where I bumped into the host of the fun voice acting Q&A panel we had just attended; to Cavo Crepe Cafe (more my wife's kind of place), where we hurriedly ate outside as the staff started to close up shop and the wind nearly swept us away; and to one of the many food kiosks at the convention center, where I ate a mediocre pizza. Wait, I wasn't going to tell you that last story.

This year, we identified several restaurants within 10 minutes of the convention center, making note of their business hours. Given that my wife only eats during a convention if (a) she's about to pass out, and (b) there's nothing else of interest on her schedule, I knew I'd be fending for myself a lot of the time.

Still, my wife and I joined up for a hearty Saturday dinner at Los Amigos, a Mexican restaurant that appealed equally to both of us. We also had a supremely enjoyable Thursday dinner at The Continental. I had French onion soup dumplings, which were incredible. We loved the decor: our "outdoor" table (technically indoor, because we were in a mall) was next to a fire pit on a little island surrounded by water, and the rest of the restaurant was some combination of the original Star Trek, original Battlestar Galactica, vintage Doctor Who, and a David Lynch film. Very cool.

We also had breakfast together every morning. The B&B had a set menu of a half-dozen options—pancakes, eggs, bacon; all the usual fare. This was fine for me, but my wife was restricted to avocado toast because she's a filthy Millenn—I mean, uh, vegan. Actually, my wife informs me it was avocados and oatmeal. Either way, our hosts were very accommodating, and the orange juice was on point, so that's what really matters.

I ended up having all my other meals at the convention center, but I was smart this year: instead of sodas and greasy grub, I opted for Powerade and vaguely healthy sandwiches (vaguely healthy in that there was a lettuce leaf on top). Physically, I felt much better this convention, what with being properly hydrated and not traveling everywhere with a lead stomach.

SUMMARY

I think that pretty much covers everything. AnimeNEXT 2019 was—oh, I guess I missed some stuff.

COSTUMES

Well in advance of the convention, I had agreed to doing a couple's cosplay with my wife. She reckoned that we'd have more fun and be more recognizable as two characters from the same series. We both had our demands: I required a costume that was relatively easy and unobtrusive; she wanted something that didn't require a wig. We settled on Dr. Mikhail Cossack and Dr. Noelle Lalinde, two scientists from the Mega Man franchise (the latter from the Archie Comics continuity).

The costume components were easy enough to assemble. I had a pair of brown shoes that looked fairly accurate, and a pair of fake glasses left over from the Lowery Cruthers cosplay I did for a Jurassic Park/World movie marathon some months prior. I don't mean to brag, but I own a pair of khaki pants. I found a perfect tie and shirt at Goodwill. I picked up a lab coat from a uniform store—not the cheapest costume piece I've ever bought, but it opens up numerous future cosplay options. My hair and beard were already the appropriate length and easy to style.

I forget what all my wife had to do to pull together her costume, though I suspect there was some sort of Sailor Moon transformation sequence involved (or maybe just lots of sewing).

Now, my wife's intention was to bleach her hair, cut it to the character's specifications, and dye it the appropriate color. She had hassled with transporting, styling, pinning, and enduring the weight of two different wigs at the last convention, and she simply did not have the patience or energy to go through that again. Unfortunately, there was a mishap when she trimmed her own hair. And then another mishap when she attempted to salvage it for a secondary costume that fell through. Instead of looking like a comic book character, she turned herself into Little Lord Fauntleroy.

With tears in her eyes, she drove off into the sunset looking for a place that would sell her a wig.

Of course, costumes alone wouldn't be enough for anyone but the most diehard Mega Man fans to recognize us on sight. We needed props. So my wife went to work on a plushie (well, a round cat toy strung with wire and covered in fabric) of Beat the robotic bird, laminated fold-out "photos" of my fictional daughter (including official art, manga and comic book panels, and a screenshot from OH JOES!), and name badges for the both of us (complete with fake bar codes made of inverted tiles from Pharaoh Man's stage in Mega Man 4). I think everything turned out pretty darn well.

I don't think I've ever gotten so many requests to have my picture taken at a convention. A few times, people called out, "Hey, Dr. Light!" to me—and though I always set the record straight about who I was, I was happy they at least got the right franchise. My wife pointed out that Mega Man 11 was still fresh in people's minds, and young Dr. Light isn't too far off from Dr. Cossack if you're just going off of memory. Maybe that's a costume for another convention.

​My wife also went to the effort of drafting an essay written from the perspective of her character, and putting it in a binder with robot schematics on the cover. Although she didn't end up doing so, she toyed with the idea of hamming it up and handing out copies of her essay to random conventiongoers to warn them of the dangers of making robots seem too human.

We took a break from cosplaying on Saturday; my wife needed a respite from the wig, and I thought I'd be happier in street clothes for a day. Although my neato Super Metroid shirt got a few comments, I was surprised to find that I missed the recognition (and extra pockets) of the costume. I was also a little chilly at times; the Atlantic City convention center cranked up the air conditioning the appropriate amount for hordes of people in costume in the middle of summer. Good on you, AC. I reprised my role as Dr. Cossack on Sunday, while my wife changed into her alternate costume, "Woman Who Can't Even With This Wig Anymore."

THURSDAY/FRIDAY

After standing in line (a comically long line extending the entire length of the convention center, down the stairs, and back up the same stairs) to pick up our badges on Thursday night, we spent some time poring over the program and schedule. I had already downloaded the Guidebook app (a precaution after last year's scheduling problems), but I was pleased to discover that the print schedule completely matched up with the online one, at least for everything I wanted to attend.

Unfortunately, everything I wanted to attend was distributed in the worst way possible. Either there was absolutely nothing of interest, or 2-6 really compelling programs all happening at the same time. I had wanted to see the film Summer Wars, for example, but it would've required me to give up a panel on Lupin III (my favorite anime franchise), dinner at a reasonable time, and two competing events that I was tossed between. And if I gave up on Summer Wars after a few minutes—which would be consistent with the "not really feeling this" and "can't read the subtitles from my seat" reasons I had for abandoning videos the previous year—the Lupin panel would be half over and probably filled to capacity anyhow.

So, here's how my Friday went:

Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water: I wasn't thrilled about starting my day with random video programming, but the dealers' room wasn't open yet, and most of my other options were introductions to things outside my sphere of interests. So, I watched an early '90s adaptation of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. It filled the time just fine, but I wandered off after two episodes to go find my wife.

Anime Car Show: I think it's cool that there were half a dozen cars on display from Initial D or with anime-themed decals all over. But Doc Brown's DeLorean, KITT, and my personal vehicle when it's carrying newly purchased dessert are about the only cars my wife and I get excited about. The fact that we showed up, even briefly, to look at cars that didn't travel through time, talk to the driver, or contain dessert should indicate how our morning was going.

AnimeNEXT Family Feud: Family Feud is my favorite game show and one of my favorite TV shows in general. There was no way I was missing this. Disappointingly, the organizers were running on little sleep due to unforeseen circumstances, hadn't had a chance to test the technical equipment, and kept forgetting how certain elements of the game were supposed to work. The pace was slow, and most of the questions were either too broad ("Of all the Gen 1 Pokemon, which would you want for a starter?") or too narrow ("Name a Devil May Cry character with white hair"), and the majority were gaming questions instead of anime questions. The high point was playing rock-paper-scissors against our fellow audience members to gain a seat on stage, and tying about a dozen times in a row with the person behind me. Ridiculous. Also, I lost.

Dealers' room and artist alley: With nothing else on the schedule until early evening, I strolled through aisle after aisle of manga, plushies, keychains, tiny boxes from Japan containing models of the Fisher-Price Enterprise from Star Trek (2009), and any other merchandise you can think of. As with last year, I didn't want to bring home much more than a book full of sketches (more on that later), but I allowed myself a few purchases over the course of the weekend—mostly video game art prints for myself, but also a Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai art print for a friend, and a few varieties of Pocky to share at my workplace.

Lupin the 3rd With Various Guests: This panel was hosted by Richard Epcar, Lex Lang, and Ellyn Stern, who had lent their voices to various Lupin III dubs over the years. Now, I've only ever watched Lupin (and most anime, for that matter) with subtitles, but I was hoping that my passing familiarity with these people (who've played bit parts in such favorites as Heroes of Might and Magic III) and our shared interest in Lupin would be sufficient to enjoy the panel. In retrospect, I really should've gone to Summer Wars; there was a lot of discussion about the Blue Jacket series on Cartoon Network that I haven't seen, and it seemed like Ellyn and Richard weren't in sync about how structured or serious the panel was supposed to be.

Companies That Knew Nothing About "ANIME FAN WANTS": This was a treasure trove of hilarious horror stories and unbelievable anecdotes from now-defunct companies in the anime industry. George from Land of Obscusion regaled us with tales about everything from DVD production ("No, we totally didn't charge money for a DVD set that just sloppily ripped a fan translation from the Internet") to subtitles ("Hey, when you translate this anime, could you avoid using words with the letter 'Y'? The keyboard I'm using to type the subtitles doesn't have a functioning 'Y' key"). Tight presentation of interesting material.

AMV Contest Screening: I missed the first half because of the previous program, but my wife saved me a seat. I arrived in time for the beginning of the Dramatic/Serious category, which hit me right in the feels with the likes of "Parallel" (Violet Evergarden + "Restless Soul" by Flor). In the Artistic category, I was captivated by the psychedelic "Pachyderm Panic" (Puella Magi Madoka Magica + "Pink Elephants on Parade" from Dumbo). "The hero we need" (Astro Boy + "Captain Underpants Theme Song" by "Weird Al" Yankovic) was an amusing surprise in Fun/Upbeat, and funnier (to my tastes, anyhow) than anything under Comedy. Shockingly, last year's trend of everyone using the same two songs from The Greatest Showman continued unabated.

AMV Sing-Along AFTER DARK: Our first choice was the too-popular-to-get-into panel on hilariously bad anime, so we settled in for a less restrained version of the family-friendly AMV sing-along that cheerfully capped off last year's convention. Notably, this was not labeled as an 18+ panel, but it was late enough that the hosts felt comfortable with just giving a warning before any video with questionable content. There were gems such as "Clubbin' with Lupin" (Lupin III, One Piece​, and others + "Jack Sparrow" by Lonely Island feat. Michael Bolton), plus a few of the bawdy AMVs you'd expect from an "after dark" panel, but there were also some horrifically gory ones. Like, "how did my child get into this without a wristband" gory. And I am supremely squeamish. I spent what felt like a quarter of the sing-along looking away from the screen.

Richard Epcar's Famous Outtake Panel (18+): I think this is what I wanted out of the Lupin panel earlier in the day. Richard Epcar, accompanied by Lex Lang, showed a multitude of voice acting outtakes (audio paired with the video clips they were trying to dub) from Lupin III and other anime they'd been involved with. I could've done without so much locker room humor; my favorite outtakes were the flat-out silly ones, with actors catastrophically stumbling over their lines, making up random nonsense, or breaking the fourth wall with absurd observations about the show.

Thursday/Friday cosplay photos:

This was hastily taken as my segment of the snaking registration line curved around a corner, briefly matching up with where these cosplayers were. Left to right, we have Rin Hoshizora, Nozomi Tojo, Umi Sonoda, and Maki Nishikino from Love Live!

Serendipitously, our first cosplay encounter of the convention proper was with a character from the same franchise as us. Metal Man from Mega Man 2 is pictured here with two random nerds.

Shizuo Heiwajima and Izaya Orihara from Durarara!! stopped to duke it out.

The crew from Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid was in attendance: Quetzalcoatl, Elma, Fafnir, Tohru, and Kanna.

It's great to see a whole family (or else a bunch of convincingly familial strangers) cosplay together: Ryuko from Kill La Kill; Flynn Rider from Tangled; and Dr. Eggman, Cheese the Chao, and Miles "Tails" Prower from the Sonic games. Eggman's hand gesture summarizes my feelings toward the accuracy of these costumes.

My wife tells me these are Red Blood Cell and Macrophage from Cells at Work. I tell my wife that she can watch shows like this without me because blood is icky.

I was impressed by this superb Brock and Steelix from an obscure series called Pokémon.

I saw more cosplayers from The Seven Deadly Sins than from any other show I recognized, and it was fun scrutinizing the differences in construction and detail between similar costumes. I held out on taking any photos until I found a group, and Meliodas (and Hawk), King, Escanor, and Diane were kind enough to oblige.

Final Fantasy VII's gloriously polygonal Cloud was one of my favorite cosplays of the convention. So clever.

I'm glad to see that good ol' Vash the Stampede remains a convention staple some 20 years after Trigun stopped airing.

Kirby's King DeDeDe would like to ask for your place in line. Best not to argue with that hammer.

SATURDAY

By the time we got back to the B&B, it was technically Saturday. Our biggest mistake was staying up past 2 AM trying to reassess our initial program selections now that we'd been conventioning for a whole day.

Even without getting up early to don a costume, I was exhausted when I woke up. In large part because of that exhaustion, Saturday ended up being the least enjoyable day of the convention, though not without its high points.

Experiences as an Anime Singer Songwriter With Shihori Nakane: Although I was unfamiliar with this person's work, hers was the one and only morning program that wasn't an educational workshop of some sort (tough luck if you're not interested in crafting, cosplay, or putting your brain to work before lunchtime!). I'm glad I tagged along with my wife; I got to hear some fun stories, including one about meeting the legendary Yoko Kanno. Nakane idolized Kanno and was giddy and nervous when meeting with her to collaborate on a song. Kanno introduced herself by offering a bag of snacks to Nakane. Awestruck, she thought to herself, "God gave me snacks!"

AMV Contest Screening: As the arts and crafts programming continued into the lunch hour, I got caught up on the AMVs I had missed the previous day. Trailer/Parody is usually my favorite category, but this crop of AMVs relied on being familiar with a bunch of series I've had minimal exposure to. Romance/Sentimental gave my feels no chance to recover from the previous day, assaulting me with "Happy Little Clouds" (various series + "Bob Ross Remixed" by Melodysheep) and "Chihiro in Wonderland" (Spirited Away + "C'mon" by Panic! at the Disco). Action didn't seem as action-y as usual, but I enjoyed "The Deciding Moment" (Haikyu!!, Ace of Diamond, and Kuroko's Basketball + "Seki-ray" by Gackt). I'll refer you to this playlist for all the AMVs I didn't mention; there were a lot of good ones.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time: "Slice of life with a sci-fi twist" is one of my favorite anime genres, and my wife and I enjoyed this tale of a girl...well, you read the title. Lots of clever surprises and fun character interactions, and the ending gave us plenty of conversation fodder. Probably the best part of the day for me.

The Anime Bubble of 2008: What We've Learned: We apparently learned nothing, because I have no recollection of this panel, aside from showing up late and taking a photo of some cosplayers on the way out.

Why Visual Novels: Tales from a Beta Tester (18+): I'm not into visual novels, but I play one on TV. I mean, uh, I know people who make visual novels, I have actual beta testing experience, and I'm interested in behind-the-scenes stories from the video game industry. Mike (I think his name was Mike) was an engaging presenter, and his stories were funny and insightful. He described the workload (tens of thousands of words to review), the wide variations in how tester-friendly games might be, and how testing games with naughty content isn't as glamorous as it sounds.

AnimeNEXT Match Game: After Dark (18+): We attended this last year, and it was the highlights of the convention: Match Game but with audience members participating as the characters they were cosplaying. At that time, voice actor Bill Timoney was on the panel and brought a sense of humor and professionalism that elevated the whole thing. This time, I arrived late and missed the introductions, so I had no clue who was on stage. If I hadn't read the description, I wouldn't have recognized the program as a game show; participants were rambling about NSFW topics (and after Epcar's outtakes, blunt sex jokes were wearing thin for me). I left after maybe 5 minutes.

New Cutey Honey OVA '94: Either I got the wrong room or they switched what they were showing, because this OVA about a crime-fighting android looked an awful lot like a grossly underage busty girl undressing before a grossly underage boy. I left after maybe 5 seconds.

These Are a Few of My Favorite Scenes: Regrouping with my wife, I resigned myself to random video clips for the rest of the night. At its best, the panel was a parade of share-worthy videos, such as a very cool animated Star Wars short film called "TIE Fighter" and the supremely absurd "Daffy Duck the Wizard." Just as often, however, it was a prolonged introduction from one of the four hosts, or an uncomfortably gory clip that once again had me closing my eyes. I'll add that this was not labeled as an 18+ panel. We left around midnight; there was another hour to go, but my exhaustion had finally reached its limit.

Saturday cosplay photos:

I appreciated the double dose of Samuel L. Jackson, with Nick Fury from The Avengers and Frozone from The Incredibles.

Princess Daisy is ready for some Mario Tennis. I saw a number of good Mario cosplayers, but I was especially excited to see one of my mains from an underappreciated spinoff series that I love.

Compared with last year, the total population of non-anime cosplayers dropped by half. I suspect Nick Fury had Thanos flashbacks and used his cosmic pager to summon Captain Marvel's Captain Marvel to the convention to help.

I DON'T KNOW WHAT THIS IS, BUT IT'S AWESOME apparently it's Garuda from Final Fantasy XIV.

With Hunk and Voltron from Voltron: Legendary Defender on hand, I knew the parking garage would be safe.

I ate lunch with All Might and Katsuki Bakugo (as influenced by Best Jeanist). I don't know what those words mean; my wife told me to say them.

Lastly, two characters I could identify unassisted: Little Witch Academia's Atsuko “Akko” Kagari and Diana Cavendish. I also spy Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid in the corner trying to sneak into or out of this photo.

SUNDAY

I wish we could've started with Sunday's programming; this was the convention I was here to attend. An eclectic assortment of options, timed neatly enough to minimize awkward gaps, gave me the freedom to attend whatever I felt like without agonizing over what I might miss.

How to Panel 101: As a Minor Internet Celebrity™, I've long considered applying to host a panel at a video game convention where people might recognize my work. I've recently been given opportunities to present at small local events, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to brush up on the basics. This presentation was invaluable. A lot of the advice was common sense, but the way the information was organized really helped to emphasize the importance of having someone proofread your application to host a panel, practicing your presentation, and preparing for every worst-case technology scenario.

Creatures in Features with Voice Actors Lex Lang and Sandy Fox: Hands-down the best part of the convention. The first half alone would've been one of the best panels I attended, and accessible even to people with no prior knowledge of these people. The affable hosts discussed how they got into voice acting; some of the roles they've played; and their involvement in loop groups, who fill in all the grunts, gasps, background chatter, and animal noises (you wouldn't believe the training involved for animal noises) needed to flesh out the sound in movies and TV shows. They talked about how Amy Jo Johnson, the original Pink Power Ranger, contributed to getting into that line of work. They played clips from some of the movies they've done and pointed out where you can hear them; Sandy cheered as the candy spectators in Wreck-it-Ralph, and it turns out Lex is my favorite velociraptor in Jurassic World.

The second half is what made this panel truly special: the audience was invited to do the looping for a scene from one of the newer Planet of the Apes movies, with the takes recorded and edited on the spot. A few people were background apes, and Lex coached them on how to grunt and ook convincingly. One person was a more prominent ape who got to shout. I was Breathing Man, as we called him—some poor schmoe who wandered into the jungle for the express purpose of breathing heavily and gasping at apes. I'm plenty comfortable with voiceovers, but I'm definitely not a natural when it comes to nonverbal reactions. Still, between thinking back to my theater days and getting some fantastically supportive coaching from Lex, I eventually produced some usable noises. When everything was spliced together and the music track was added, you could've convinced me that I was watching the actual movie. So, so tremendously cool.

Anime Openings & Endings THE MAN Doesn't Want You to See: I was tossed between this and a workshop on learning to play hanafuda. However, we wanted to wind down with something passive, I recalled how much I enjoyed last year's panel on the best anime openings of the '80s (including one from Kimagure Orange Road that was logistically fascinating), and I saw that George from Land of Obscusion would be hosting. This was an entertaining collection of footage that never made it stateside due to licensing or other issues, such as the Astro Boy opening that doubled as an advertisement for Glico (the Pocky people), or the trio of openings where composer Rui Nagai kept getting in trouble for ripping off other people's songs.

Animation in Anime: After a final run through the dealers' room, where I realized I'd blown my chance at getting a Ridley amiibo, I joined my wife for our final program, already in progress. There were two other panels I was considering attending, but I saw that this was co-hosted by Evan Minto, who ran two of the best-presented panels that we attended last year (one about the evolution of faces in anime, and one about the various appearances of burgers in anime), so that won me over. This was a discussion of the techniques and processes that bring anime to life, and I was especially interested in the part about visual continuity. Apparently, each scene in a show or movie might be done by a completely different animator. My favorite moment was, when discussing the importance of checking for quality and consistency, this image was left up on the screen:

This makes me laugh every time I see it.

Sunday cosplay photos:

We weren't able to get a clear shot of a fantastic Alex Louis Armstrong cosplay from Fullmetal Alchemist, so you get nothing.

ARTWORK

...I'm sorry; I glanced up at that goofy screencap and started laughing again. What am I talking about now? Oh yes. Artwork.

Last year I brought a sketchbook to the artist alley and solicited doodles from anyone who was willing. This year, I brought the same sketchbook (plenty of pages left to fill!) and a pocketful of dollar bills. My wife, herself an artist, said that even though these doodles weren't formally commissions, it'd be only fair to thank the artists with a little financial support. So, until the allotted cash ran out, I went around artist alley asking folks, "If I give you a dollar, would you draw me a doodle? Anything you want; wherever there's a blank spot is fine."

There were still many blank spots among the doodles I got in 2018. To save you the effort of comparing these images against the ones in the previous convention recap, my wife has drawn yellow boxes around any new doodles on old pages.

Most people were receptive to the proposal; a couple were busy or just watching the booth until the artist returned. One artist wanted some time to think and had me come back later; another couldn't decide what to draw, which prompted the first suggestion I've ever made (RWBY, specifically, after looking at what was on display) since making sketch collection a habit.

One girl who was a convention attendee saw me soliciting sketches, and she asked if she could draw something. The woman with her (I'm assuming her mother) apologized and tried to dissuade me, but I was more than happy to give the girl a dollar for the boxy little robot she drew.

Instead of drawing his own doodle, one artist thought it would be fun to add to someone else's doodle. Apparently he does this all the time. I'm still not sure whether to be amused or annoyed that I paid a dollar for a breath puff.

I wasn't choosy about the artists I solicited; I started on one end of artist alley and systematically worked my way across, circling back to a booth later if it was too crowded when I got there. I've found that the sketches I receive often bear no resemblance whatsoever to the art on display, so I even asked the people selling jewelry and sculptures to contribute.

I'll stop yammering for a while and let you get on with looking at sketches.

I like how it looks like the ghost is spooking the doodles to the right.

Important note: these are gay bees. The artist said so.

These last two are best viewed in the sketchbook itself; the scanned images don't give the full "flip book" effect of looking at the first one and then turning the page to see the second one appear directly behind it.

SUMMARY

Overall, I enjoyed AnimeNEXT 2019, but it ranks just below average among my convention experiences. I'm grateful that the convention staff listened to last year's feedback about the print schedule, and the program booklet was organized much better than before. I was pleased that every video I watched had subtitles where I could see them. Any other improvements from last year were ones my wife and I introduced: costumes that were more recognizable and fun to wear, planning out our meals better, downloading the Guidebook app to supplement the print schedule.

I wasn't a fan of how the programming was distributed; awkwardly staggered start times and too many panels appealing to the same audience at once (especially when they dominated an entire hour block) made it hard to be satisfied with my choices. My wife reports that most of the many concerts she attended didn't do the performers justice—too large a stage for just one person to command. I intend to have a word with the convention organizers about how graphic violence doesn't suddenly become appropriate for all ages after 10 PM.

Perhaps the biggest lesson for me was that the presenter is more important than the material being presented. Shihore Nakane was interesting because she's fun to listen to, not because I had any connection to her work. Previous attendance at panels hosted by George, Evan, and Lex swayed my decision to attend panels they hosted on Saturday and Sunday, which ended up being some of my favorites. Of the four game shows I attended between this year and last year, the only one I genuinely liked was largely because of the special guest.

Despite the low points this year, a lot of things we liked about last year's convention remained unchanged: great location, perfect attendance size, interesting events with interesting guests, good-quality cosplay, a dealers' room and artist alley with plenty to see, friendly convention staff, friendly convention center staff (those folks don't get nearly enough credit), and a very reasonable entrance fee. We're excited to try our luck again next year.

AnimeNEXT has become our convention of choice, just like Otakon was over a decade ago. Even when things don't go as well as they could, it's nice to have a place to call home.

Back in my Exfanding days, I wrote at length about attending Otakon, PAX East, and New York Comic-Con. I've been to other conventions since then—Castle Point Anime Convention and Trekonderoga, off the top of my head—but you'd never know it from this blog. It's been several years since I've posted anything about a convention experience, and my last attempt was essentially a self-reminder to have fun at conventions. I must have internalized my own advice pretty well, because I had a fantastic weekend at AnimeNEXT 2018.

...Wait, didn't I just get back from AnimeNEXT 2019? Apparently I've been sitting on a half-written convention writeup for the past 11-12 months, so I'd better discuss last year before moving on to this year. Here goes.

THURSDAY

I scooted out of work a bit early, picked up my wife, and began the trek to Atlantic City, NJ. My wife and I are relics from the era of putting together mix tapes for car trips, so she had burned a CD for the occasion: an assortment of intro and ending songs from anime series we'd watched together in the last few years. There's nothing like tunes from Bleach, Silver Spoon, Restaurant to Another World, Kill la Kill, Yuri on Ice!!, Himouto! Umaru-chan, Arpeggio of Blue Steel, Valerian and Laureline, Magical Girl Ore, Kakuriyo: Bed and Breakfast for Spirits, Bodacious Space Pirates, Free!, Orange, Little Witch Academia, and the original Devilman to get you pumped for sitting around in traffic. And there's nothing like the preceding list of titles to get you to question our taste in anime.

Our first destination was actually just outside Atlantic City—we had a room reserved at the historic Joseph Pitney House in Absecon. Ever since our honeymoon, my wife and I have been staying at bed and breakfasts instead of hotels whenever we have the opportunity; the food, hospitality, and unique charm are often as memorable as whatever we're in town to see or do, plus we tend to get better prices and quieter neighbors than we would at a hotel. We arrived fairly late in the evening, picked up our room key, visited the always-open snack pantry for some homemade shortbread, and settled into our spacious room.

We missed the window to check in early at the convention, so we didn't have our schedules and program booklets to be able to plan out our first day. Instead, my wife doodled around on her tablet while I read a book (specifically, Live From New York, a fascinating and highly entertaining collection of interviews recalling the first few decades of Saturday Night Live). My wife laughed about how we were spending the first night of our vacation doing exactly what we'd be doing at home. "Yeah," I responded, "but we don't have to worry about cleaning, or cooking, or going to work tomorrow; everything's taken care of, and we can relax without feeling like there's something else we should be doing."

I cannot begin to articulate how comfortable the bed was—once my head hit the pillow, the world beyond the bed ceased to exist. It was magnificent.

FRIDAY

The world beyond the bed reasserted its existence at 5:30 AM. My wife had a different costume planned for each day of the convention, and today's required over 2 hours to prepare. Taking into account when breakfast would be served, how long it might take to find parking at or near the venue, and how long the registration line was likely to be, we resigned ourselves to an unpleasantly early morning. Fortunately, I was cosplaying as "dude attending an anime convention," so I went back to sleep.

Eventually, I left the bed to pursue the "and breakfast" part of the arrangement, and it was delightful. Vanilla yogurt parfait with granola and berries (I'm not big on berries, but I'll eat them if sprinkled sparingly on yogurt parfait), followed by a two-egg omelet and a glass of orange juice—enough to fuel me through the start of the convention.

I get anxious driving around unfamiliar urban areas, what with their endless traffic lights and surprise one-way streets and claustrophobia-inducing architecture right up against the sidewalks, but the drive to the convention center was downright pleasant. There was plenty of parking onsite at the convention center—and as I would later discover, there were several food vendors and even a train station onsite, making this the most convenient convention venue I think I've ever been to.

I remember PAX East being obnoxious because the layout made no sense and there were waiting lines for everything (my wife refers to it as "Line Con"). I remember it taking forever to get around Comic-Con because of the incredible masses of people everywhere. The last Otakon I attended was uncomfortably over capacity, to the point where even the restaurants outside the convention center were overrun by otaku at all hours. As a midsized convention in a well-organized space, AnimeNEXT had none of these problems. The convention never got in the way of the convention, if that makes sense.

AnimeNEXT had the dealers' room, video game room, and concerts on the second floor; all the panels and screenings on the third floor; and all the niche events and novelty rooms (eg, the Cosplay Repair room, which I think is a brilliant idea) on the fourth floor. Escalators were plentiful and logically placed; and the design of the convention center gave every level a good view of the ground floor, where audience-participation events such as a cosplay wrestling tournament would occasionally occur. I also have to credit the building staff—from the folks in the parking garage to the folks at the front desk—for being friendly the entire weekend, and for being incredibly helpful every time I approached them with a question (mostly pertaining to food).

Of course, the first order of business was getting through the registration line. Ahead of us in the lobby was a group with one person cosplaying as Shrek, and someone in the group periodically used their smartphone to play a selection from the Shrek soundtrack to get us pumped for standing around in line. We struck up conversations with other attendees as the line snaked back and forth, commenting on one person's clever "Shyguys Burgers and Fries" t-shirt, praising an excellent Castle Crashers costume, and asking about a superb Stephen Universe cosplay we didn't recognize because we'd never seen Stephen Universe. I swear this was an anime convention.

Oh, but that was just the line to get into the registration line. Once we made it through the big doors into the registration area (which was the size of a basketball court), we split off into the queue for people who preregistered for tickets. There we encountered new cosplayers, such as Blair from Soul Eater, whom I mistook for I-No from Guilty Gear because my brain still thought we were at a video game convention. The hardest part of appreciating convention cosplay is that, as my wife put it, it's like playing one big trivia game all weekend. "Name that character." Which gets harder and harder with every passing year, thanks to new characters I've never heard of and old characters who've slipped my mind.

Case in point: my wife was cosplaying as Ujibe, the coach from Keijo!!!!!!!! (yes, there really are that many exclamation points in the title), and not a single person made any indication that they recognized her. This was a little heartbreaking to me, knowing the effort she had put into this costume. She had painstakingly reviewed clips and screencaps from the show to ensure every detail of her outfit was accurate. She had hand-dyed her shirt in an involved process using tea and tumeric. She had hand-stitched the clover logo on the shirt (never mind that it was rotated 45 degrees; it was late, she was tired). She had spent the morning styling her wig and beauty mark to precise specifications. I was proud of her for what she pulled off.

Granted, Ujibe is a side character in an anime that a lot of people might not admit to watching, on account of its subject matter. (I swear I watched it for the story, but it's about girls in bathing suits hitting each other with their butts.) However, I think my wife hit the nail on the head: she believes people just aren't accustomed to seeing plus-size women cosplaying as plus-size women. If people assumed my wife was pretending to be one of the bajillion characters as scrawny as Sailor Moon, of course they wouldn't recognize her costume. This would account for why one dude thought she was the 4chan mascot.

Anydigression, as soon as we cleared the registration line, we sat down with our schedules and mapped out the first half of our day. I marked up anything that seemed remotely interesting (I wanted backup plans, in case anything was a dud or too full to get into), but I opted to follow my wife around whenever there was any overlap in our interests. Our last Otakon was marred by the logistical frustrations of trying to meet back up with people after going off to do our own things, and I was more concerned about having a fun convention together than getting to do and see everything I wanted most.

Japanese Feminism 101: In our first dynamic panel of the day, we waited about half an hour for the presenter to show up. Around 11:35, one of the convention staff wandered in to see why we were sitting around in an empty room. Apparently, there had been schedule changes since the agenda was printed.

Look, I understand that plans change. But nobody at registration told us about it. Nobody put up a sign. Although we later discovered that the most current room schedule was displayed in a tiny box beside the door, that didn't help anyone trying to plan their day before they got to the room. I asked the staff at the information desk whether they had a list of corrections to the printed agenda. Not only did they seem surprised about there being schedule changes, but they directed me to view the updated schedule online—which is a poor solution for anyone who doesn't have a smartphone or has to deal with roaming data in a place with no public Wi-Fi. We eventually noticed a widescreen monitor rotating all the events and their locations for the next couple hours—not ideal, but better than nothing.

Game the Gamer: With an unexpected hole in our schedule and the dealers' room not yet open to the public, we wandered over to the only event that wasn't already deeply in progress. The premise of "Cutthroat Kitchen, with Wii games" sounded like a decent use of the next hour, but I started to lose interest when too much time was being spent auctioning off more sabotages than I felt were necessary for the first round. I stuck around long enough to see one of the contestants attempt WarioWare: Smooth Moves while handcuffed to a chair; my wife stayed for the whole thing, but I headed out somewhere around when they were trying to get someone to play Smash Bros. with a Wii bowling ball.

Kaibyo: The Supernatural Cats of Japan: I'm sorry I missed the beginning of this, because I'm interested in Japanese mythology and folklore, the presenter (Zack Davisson) was very engaging, and I'm enough of a cat person that my wife and I meow at each other as a form of communication. At least I got there in time to laugh about cats who gain power from wearing silly things on their head, see the tragic portrait of a cat minstrel playing a shamisen (an instrument that would have been partially constructed of cat leather), and learn about the origin of Japan's fondness for catgirls. The Japanese government at one point prohibited artists from drawing or painting people of a certain social variety (eg, prostitutes)—and the artists cleverly got around the issue by creating the exact same art, but with anthropomorphic cats instead of humans.

Lunch: I think I had a barbecue chicken wrap. I'm not a big wrap guy, but that's what they served at Esquires, the food stand in the train station attached to the convention center. I don't know about you, but I don't think of wraps when I hear "Esquires."

Finding Your Anime Voice: I popped in a bit late for what I hoped would be a panel on doing different voices, which would have been helpful for me on Twitch and YouTube with all the dialogue I read aloud while playing games. Unfortunately, the part for which I was present consisted mostly of random audience members trying to speak in a different register (eg, head voice) with minimal coaching. I left after maybe 5 minutes.

Dealers' Room: With an unexpected hole in my schedule and the dealers' room now open to the public, I meandered down to peruse the treasure trove. Geekery in every format was for sale—posters, wall scrolls, books, clothes, figurines, body pillows, DVDs, video games, and so on. Normally, this is where most of my convention budget goes, but I found myself exercising an unexpected amount of self-control.

Much of the merchandise was from new anime series that I hadn't seen or didn't have a special attachment to, so that helped. But I'm also in a different phase of my life than I was the last time I attended a convention with this much for sale. There's very little I actually want anymore—and I'm subscribed to the Star Trek Official Starships Collection, so shelf space in my home is at a premium like never before. I think about all the other ways I could be using my money—bills, charities, clothes that fit.

To that end, one of the few things I bought for myself was a t-shirt mashing up Mega Man and Iron Man. I also picked up a copy of the NES game Faxanadu, which has been on my radar for a while, as well as a RWBY poster. I'm particularly happy with the poster, because I had a similar image as a desktop wallpaper for a while and I love the multi-panel aesthetic.

HIATUS

Then I saved this post as a draft and didn't come back to it for almost a year.

My original intention was to pick up where I left off, using the online schedule for 2018 (with the numerous updates not reflected on my print schedule) to jog my memory and organize my storytelling. However, at the time of this post, I can only find online schedules for 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017...and 2019. As much as I want to keep going with the blow-by-blow recap, I recognize that this is a good excuse to scale back the verbosity and focus on the highlights. Nobody needs to hear about the mediocre pizza I ate.

I could regale you with tales of the three minutes I spent at an 18+ panel that I thought would be like Mystery Science Theater 3000 for adults only, but ended up being a YouTuber showing us his skeevy hentai game playthrough videos and creepily talking over his own recorded commentary. I could gush about Anime Burger Time, the BYOB (Bring Your Own Burger) panel where the host chowed down on Johnny Rockets while showing us clips of hamburgers appearing in various anime. I could recount what I recall of the Mazinger Z: Infinity movie, or of the Gaijin Girl: Life in Japan presentation. I could describe the hilarious Bad Anime Bad! panel and invoke the infamous names Garzey's Wing and Titanic: The Legend Goes On.

Instead, I'll attempt to work some untold stories into my writeup of AnimeNEXT 2019, where they'll still be relevant due to how often I found myself thinking back to 2018. If I write in a less comprehensive and detail-oriented format, I may even finish before the 2020 convention. In the meantime, please enjoy some photos from 2018, which we'll pretend are the intended conclusion to this post.

NOTE: If you (you, the reader) are in any of the photos below and don't want to be featured here, or if you'd like to be credited, please let me know (see the main page for contact options) and I'll action your request accordingly.

First up, a couple scenes from the convention in general:

A couple characters I don't recognize, but their costumes looked cool:

Some woman I'm married to, cosplaying as Tamako from Silver Spoon and then Ujibe from Keijo!!!!!!!! in an alternate outfit:

Umaru from Himouto! Umaru-chan, Uno and Nico from Nanbaka, Ryuko from Kill La Kill, and Dark Samus from the Metroid Prime series:

Nora, Ruby, and Yang from RWBY:

Buncha characters from the Phoenix Wright series:

Lastly, some group cosplay from Fullmetal Alchemist, Black Lagoon, and Gurren Lagann:

Ah, but that's not all. Carrying on with a tradition my wife started at the 2011 New York Comic-Con, I purchased a sketchbook and went around collecting doodles from the people at the booths in artist alley (regardless of whether they were an artist or just the person looking after the booth). These weren't formal commissions; rather, I asked for whatever they felt like drawing, if they felt like drawing anything in the first place. No pressure, no restrictions. Surprisingly, only one person drew genitalia.

Here are the sketches I collected—and as with the photos above, please contact me if your art is featured here and you'd like it to be removed or credited:

So there you have it. AnimeNEXT 2018. At least, as much of it as is contained in this post.

Story navigation: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

The Make a Good Mega Man Level Contest (MaGMML) 3 judge team was assembled a full year before judging began. We had plenty to keep us busy in that time, but I took on some non-judge work as well.

I spent a good chunk of 2018 helping to expand and test the game engine, making such contributions as assembling new tilesets (eg, the MM10 lab), reorganizing existing tilesets and creating slopes for some of them (eg, Skull Man; Charge Man; MM1 Wily 1, 2, and 4; MM2 Wily 1), and checking engine assets for fidelity to the original games (eg, all the Joes). For a time, I also was in charge of showcase development—that is, planning, building, and delegating the example levels that show off everything available in the engine.

I knew that contestants would be influenced to some degree by how the engine assets were presented to them. Without a showcase, many people would stick with the gimmicks and enemies they were familiar with, and overlook a lot of the engine's customization options. At the same time, any kind of showcase ran the risk of encouraging contestants to crib from the example levels—whether due to a lack of creativity, a false assumption that the example levels demonstrated the "right" way to use these assets, or a genuine inspiration to develop one of the sample challenges into a full level.

Before I took over showcase development, the team was grouping assets together by stage—here's everything from Cut Man, here's everything from Heat Man, and so forth. My main objection to this approach was that it would reinforce that certain assets need to go together, because that's how they appeared in the original games. After a lot of discussion, we agreed to rework everything and break up the assets by theme and/or function. I created a blank room in GameMaker; inserted one instance each of every enemy, gimmick, miniboss, and boss in the engine; and then started organizing these assets into categories (eg, water minibosses, moving platforms). Not unlike dumping out a basket of clothes and sorting them into piles.

With input from the devteam, I finessed the groups until everyone seemed to be happy with the distribution. Once things were finalized, I set up a tracking spreadsheet and requested volunteers to build example levels using the assets in each group. Tapping into my instincts as a judge and design critic, I also provided some guidelines for creating the showcase levels:

Of course, the showcase levels needed to be labeled to help players remember what they had and hadn't seen. You can blame me for all but one or two of these groan-inducing names:

• A Slog of Ice and Fire
• A Torrent of Turrets
• Airborne Assailants
• Brawl of the Wild
• Castle Castoffs
• Circuit Breaker
• Demolition Mission
• Extraordinary Ordinance
• Factory Fisticuffs
• Fan the Flame
• Fluidic Foes
• Ground Control
• Industrial Intrigue
• Invite Your Fiends
• Landlocked Leftovers
• Maniacal Manipulators
• Might As Well Jump
• Misfit Minibosses
• Modified Mobility
• Never Gonna Let You Joe
• Perilous Patrol
• Platform Swarm
• Pleased to Met You
• Razor-Sharp Rivals
• Respect the Unexpected
• Spectacular Spawners
• Submerged Scuffle
• Thug Zappers
• Water You Doing

I called dibs on Maniacal Manipulators (bosses with physics-altering attacks, one of whom is Flash Man, my judge avatar for the contest), Landlocked Leftovers (all the ground-based enemies that didn't fit anywhere else), and Never Gonna Let You Joe. After devoting two years of my life to OH JOES!, a game devoted to using this tired old enemy type in new and different ways, there was no way I wasn't going to claim the all-Joe showcase (Joecase?). Although I wouldn't consider it one of my strongest levels, I relished the self-imposed challenge of making the level beatable without destroying a single Joe (seriously, try it). Plus, I got to put some of my custom slope tiles to use.

I had wanted to take on more levels, but the stress of being a game designer (not just a level designer) finally got to me. For one thing, I was burned out from OH JOES! and needed a break from working on fangames. For another thing, I wasn't prepared for the logistical hurdles of this particular project.

The sheer size of the devkit meant absurd amounts of time spent loading and compiling in GameMaker. With OH JOES!, I could fire up the software, make a change, test it, tweak it, and test it again in a matter of minutes; with the MaGMML3 devkit, the same amount of work could easily take half an hour. Level design was suddenly an arduous, inefficient task that required me to plan my time differently and adjust how I approached playtesting.

Moreover, the showcase was being designed while the engine was still being expanded and tested. From a programming perspective, it's incredibly helpful to see how assets behave in normal gameplay situations. From a level design perspective, it's difficult to plan out challenges when the building blocks are still being finessed. I spent a lot of time logging issues on GitHub or, in rare cases, attempting to make programming changes myself. To push my changes to the rest of the devteam, I had to learn to use a command-based software called Git Bash. Even with a comprehensive guide from devteam member NaOH, I frequently ran into confusing, infuriating issues (read: merge conflicts). All I wanted to do was design some levels.

Recognizing that I needed to step back, I passed the torch to devteam member CWU01P, who did a terrific job of picking up the slack. Really, the whole devteam did some impressive work in pulling together the showcase.

If you'd like to take the showcase for a spin, it's packaged with Megamix Engine, which you can download here.