Spyro Has The Most 'Rad Nineties Kid' Voice.

[rionaleonhart]

Christmas dinner with my family:

Eleanor's mother: Do you need stuffing, Riona?
Riona: That would be lovely, thank you.
Riona's parents: (both start sniggering)

Thanks, guys.

We had a cake after the meal, and the box had the most incredible instructions:

SERVING: Place cake on a flat surface. Heat a long-bladed knife under warm water. Slice in a vertical direction. Turn cake and slice again in a vertical direction to create wedge shaped portions. Clean knife blade between slices.

Thank goodness. Far too many cakes expect you to be able to eat them without clear directions. I keep trying to slice horizontally.


I've been consuming a fair few things over the Christmas period, so here's a scattered entry about assorted media!


- Into the Spider-Verse reignited my taste for 'thirty-eight-year-old dirtbag accidentally bonds with a kid' stories, so I rewatched About a Boy. I really loved this film in my teens. There was a long period where I owned exactly four films on DVD; three of them were High School Musical, and the other was About a Boy. (I think I now also own Mulan.) It still holds up, I think, although the voiceovers of the characters' thoughts feel a bit dated. I love how Will gradually, reluctantly becomes used to Marcus's presence in his life.

It's really made me want an AU of Into the Spider-Verse where Peter B is the Peter Parker of Miles's universe. Miles goes HELP, PLEASE TEACH ME TO USE THESE POWERS, SPIDER-MAN and Spider-Man goes 'you're on your own, kid' and Miles sneakily follows him to find out where he lives and goes 'hey, I'm here now, in your non-superhero life, please teach me' and Peter goes 'what the fuck'.


- I also rewatched Zootopia, released under the inferior name of Zootropolis in the UK. I don't think I ever posted about it on here, but it's such a cute, fun film, and the worldbuilding is so interesting, and also it made me ship the hell out of a fox and a rabbit, whoops. HE LOOKS AT HER SO FONDLY.

There is, let's be honest, a definite possibility that I'm a furry.


- I finished Gris today; it's a gorgeous little watercolour-style game about a grieving young woman learning to stand on her feet again. 'Literally and figuratively bringing colour back to the world' is something I've had a weakness for ever since Okami. I'd recommend it if you're interested in light platforming and painting-esque animation. (I'll admit I found it sort of hilarious that your options at the beginning were 'walk very slowly' or 'FALL TO YOUR KNEES IN AGONY', and there were two different 'fall to your knees in agony' buttons.)

One thing that really struck me was how good it was at teaching you its mechanics without ever outright telling you anything.


- Spyro the Dragon was my introduction to 3D gaming; my only previous experience of games was on the Master System II and the Game Boy. I went over to a primary-school classmate's house, and I watched her play this game, and I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. It was the first thing I bought when my brother got a PS2 for his tenth birthday.

For my Christmas present to myself, I bought the Spyro Reignited trilogy! And it's a fantastic remaster. It looks and feels the way I remember these games, even though there's no possible way the original games looked as good as they do in my mind. It really captures the spirit of Spyro.

I remembered the level design of the Spyro games being fantastic, and it still holds up. Honestly, in the twenty years since these games came out, I'm not sure I've ever played anything that's surpassed them in terms of level design. I love spotting gems in distant places and going 'okay, how can I get over there?'

Actually, even the first Spyro the Dragon is great, when I remembered it more as something you just had to get through before you could play the superior sequels.

I am constantly running into walls in this game, and Rei mocks me heartily for it. She's also ended up yelling some odd things at me during my endeavours to defeat plane-piloting enemies. 'Fuck the plane! Fuck the plane better! RIONA! You're not fucking!'

(Every time I encounter a small animal in the game, she goes, 'Awww! Kill it. Kill it, kill it, kill it.')

One complaint I do have: I never realised as a child, but there are no female dragons and it's really unsettling. I've encountered thirty-something dragons, all male. I keep chasing down egg thieves; where did the eggs come from? Is it essential for me to retrieve the eggs because the female dragons were somehow wiped out before the game began?

Comments

[zabimitsuki]

That's a very good question - why was it renamed Zootropolis? I can't any logical reason for it. O_O I love that movie though, Disney foxes are always A+ designwise and I am so here for the bit with the sloths in the DMV. I admit, I'm easy to please...

[rionaleonhart]

It's so strange! Zootopia is a much better name! But, yes, whatever it's called, it's great fun.

[apiphile]

There is, let's be honest, a definite possibility that I'm a furry.

Alright but what's your fursona? What's Rei's fursona?

[rionaleonhart]

Rei: I don't have a fursona. I'm just me.
Riona: Rei, your fursona is a cat.
Rei: That's what I just said.

My fursona is probably a hedgehog.

('Tell him my fursona is a tiny dragonfly that shouts abuse in your ear,' Rei adds.)

[apiphile]

Don't all dragonflies do that?

[wyomingsmustache]

From what I can understand about the Spyro remaster based solely on a gifset I happened to see going around, Spyro exists to cater to male-attracted scalies. I'm not even a scalie and I'm gay for at least two of the dragons in question.

(Maybe dragons in Spyro are like Discworld dwarves, and all of them are male by tradition but some of them happen to be what we ourselves would think of as female? Perhaps they're hermaphroditic? Or some of the dragons are trans? Or that thing you said, or possibly just good old sexism at play once more.)

[wolfy_writing]

I always liked the idea of a species that doesn’t really have separate genders as a social category being categorized as all-male, because humans who encountered them thought “Person who goes out and does things=male”.

[rionaleonhart]

Or some of the dragons are trans?

I almost pitched the 'half the dragon population is trans' idea in this entry and then thought it might feel like I was trying to pretend this game's sexist aspects are progressive when I highly doubt that's what the developers had in mind.

I have no idea what they did have in mind, come to think of it. This was in the days when very few women worked in gaming and videogame voice acting was a bit of an afterthought, so maybe the dragons in the original were just voiced by whoever happened to be in the office?

...okay, I just checked and apparently a large number of the dragons in the original were voiced by Clancy Brown, also known for playing Hank in Detroit: Become Human and, more famously, Mr Krabs in SpongeBob SquarePants. I wasn't expecting this.

[wyomingsmustache]

Yeah, "some of the dragons are trans" works from a Watsonian angle but not very much from a Doylest.

Likely they had nothing in mind: I doubt it would ever occur to them. I suppose we can just be glad that they didn't think of it, or we'd have been subjected to sexy big titty dragon ladies and no one wants that, except maybe scalies.

I'm not sure what to do with knowing that the guy in D:BH and Mr. Krabs are one and the same.

[wolfy_writing]

So that’s how you slice cake!

I don’t think I ever saw About A Boy.

Zootopia is definitely a better title.

Did you fuck the plane poorly, or not at all?

[rionaleonhart]

There were eight planes and I needed to fuck them all in the space of about sixty seconds, so I was fucking some better than others and failed to fuck some entirely. Fucking them all took many attempts.

[squeemu]

This was a very surreal comment to read, having somehow missed the paragraph about fucking planes in the entry.

[squeemu]

I'm really tempted to get Gris now.

Maybe all the dragons are female and they all just have masculine-sounding voices to human ears. I mean, there's a generation of aphids that are all female and reproduce via cloning, why can't dragons?

And I love Zootopia, it's such a good movie and I would willingly follow you down that shipping hole. I feel like I should have some kind of rabbit hole metaphor there, and yet.

[rionaleonhart]

Maybe all the dragons are female and they all just have masculine-sounding voices to human ears.

Maybe! They also have masculine names, but I don't know much about name-gender associations in dragon culture.

I'm suddenly terrified of the answer to the question 'how often is "rabbit hole" used as a euphemism in Zootopia fanfiction?'

[(Anonymous)]

- I finished Gris today; it's a gorgeous little watercolour-style game about a grieving young woman learning to stand on her feet again. 'Literally and figuratively bringing colour back to the world' is something I've had a weakness for ever since Okami. I'd recommend it if you're interested in light platforming and painting-esque animation. (I'll admit I found it sort of hilarious that your options at the beginning were 'walk very slowly' or 'FALL TO YOUR KNEES IN AGONY', and there were two different 'fall to your knees in agony' buttons.)

This sounds interesting. I'd never really thought of the effect colour palette has on a game before The Cat Lady, which sounds like it takes a bit of a similar approach to this (but it's probably more horrifying). The majority of the game is black and white (and red when things get bloody), so it's striking when it doesn't do that. I remember there being colour in the flashback to Susan's back story, plus I think in the segment with the guy from Downfall, and for the period at the beginning of the game where the protagonist is dead (long story) there are some gorgeous, colourful backgrounds. The protagonist is depressed, so her life being those endless greys as opposed to her death made a lot of sense.

You can kind of see it here in the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wx6j2I8v2Z0

My memories of Spyro are that charging was fun, I was bad at combat as I wanted to do nothing except charge at things, and Moneybags deserves to be catapulted into space. NO I DON'T HAVE ENOUGH GEMS, GO AWAY.

I've been playing FF15! I, er, may have got to level 43 in chapter 3. But it's now chapter 7 and it's level 50, so I've eased off a bit. Mainly because I had burned through every available sidequest, but more just opened up so ALL OF THE SIDEQUESTS AGAIN. (Er, except the inexplicable level 99 sidequest. Why are you at the region where I want to fish, sidequest?!).

-timydamonkey

[rionaleonhart]

I'm away at the moment and I can't watch the trailer, alas! I'll try to watch it later, because I am interested in games doing interesting things with colour, but I probably won't actually be playing it; it sounds like a game I might find upsetting, to be honest.

Charging is so much fun. Why run normally when you can charge? (I ask, hurtling accidentally into the abyss.)

I hope you're enjoying FFXV! It's such a ridiculous, delightful mess of a game.

[emu]

Yeah, the renaming of Zootopia in Europe was a weird one. I saw speculation at the time that it was due to a zoo in Denmark named Zootopia, so it was possibly a copyright thing (they couldn't sell merch with that name on it? And Disney is obviously all about the merch). I'm not going to pretend to understand why they changed it for all of Europe, though.

Anyway, it's such a cute film, I really enjoyed it. And yes, I also came out of it shipping the fox and the bunny.

Gris is so beautiful! I've played it through twice because it's mostly a very soothing game to play, I'm really into the aesthetic of it, and the soundtrack is also gorgeous. And it made me feel better.

[rionaleonhart]

Legal trouble might explain it! But, yes, whatever it's called, it's very charming and fun.

It's such a lovely game! I love how the world and the mechanics became richer as you went along, and it's just gorgeous from beginning to end.

[ghosthack]

I love Spyro! Been playing the Reignited trilogy myself lately. It's been a real trip for sure. Some of the side stuff is still super frustrating too. I swear I had a legit flashback of rage the first time I failed the trolley thing and that obnoxious bird NPC said "trouble with the trolley, eh?" That phrase haunted my childhood dreams.

I never really noticed the lack of female dragons as a kid either, but I did notice it this time around, mostly because of the missing egg sidequest. It's worth noting I think, that in the 3rd game finding stolen dragon eggs is the main point of the game, and when you find an egg it hatches into a little adorable baby dragon and its name pops up on the screen. I'm in the middle of the game now, and so far a large portion of the baby dragons have had distinctly female names.

[rionaleonhart]

Some of the side stuff is still super frustrating too.

The timed 'get all the rings/chests/lighthouses!' flying levels are the worst. I started out with dreams of one-hundred-percenting the first game, but by this point I've accepted it's not going to happen.

I'm glad you can hatch female dragons in the third game! It's been so long that I couldn't remember whether you could.

[sawthefaeriequeen]

My favorite thing about Zootopia is that they're ADULTS! Who work! In a workplace! I never realized how rare that is in a Disney movie until it was pointed out to me.

[rionaleonhart]

That is pretty cool, now that you mention it! It's not Disney, but I sort of like that the main characters of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic are working adults as well.