Wednesday, March 26, 2008

World of Huntercraft - or, Why WoW Needs Henchmen


This goes out to all the World of Warcraft players out there who prefer doing their own thing but still wish they had the support to handle tougher areas and quests... in other words people like myself who want to have their cake and eat it.

Personally I mostly do solo/PVE gaming; it’s not so much that my (uninterrupted) wow-time is limited; it is kinda, but I could still group a lot more than I do – it’s more that my negative group experiences far outweigh the positive ones. Whether it’s the time spent recruiting enough people for an instance, mediating the bickering over loot distribution, armor repair bills from too many wipes (ok that sounds wrong – a “wipe” in WoW is when a bunch of players’ in-game characters all get overrun and killed, just ya know, for the record and stuff), or even just tough instance runs that end in someone switching to his level 70 alt and running everyone through on EZ mode, I’ve just grown a bit weary of grouping.

Of all the classes in WoW, hunters seem to best suit this play style, and I know from sites like Petopia that I’m definitely not an isolated case here – not positive which class in WoW is THE most popular but if it’s not hunters then I’d be surprised if they were lower than 2nd or 3rd place.

Some people play them for the RP element, or because they are animal lovers, or because they like having tracking, or because they like "collecting" cool pets (guilty), or because “pet casters” have kind of a “cruise control” element in the form of a fast healing, semi-autonomous bodyguard, but I think the deeper attraction of the class is that it’s really a miniature group all on its own.

The hunter relegates tanking to his pet, and handles the long range support (DPS and healing). This by itself is nothing that warlocks don’t also have; “locks” are after all the other pet caster class in the game, and certainly don’t lack for killpower. And it isn’t that I haven’t tried the other classes either; other than priests and druids I have characters belonging to at least 1 of every class in the game, ranging in level from low 40s up to lvl 70. I still play them from time to time, but I have trouble maintaining as much interest in them - meanwhile I have something like 6-7 hunters.

The stuff that most distinguishes hunters from locks is their ability to fine tune their pets according to their needs rather than being restricted to a few rigid choices (to be fair to locks it could also be argued that their pets are lower maintenance, which can mean everything or nothing depending on how you feel about pet maintenance); it goes beyond just the simple mechanics of having a “main” unit and a subservient “tank” unit for hunters; their pets have a wide range of species to choose from, each with its own little innate differences (stats, pet skills, etc) as well as a number of different models and skins, some of which being “rare” and therefore something of a collector’s item.

The whole process of taming, training and caring for your pet is really almost a meta-game in itself, you get to name your pet, and you can even keep a spare pet in the stable for times when you want a different skillset or even just a change of pace.

This all combines to add a whole new dimension to your character, and this brings me to the other half of this post’s title.

Henchmen.

I'm not really predisposed to playing a shooty type with an animal friend per se; what I'm really after is being able to form a group of my own, where everyone does exactly what I want, doesn't argue with me or log off in the middle of an instance because they have to do their homework, their wife is yelling at them to get off the 'puter, etc.

I would be psyched to play a mage - with a warrior "pet" out in front holding aggro, or for that matter to play a warrior with a priest in tow to keep me healed and pop off the occasional damage spell or etc.

This goes back to the Rexxar mini-game that came with Warcraft III all those years ago, when we got a little preview of the upcoming MMORPG as well as a look at the “original” hunter. Rexxar not only had two different pets (Misha the bear and whatever his boar was called), but also a couple of companions in the form of Chen the drunken panda guy and Rokhan the troll shaman, and I think there may have been a couple times when you could even hire 2-3 mercenaries to further bulk out your numbers. That game was a blast and remains one of my all time faves, and most recently I’ve gotten to thinking “what if they had a new WoW server built along those lines – same WoW world, same WoW quests, same basic WoW game engine in fact but with the ability to acquire NPC companions?”

It would work something like this: you roll a character to be your “main” exactly as you would now, except that you can now acquire up to 2 followers.

Each time you gain a follower, a new “pet bar” appears in the lower left part of your screen; these are the same things you see now on hunters and warlocks when they summon a pet, with the basic commands and up to 4 “custom” skills that you can configure as needed and these followers would behave in much the same manner is hunter or lock pets in that they could be commanded/summoned/dismissed as needed.

Standardly, these would take the form of humanoid mercenaries, essentially mimicking the existing PC classes but in a much more simplified state; you would get to customize them about as much as hunters do now with their pets, maybe a bit more but not to the point that actual player characters would be outclassed – a PC warrior would still tank better than a henchman “fighter”, etc. Furthermore henchmen despite being less powerful 1v1 than a PC class, would still consume an equal share of XP - ; much as I like my idea I do recognize there should be some compensation for people who just don’t feel like managing the extra bodies, i.e. people who just play their “main” will level that much faster by comparison.

In a few cases more specialized pets could occupy one or both henchmen slots; hunters could fill them with animals in much the same way they do now with their single slot, and warlocks would have some ability to gain demonic minions. You could do similar things with other classes, i.e. druids might have access to forest humanoids such as dryads, furbolg and so forth. Henchmen would consume either food (for critter followers) or coins (for the humanoid kind), and the degree to which they are compensated would impact their happiness icon in the same manner as with current hunter pets.

Of course this would not be simple despite having most of the basic mechanics in place; hunters and locks would both need to be retuned to reflect the fact that their pets are no longer a unique item but rather just a different twist on a (now) common theme, and instances would have to be re-tailored to allow for henchmen; I would make followers count as players for purpose of maximum group size, and have two versions of every instance, much like the normal/heroic modes of BC instances – you’d have your basic 6 man instance which could be handled by two players accompanied by a full retinue of 2 henchmen each, or a tougher party formed of all “mains”. Or if you just wanted to grind “yard trash” or a few early/mini-bosses you could go it yourself with your two henchmen.

Then there would be the heroic mode which would be designed for 15 slots, i.e. 5 actual players with maximum allotment of henchmen or as before less henchmen and more “mains” to form a tougher group.

Another benefit of henchmen in instances is that if someone has to bail suddenly, another player can potentially replace him by summoning a henchman (e.g. let's say you have a group of 3 players accompanied by 3 henchmen, which could mean that one of the players has a henchman "unsummoned"; if a player leaves, that henchman can be brought forward to fill the spot and the group can continue without having to put everything on hold and spend the next hour or two trying to recruit a replacement player).

I don't want to oversimplify the very complex process of tuning dungeons for the right difficulty/payoff ratio but I do think this could work; after all they already laid the groundwork in Rexxar.

All this being said, it will never happen – not in World of Warcraft anyway. The game is too successful and too well established for their parent companies/shareholders/etc to even think about allowing such a radical tweak.

But the radical new thing that scares the established industry leaders can also be just the new angle a young up and comer needs to wedge their way into that same industry and attract enough business to fuel its own MMORPG. It wouldn’t have to take much away from WoW to do it – World of Warcraft already has so many subscribers it could split off enough customers to spawn a few different MMORPGs and still remain easily on top, and that would be fine with me; more than likely I’d just end up playing both games rather than choose between them.

One can dream anyway.
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Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Expandable Posts - None Too Soon

A big thank you to Beta Blogger For Dummies for helping this definite dummy out - I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to put my run-on posts behind manageable summaries; the first place I checked was this Blogger help post, and it was too vague on exactly where to put what in the HTML, but luckily I followed a link at the bottom over to Beta Blogger, who did a great job of filling in the gaps for me.

My one remaining gripe is that now I get the "Continue reading" link at the end of every post whether there is more to read or not. Still a huge improvement from the previous look though... Continue reading

10,000 BC - Eh.



I saw this movie on opening night 3/7, after a Tivo preview piqued my appetite for fantasy drama. Any story set in the past gets an automatic mulligan from me; I’ll save the hows and whys of that for another post but for now suffice to say that 10,000 BC had a pretty easy sell with this viewer. Note if you haven’t guessed by now this is a definite SPOILER so stop here if you’re planning to see this.

It started off so-so; you had a tribe of dreadlock wearing mammoth hunters, with the (obligatory) black sheep D’Leh as the protagonist and the blue eyed foreigner Evolet as the love interest (a bit of borrowing there from Clan of the Cave Bear, but no big deal), and some basic caveman interaction overlaid with some mystical mumbo-jumbo from the tribe’s witch doctor.

As far as looks go, the dreads were okay – but I wasn’t thrilled with the neatly clipped mustaches and goatees; if you just took out the face paint these guys would have fit right in nowadays like a bunch of Gen Y Bohemians on the way to a rave. So, Hollywood strikes early. Meh.

Then along comes a band of horse riding, bronze(?) using slavers who capture most of the tribe and start marching them back into the great Beyond whence they came. D’Leh, his rival Ka’Ren, a boy named Baku and the tribe’s leader TicTic set off in pursuit, having been among the few to avoid capture, which takes them on a journey far beyond their accustomed homeland and incidentally following the footsteps of D’Leh’s long departed father.

Now the idea that the tribe’s chieftain/top warrior/etc TicTic would have simply been “missed” is a bit of a stretch to me; I’d expect slavers would normally take a few minutes to scope out a village before attacking it, and leave no hut un-checked. After all, every villager is cash in their wallet at the marketplace.

It would have been more believable as well as more interesting to me if D’Leh’s little group were initially captured along with the rest of the tribe, but later managed to escape and then tail the slave caravan.

But whatever. The early part of the trip down south was pretty cool, enlivened by the appearance of terror birds – giant flightless avians (Phorusrhacids according to wiki) that harrassed the slavers and would-be rescuers with enough horrific panache to do proud the raptors in Jurassic Park.

That was actually the high point of the movie for me; events happened quickly with a natural flow, the sense of terror drew me in, and the characters all behaved in a believable manner.

All too quickly, they passed beyond the territory of the giant birds, and the plot returned to its drifting, predictable pace.

Now entering into an area looking like North Africa, the rescuers team up with the warriors of several local villages – all of which apparently having been raided by the slavers not long before – and the resulting angry mob has just about caught up with the slavers when the dastardly villains slip away down a river on a flotilla of sailing ships.

It was only just barely believable that the slavers could hit all of these different villages with their considerable numbers of warriors, and that only with a stretch of faith; yeah they would have attacked by surprise and been aided by their superior mobility and weapons, but still… eh.

And then you have the whole saber-tooth spirit protector thing going on, by way of spooking the remaining Naku villagers into accepting D’Leh as their new leader. It would have been (a lot) more convincing to me if D’Leh’s group caught up with and joined a pre-formed Naku rescue party, where you would have common sense as justification and leave off with the Tarzan-ish prophecy thing.

But I guess someone was determined to find some excuse to shoehorn a friendly saber-tooth tiger in there somewhere, and this was as good a place as any. Honestly if you’re going to get that silly a tribe of pygmies with trained saber-tooth mounts would have been a lot cooler.

So anyways now you have this massive band of warriors all behind D’Leh as he leads them across the desert to the slavers’ final destination, which looks like the work site of a proto-Egyptian pyramid complex, complete with poncy long fingernailed high officials, death cults, soldiers, and of course lots and lots of slaves moving big stones around. There is one tantalizing reference to these people as having originated from a “sunken island”, but there is no elaboration.

Without a great deal of effort, D’Leh and his crew infiltrate the slave population and trigger a revolt (apparently the slave drivers here are unfamliar with the faces and numbers of the slaves on their respective work gangs), centering around the captive mammoths who D’Leh is able to stampede into oncoming soldiers, and culminating in the last stand outside the headquarters of the high priest where the ancient nasty threatens to have Evolet pulled apart by horses.

D’Leh’s solution? Impale the creep with a spear from 60-100 feet away, and grab the girl during the ensuing confusion. Of course. That would have been cool thirty years ago when I saw Conan, but somehow I felt just a bit robbed now; once again the movie sets up a major challenge which is overcome by the vehicle of B movie goofiness.

My version? Have D’Leh lose heart and back off, the enemy (of course) attacks the rebels as they are milling in disarray at the disheartening of their leader, when Baku and a few of D’Leh’s other friends dislodge the gold pyramid head piece to fall down on the crusty cackling fellow (instead of having it fall off uselessly like it did in the movie). More plausible? No, but cooler at least in that you have a bit poetic justice from an unlikely source.

Of course there has to be a rub; like Brutus from Popeye, the head slaver is smitten with Evolet, tries to carry her off on horseback and when that is foiled resorts to putting an arrow in her back just to be spiteful. But happily Evolet is resurrected by the magic of the tribe’s witch doctor from the beginning of the movie (remember her?), so D’Leh has the last laugh, and all is well.

My initial reaction as you may have guessed was mostly negative, but the more I’ve thought about it since, I’ve realized this actually could have worked – broken into a mini-series on the Sci-Fi or Discovery channel, you would have gotten to spend more time with the individual cultures and their idiosyncrasies (including not least of which the background of these presumed refugees from Atlantis), and where character development and plot would be less important.

They could still do something like this although I haven’t heard anything about it and from the kind of rating it’s gotten from critics it’s unlikely to happen.

But we’ll see.
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Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Cloverfield - What the Hell Is It?


Note: this post is my best attempt at making some sense of this movie and tying together as many loose ends as possible, by researching the internet and filling in blanks with my best guess, so for people like me who saw the movie and had a lot of questions, this might be your thing - for folks who haven't seen it yet and just want the general flavor, this is not a movie review.

I saw the "JJ Abrams Production" trailer last Fall, thought it was cool, and then forgot about it till shortly after the movie came out, when I overhead some people talking about it (full disclosure: the "people" I overheard were other World of Warcraft players) and remembered why it sounded familiar. After that I got completely caught up in the E-buzz, saw the movie, and then spent lots and lots of time playing the "game"; I googled like never before looking for images of the Cloverfield monster, the parasites, anything I could find on the movie.

Since then I've caught myself lying awake at night thinking about it, and decided enough is enough, so I'm going to put down my best shot at making sense of it all and tying it together in hopes of getting it out of my head:

Wild Cloverfield Speculations

Cloverfield Origin

First and foremost it should be kept in mind that the design of Cloverfield and his parasites emphasized form over substance, per their lead creature designer Neville Page (“make it cool first then justify it later”), and I think everything about the movie proceeds from there.

What we do know about Cloverfield is that he is a newborn baby, who had previously been in a gestative state at the bottom of the sea for “thousands and thousands of years”. His motivation for attacking Manhattan? He is confused, frightened, angry, and itchy.

Physiologically he is around 250 feet tall, bipedal with two long primary arms and a smaller pair of secondary arms tucked in around his lower abdomen, a nasty fishlike face with some kind of breathing bladder on the back of his head and a flattened tail which [may indicate] an evolution from something more fishlike/aquatic, according to Page.

So, was he terrestrial or extraterrestrial? While the designers were careful not to commit 100% either way, I’m betting on terrestrial; not only did Neville Page seem to lean heavily in this direction, the only comments even potentially suggesting otherwise are Matt Reeves’ references to the falling object at the end of the movie; I’m not sure what his intentions were in emphasizing that but don’t think he was suggesting some kind of an “alien crash landing” background as that would be inconsistent with the declaration that Clover had been in the ocean for “thousands and thousands of years”, above.

(That said, I wouldn’t put it past JJ to still go with the alien origin in Cloverfield 2, just to throw fans a curveball – that would be in keeping with his style in Lost).

However going with the terrestrial origin does raise more questions namely “when and where would the species first appear” and “how would it have lived”?

There are a few hints suggesting that cloverfields have always lived in (or under) the deep sea, suggesting something a bit like “Journey to the Center of the Earth”, where fantastic creatures have lived in deep places undiscovered for untold millennia.

Personally I favor something a little more integrated with the known world (not because it’s more plausible but because I think it’s cooler), so here’s my spin: going from the Hasbro toy model you can see that it has (almost) nothing in the way of really obvious tools for aquatic living; I see just the very traces of webbing between its fingers and toes, and no fins beyond the slight protrusions on the sides of its (not very long) tail – the one real exception here is the “breather bag” on the back of its head.

Since it wouldn’t be much of a swimmer, the best it could really hope for then in the way of catching a meal underwater would be to maybe dig a (really big) hole, cover itself up, and try to grab passing fish/sharks/whales/etc with its insanely long primary arms. Not very likely though – the creatures who do this kind of thing tend to be flattened for easier concealment e.g. crabs, rays, flounder etc, and not ginormous gangly upright things like Clover.

More likely then Clover belongs to a species of giant amphibians whose heyday was back in the age of the dinosaurs, when they would lurk just offshore and grab large prey that came too close to the water’s edge – there were lots of big things to eat back then, and Clover’s mantis/bat-like primary arms are among his most obviously specialized features so I can’t think of a better application for them than that. Being amphibious they could also make short dashes from the water if needed, like a massive crocodile.

This would explain them being 99% suited to hunting on or near land with the ability to hang out under water while sleeping, mating or otherwise waiting for the next meal to come walking by (which is also the only place something that large could exist for any real length of time, incidentally, without super-thick legs to support it – although there may be more to it than that). Being incredibly large and tough they probably were also capable of trudging along the ocean floor, and I imagine them making trips in this manner to the deepest parts of the ocean when spawning or in the final years of their life (returning to their instinctive spawning place).

So why weren’t any fossils found? Fossil locations are found in places where animals die, and something that large and tough probably couldn’t be killed by anything else, which would limit potential remains to the extreme ocean depths (any killed by their own species likewise would have been dragged far down for later consumption).

Slusho/Tagruato

Here is where we get into the pre-1/18 viral marketing. What was Slusho and what was its connection to Clover? At the Slusho site they relate the story of how the parent company CEO Ganu Yoshida discovered a fluid on the ocean floor that was “near frozen” and under “amazing pressure”; this stuff has all kinds of amazing properties most notably of making people ecstatically happy, and became the base ingredient for Slusho, called “Seabed’s Nectar”. This seems to have occurred in 1989, when “a brilliant young engineer named Ganu Yoshida was in search of an avenue to support his off-shore drilling revelations” and took over the ailing Tagruato Corporation, backed by a team of investors (the company is described as having its “main focus” on “deep sea Petroleum excavation”, but this sounds like an early sop to investors while Tagruato explored various profitable uses for Deepsea’s Nectar such as Slusho and biomedical applications, and ParafFUN wax which appears to be a kind of nectar/petroleum fusion).

The first such rig was Jimmu Station, built in Japan’s Inland Sea in 1991. Thirteen more have been built since, the latest being Chuai Station, located in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and going into operation in 2007.

Shortly afterward January 08 is a busy month; we learn that Seabed’s Nectar gains approval from the “AFA” (a sometime stand-in for the FDA), and that Ganu himself has come to New York to discuss the distribution of Slusho into the US via “pre-established public waterways”. Furthermore the Chuai Station is destroyed under mysterious circumstances that are blamed on a random eco-terrorist group, and tankers are going missing en route to New York (according to the translation of the Japanese report), and finally, early in the movie we learn on the news cast that the last one capsized in New York Harbor just prior to Cloverfield’s rampage.

Sifting through this jumble of info-bits you get the sense that Deepsea’s Nectar is a kind of super-enriched amniotic fluid (in particular note the comments re: its effects on puppies and kittens – “Kittens love Slusho! It reminds them of mother’s milk!”, and also the description of Ganu’s dream at Slusho wherein a whale (i.e. mommy-Cloverfield) tells him to drink the Deepsea’s Nectar and in doing so he himself grows to great size) secreted back in the age of the dinosaurs by a mommy-Cloverfield to contain her embryo(s). The extreme cold and pressure could have helped the stuff last over time, and there are also clues strongly suggesting it was covered over (“There are great reservoirs under the ocean floor that no one can get to due to obstruction by physical elements”), which would be necessary to protect it from hungry deep sea critters and which would in turn also necessitate active drilling to reach it.

Given that this was going on since 1989, it seems likely that many Cloverfield nests exist in our seas and oceans (it doesn’t say which rigs are devoted to petroleum and which to nectar, though we know Chuai and likely Jimmu at minimum are for nectar extraction), hidden beneath the seabed where they remained undetected until Ganu reached them with his advanced techniques and equipment (“This groundbreaking feat of industrial triumph allows for research and retrieval in areas previously unexplored by man”). However as Tagruato sought to increase production output, making “each [rig] more efficient and productive than the last”, it also caused more and more disturbance at the drill sites, finally resulting in sufficient commotion to awaken the nest’s occupant at the latest rig, Chuai Station.

From there, Clover destroyed the rig and followed the tankers that were carrying away its amniotic fluid to their destination in New York (presumably it was able to track the stuff thru the water by smell, the way a shark smells blood), where it threw a big tantrum on discovering that the Statue of Liberty was NOT Mommy (probably the last straw at that point).

Cloverfield Parasites

These are “parasites”, and therefore not some sort of offspring or otherwise related to Clover. They are eight legged, four eyed, chitinous things about the size of a dog, with a snout like an animal trap and the ability to survive long falls unhurt by folding up into a spindle. The best picture I’ve managed to find so far is a modelling clay sculpture here.

Shed by Clover as he makes his way about New York, they scuttle around and serve mainly to keep the sense of threat ever-present by denying humans any sanctuary; not only can they reach you wherever you hide, they can even get inside you by way of their peculiar saliva/venom, which is administered through a bite and can cause you to later explode if enough of the stuff gets into you (the brief view of the soldier on the gurney shows the end result to be the evacuation of the torso/abdominal area by the way and not an exploding head).

Now how exactly does that effect work? Is it some kind of gas or chemical reaction, and if so to what purpose – simply killing the victim, or is death the byproduct of making the victim easier to consume? Or is it some form of reproduction a la Aliens?

There is no definite answer to this since Marlena meets her end behind a tarp, however we can find some clues in the comments of Abrams and Page, where the parasites are described as flea-like and causing Clover skin irritation.

To succeed as a flea on something like a cloverfield, you would need a very specialized means of feeding off of it. After all if Clover’s hide can stop tank rounds, bombs and RPGs, you aren’t just going to be able to latch on and expect to get any blood or digestible material with a simple bite – you need something like the anti-coagulant of a flea or mosquito.

We know that the anti-coagulant of the above critters does indeed cause the itching described by Abrams, so proceeding on that assumption we could assume Marlena exploded due to a massive super-hemorrhage (I’m no medical student, but “hemorrhage” is described by www.thefreedictionary.com as “Excessive discharge of blood from the blood vessels; profuse bleeding”, which does seem to fit with the idea of an anti-coagulant – and you can’t get more “excessive” than what happened to poor Marlena). This theory is further supported by the fact she was bleeding from the eyes as well as the nose and mouth just prior to blowing up, and the only thing I know of that can cause that kind of bleeding is a massive increase in blood pressure.

So, adding all that together I think the parasite bite effect is most likely caused by a monster-strength anti-coagulant in the parasite’s saliva, and is not a means of reproduction.

But where would the parasites come from and why haven’t they been seen before – not even fossil remains? Well if you go with the idea of cloverfields as shoreside lurkers, then it follows that these bugs would be all over the place, so the only way to avoid fossil remains would be if their hardest parts were a kind of cartillage i.e. nothing hard enough to stay around long enough for fossilization. This would help explain why they were able to survive the 200+ foot fall from Clover’s back, as well as being in-line with Page’s comments on the parasites being “thin and vertical and light” AND for that matter would also explain why mere humans were able to squash them with clubs and axes.

I imagine the ones in the movie to have been trapped in the Deepsea’s Nectar, shed by Clover’s mom during the egg laying process the way fleas fall off animals every few seconds, and kept alive in a state of suspended animation by the same process that kept Clover alive all those years.

Cloverfield Resilience

How was Cloverfield able to survive hits from rockets, missiles, bombs, tank rounds and etc?

Being 250 feet tall, Clover has a lot of mass to absorb incoming damage. As far as I know this is way beyond the scale of anything we know today (the largest recorded whales were around 100 ft long, as were the largest recorded dinosaurs), and so the effects of conventional weaponry are a bit of an unknown here (and remember he is just a “baby” – an adult Cloverfield probably stands somewhere in the neighborhood of 500-1000 feet).

We do know that the military succeeded in hurting Clover, from Abrams’ comments about the critter being maddened by the stinging of our shells and rockets, and from the way it briefly collapsed after being carpet bombed near the end – and yet it never seemed to actually show any signs of bleeding or long term debilitation.

I’m thinking that the lack of bleeding was due to a super-powerful blood coagulating ability, something that actually seeded wounds with stem cells rather than just lots of interlocking platelets (giving the sealed wound the appearance of whole flesh) and which might have evolved in response to the super-anticoagulant in the saliva of their parasites.

It would also be inherently tough from being adapted to surviving extreme ranges of pressure in its journeys about the ocean floor – yes some deep sea creatures are soft and flabby, but that doesn’t mean something else couldn’t adapt by being super tough. This could include a lack of any gas or air pockets within its body, which are the most vulnerable to decompression and are minimized or omitted entirely by things living at extreme depths. Lacking those cavities would make it that much more resistant to punctures and concussions.

But probably the single most dramatic defense Clover possesses is at the cellular level – more than likely the properties found in Deepsea’s Nectar (“accelerated cell growth, increased strength, increased soft muscle tissue growth, sharper eyesight [and] better digestion”) persist within the creature itself, making it incredibly strong and resilient even for its size (which could explain not only its resilience but also why it can remain out of water for long periods of time, and defy the normal laws of physics mandating thicker legs for large land creatures).

All that being said, I do think the military could have taken it out – given enough time. But Clover denied them that opportunity with its mobility and ability to destroy anything shooting at it before the incoming firepower could focus and wear down its defenses.


And that's it. Needless to say I loved the movie and do hope they come out with a sequel (Aladgyma?); it would be cool to see more Cloverfields emerging, or more of the original one, whatever. While I wouldn't object much to another Blair Witch/camcorder style angle, I kind of would prefer something a little more classical -- the schtick worked great for me in Cloverfield 1 but doing it repeatedly might get old.

And hopefully no more of the viral marketing either. Continue reading

Hello There

This is my first foray into blog writing; I figured this would be a good place to empty out my thoughts from time to time and free up head-space when I get stuck overprocessing things, and maybe even encounter other people with the same problem. Who knows. Continue reading