Disney Infinity

A game being rated E (equivalent to G in film) does not automatically make a game "bad," or a "kiddie game"... By the same token, being rated mature does not make a good or actually "mature" game. A "kids game" can actually be a lot more mature than most gamers give them credit for...

... But that's a topic for another day, because today we're talking about Disney Infinity, where anything resembling maturity is thrown out in favor of extreme nostalgia and fun.

     This game is best described as "Skylanders meets Disney"... Whether or not that is an accurate assessment, I will get into later. First I have to actually explain what that means for those not video game savvy.

     Skylanders is a reboot of the popular videogame series Spyro, which was a 3D action-platformer (think Mario in 3D, and you got the genre. Add the ability to fly, breathe out fire, and other dragonny things, and you get Spyro). Spyro The Dragon's series of games is very much beloved by fans; Skylanders not so much... Don't get me wrong, I am not saying Skylanders is bad (I haven't played it) but it did come as a bit of a slap to the face of a lot of fans.
It is best exemplified with an image:

Forgive the bias of the caption.

     The original Spyro is fun and mischievous, while also being clever, and that is reflected in his sleek design. The Spyro from Skylanders however, looks like a stereotypical dragon, with nothing special about him. He doesn't have a personality to speak of (not helped by the fact none of the "main" characters speak in cutscenes... I'll get into why in a minute), and is actually relegated to the background... Want to know why?

They are why.

      Can you see Spyro in there? He's at the top left; among 31 other characters... In the first game alone.

      This is the gimmick of Skylanders: Multiple interchangeable characters. They all have their own unique fighting styles and abilities... And you can level them up individually. And buy them individually. For 15 dollars each. I am dead serious.

     Given this, can you see why fans of Spyro do not like this game series? Spyro is just a legacy character slapped on to give it the illusion of history, with a massive cash grab attached to squeeze as much money as possible out of the parents of young children... And it works.

     The Skylanders series is massively profitable. the combined cost for owning the entire first game's collection is 312 dollars (currently) (assuming you buy the combo packs for characters... I don't even know if you can get them all that way; I know at least two you need to buy individually. It's $480 if you buy them individually).

     Now, I am a Bionicle fan... I sunk a lot of money into it, and my parents did for me as well... I know I rather easily breached 500 dollars in them... But here's the thing: ALL OF THE SKYLANDERS CHARACTERS ARE STATUETTES. You can look at them, maybe pet them a little, but outside the game they are useless. And the majority of them are kinda ugly (it's meant to appeal to young boys, if you catch my drift). Bionicle (and other lego products) are better to sink money into, because you can make MORE things with them if you so desire. Skylanders? They'll just sit there, gathering dust...

... Throw all that information out with Disney Infinity. For three reasons: nostalgia, recognizibility, and awesomeness.

     Disney Infinity saw what Skylanders did and said "We can be just as profitable, more fun, and worth more."

     Disney Infinity follows Skylander's model with the statuettes using them to unlock characters within the game. Difference is, rather than some no-name monster, it is one of your favorite Disney characters. They are actually something you'd want to display when not in use. And the fun of the game is increased by quite a bit when one is playing as their favorite pirate Captain Jack Sparrow, or Mr. Incredible, or Buzz Lightyear, or Jack FREAKIN' Skellington! (Not to mention the statuettes cost about 3 bucks less. Get them at Toys R Us or anywhere that's having a sale and you can get a lot more for less. Not that Skylanders didn't have sales too, but Disney Infinity has sales going on right now. It took Skylanders a while to allow sales.)

    In the starter pack, you get Mr. Incredible, Jack Sparrow, and Sully from Monster's Inc. You also get 3 campaigns to match each one, and a random hexagonal token that has different effects. But the campaigns are not the meat of the game... No, they are merely a series of fun quests and worlds to explore, to unlock items... To create your own world.

The actual meat of the game lies in its sandbox mode, called the "Toy Box." Basically, you take items and "Toys" and place them in a world of your design. It's a bit like Simcity but more creative and with less micromanagement.
You can make races, obstacle courses, gladiatorial arenas... Just about any level you can imagine, you can do. Want to make a sewer level where you have to fight weasels and rescue mutated citizens? You can do just that. Want to make your own city? You can do that too. Want to remake the flying city Columbia from Bioshock: Infinite? Disney's been there, done that.
Skylanders has nothing like this. But then again, this idea did not originate from another company... The toybox actually appeared in another Disney game: Toy Story 3.
Yes, a movie video game that didn't suck; it's a once in a life-chance miracle! The Toybox is actually the reason Toy Story 3 the game did not stink, so Disney figured "Why not reuse this concept... and apply it to ALL of our properties? We can even use it as promotional material for our upcoming movies, so we don't have to create games for them!"

That actually kind of brings me to the downside of the game... It is almost all Disney movies from the last 10 years. Jack Skellington is the exception to this, but this is because this is his 20th anniversary. Don't get me wrong, I love a lot of the characters; Wreck-It Ralph and Venelope Von Shweets I plan on getting the day they come out, same with Rapunzel, and likely the Frozen Characters... But that's really it. The rest are characters I don't really care about... Cars, Monsters University, Pirates of the Caribbean (other than jack Sparrow who comes with the base game), Phineas and Ferb, Lone Ranger, and Toy Story (nothing wrong with this one, just no interest)...
There are no characters from the 2D era of Disney. There are villains from the era, but no playable characters. I'd love to play as Wart from Sword in the Stone, Or Quasimodo, or Hercules... I would pay through the nose for a Hercules figure, the same for the "crystal" version of it. Then again I'd also pay through the nose for a hexagonal piece that allows me to ride the Hydra, so you can just write me off as a massive Disney's Hercules fanboy. 

But anyway... It's a small problem, easily fixed by sequels. (Skylanders added 16 new characters to its roster in its first sequel. If Disney did the same, there is hope to see old characters like Aladdin, Mulan, et cetera.)

I'd say Disney Infinity is a very solid game, with a pretty good shelf life, and high profitability for Disney, likely leading to more sequels.
Though, one request of Disney regarding sequels: Please, unless the pad changes drastically, sell the game separate from the characters and base. 75 dollars per game is a bit too much; it's better to think of the added 35 dollars (3 figures about 25, pad about 10) as an investment into the series, and future installments won't cost those who played the first as much. It may end up slightly confusing for people just picking up the game for the first time, but it's better than losing a ton of customers because they don't want to pay 75 dollars for each installment.
If you have to sell it with a new pad... Add some more stuff to it. Add mini square disks that give you companions like Stitch, or Tinker Bell. Really give us a reason to pay extra.

This has been Fixer Sue; forgetting about promises on this blog yet again!

Stranger than Fan Fiction- History

     Fan fiction is widely derided on the internet; many consider it to just be women pairing off their favorite characters with very little editing and spell checking. In many cases, this assumption is correct. A prime example of this is "My Immortal," a self-insert Harry Potter fanfic that is the both the most well known fan fiction, and is also one of the most widely hated. But that is just the mere surface of this internet phenomenon. There is so much more to see.

     First, a brief history: Fan fiction is as old as stories. No, seriously. Though Fan Fiction is a new term, it has been around significantly longer. What do I mean? Well... There is a chains of books, written by different authors, that are all written as fan works of another.
     The chain begins with Homer's The Iliad (adapted into the movie Troy, for those ignorant of the book). It tells us about the war between Greece and Troy, the politics involved in it (both on earth and on Olympus), and the people involved in the war. It is the source of tropes like "Achilleus in his tent" (The spelling of Achilleus is varied. Some use a K, some don't... I use the version found in my copy of the book), and is one of the great epic poems of the past.
      Which is probably why Rome wanted a story about how they descended from Troy as propaganda. They commissioned Virgil to write The Aeneid, the story of Aeneas, one of the few survivors of the Trojan Horse attack, who would later found Rome. The Aeneid is written in much of the same style as the Iliad and Homer's other works, which makes sense since they wanted it to be like an extension on them. There is one notable detour in Aeneas's quest: he journeys through the underworld. There is quite a bit of explanation on the innerworkings of the underworld; such as the Elysium Fields (not the movie), the pit of Tartarus, and the river Styx. Though the Aeneid pretty much forgets the whole thing occurred, it is important for the next book in the line...
     Dante's Inferno is probably much more widely known than the other two, and it is the third piece of this chain. You see, Dante was a fan of Virgil's the Aeneid; so much in fact, that Dante made Virgil his guide through Hell. Why? Because Dante's Inferno is a self-insert fanfic, where he gets to meet his idol, along with philosophers like Socrates and Plato, and punishes people he doesn't like, like the pope. With that, there is also a whole lot of Continuity porn, such as Hektor being higher up in Hell than Achilleus, Dido being in Hell for lusting for Aeneas, Charon being the ferryman for souls (and even mentioning the other people who've crossed into the underworld and caused trouble), and Limbo being a word for word equal to the Elysium Fields. Dante's Inferno is true blue Fan Fiction. Different perspective on the whole thing now eh?

     Fan Fiction as a term mostly came about because of movies and other big productions, along with copyrights. Before copyrights, anyone could simply write a sequel to someone else's work, and it'd just be called a story. After copyrights put the kibosh on that, there became a rift between the creators of a piece, and the consumers.  Consumers trying extend the story for others became illegal (along with just flat out stealing the book to make money, but we're not focusing on that), thus there was a problem: consumers had to accept what was given to them, with zero control over the outcome.

     ...Then came the fanzines. This was a new (legally unstable) method of outputting fan fiction to people. The fan fiction featured was much shorter; they tended to be short stories, unless a magazine was okay with printed them chapter by chapter. They were of decidedly lesser quality than previous ventures (then again, a lot of things pale in comparison to the Iliad), but still, they were generally good. However, they were prone to being taken down by companies for violating copyright, as is prone to happen when one profits off someone else's work.

     Fan fiction was in a rut, until the internet. With he internet, came a massive surge of Fan Fiction. In 1998, fanfiction.net went live, and 3 years later, it had 100,000 stories cataloged. The quality of each piece did not matter, because there were more available if you didn't like one! The best part of all, since it is free, it falls under fair use, making it safe from copyright infringement! (Unless some other circumstance occurs, but that's generally true.)

That brings us to the present... Fan Fiction is everywhere. It is nearly unavoidable. But, there is a lot going on with it... Return here tomorrow for the next installment of Stranger than Fan Fiction.