firehose

By Alec Meer on January 10th, 2014 at 3:00 pm.

Hanako Games’ sweetly brutal fantasy monarchy sim came out last Summer, and sadly I missed it at the time. Pray allow me to rectify that before ordering off with my head.

If the art style puts you off, how about this: Long Live The Queen is a Sansa Stark simulator.

Falling somewhere between life sim and interactive fiction, Long Live The Queen is perhaps most analogous to the Fighting Fantasy books, only the threats come to you and are dealt with more by stately composure, regal dancing and a thorough knowledge of the kingdom’s history than by sword and spell. And if you don’t keep up your singing practice you’re in for a nasty surprise further down the line, young lady.

LEARN SINGING. SINGING IS VERY IMPORTANT.

Playing as the female heir to a monarchist kingdom, what begins as something of a Princess Maker concept, all making yourself courteous and appealing to potential suitors, quickly becomes an exercise in survival against increasingly present and numerous dangers. Long Live The Queen probably should have been called The Queen Is Dead, but as a fight with Morrissey would probably be deeply tiresome, I respect the choice of wry alternative. Long Live The Queen, you see, is all about getting the young queen killed. Clearly you’re trying not to, but like those sadistic Jackson/Livingstone books the game’s trying so damned hard to stack the odds against you and trick you into doom that after a time you’ve just gotta embrace its brutality.

LEARN FALCONRY. FALCONRY IS VERY IMPORTANT.

Again, you’re Sansa Stark, a teenage innocent trapped at the eye of someone else’s political storm, all eyes upon her, trying her best to stiff-upper-lip through a torrent of courtly expectations and skullduggery, expected to be the perfect gentlewoman whilst simultaneously fighting for her life but too green to truly understand what’s happening around her. Long Live The Queen looks sweet and innocent, but it’s a dark, manipulative spider of a thing. It will trap you in its web, and then it will murder you.

Here’s the structure. Each turn constitutes one in-game week, and during that time you’ll pick a morning and an evening class from what initially seems like an overwhelming range of choices, be subject to series of scripted events and decisions and indulge in genteel leisure pursuits that will affect your mood. While allowing your wide-eyed charge to become depressed or lonely sounds like a bad thing, in fact each mood provides a learning bonus for specific skills. A depressed queenie, for instance, will get more out of spending time with animals, thus increasing her skills at falconry or likelihood to feed potentially poisoned to chocolates to the dogs rather than eating them herself. Cheerful, afraid, lonely, wilful, angry – positive and negative emotions alike have skills they help and skills they hinder. Choose your mood wisely.

LEARN DOG-HANDLING. DOG-HANDLING IS VERY IMPORTANT.

The essential push and pull of the game is which stats to improve and when, and to knowingly alter the queen’s mood in order to buff singing or presence or archery or knowledge of naval warfare or any of the below as quickly as possible, in the hope of thus being able to deal with the next curveball the game throws at you. Perhaps it will be a requirement to dance at the ball. Perhaps it will be to understand that immediately wearing a necklace given as a gift from a man means you’re publicly declaring him your suitor.

Perhaps it will be being shot with an arrow whilst undertaking a stage coach journey to a foreign dignitary’s birthday party, and attempting to staunch the fatal bleed yourself. Each situation, be it a matter of social peril or mortal peril, can be overcome, but it requires the queen to suitably adept in whatever ability the game deems appropriate.

LEARN BATTLEFIELD MEDICINE. BATTLEFIELD MEDICINE IS VERY IMPORTANT.

The barrage of events and crises comes so quickly and so unpredictably that there’s no real way to prepare yourself or pick a ironclad strategy on your first couple of plays. I think for some people this may be a dealbreaker, because it can feel so much like you’re at the whims of chance and trickery, and because it means you put a lot of time, energy and anxiety into trying to do the right thing only for it to end up wasted and lost when a leftfield death – drowning, stabbing, poisoning, falling, banditry, foreign invasion, sorcery – hits out of the blue.

Assorted colleagues and allies have observed that the death system, the sudden loss of all your investment, is too punitive and too frequent in the game’s mid-to-late stages, as the kingdom falls into all-out war and magic enters the fray. I take their point, but even aside from gesturing archly at the Save Game option I’m enjoying the nastiness, that I’m being so kept on my toes, that I’ve got a game building high drama and blood-freezing dilemma out of whether to spend an afternoon learning to dance or studying foreign politics.

LEARN TO DANCE. DANCING IS VERY IMPORTANT.
LEARN FOREIGN POLITICS. FOREIGN POLITICS IS VERY IMPORTANT.

Here’s a mid-game example of everything going spectacularly wrong. I should point out that I’m aware from previous experiences that I’ve very much painted myself into a corner here, which is why some of my choices seem entirely reckless. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

In parallel to the queen learning how to be a queen, I’m learning too, a silent reflection of her graft. I’m learning from mistakes, by which I mean my sudden and usually humiliating deaths. It’s not so convulted that I need a notebook, but it does mean I’m anticipating certain scenarios come my next playthrough and preparing for them. Though that might sound like passionless rote learning, the inherent chaos theory of the game means that I’m activating new and perhaps even more bastardly options from its sprawling database of punishment.

Because I’m trying to force the queen to, for instance, up her sword skills so that she won’t get slain by a vengeful orphan at a prize-giving ceremony, doing so necessitates abandoning my attempts to learn accounting in order to bluff my way into the treasury to obtain an important doohickey. Which means I have to do something else to obtain said doohickey, which turns out to involve Very Bad Things. Or perhaps it means I don’t become adept at flattery, which means I wind up commenting on the sizeable diameter of someone’s breasts whilst attempting Austen-esque scorn.

LEARN FLATTERY. FLATTERY IS VERY IMPORTANT.
LEARN ACCOUNTING. ACCOUNTING IS VERY IMPORTANT.
LEARN SWORDFIGHTING. SWORDFIGHTING IS VERY IMPORTANT.

Every stumble, every embarrassment, every death is being logged in my own personal database, which concurrently with slowly grasping the maths of moods necessary for rapid mastery of skills is eventually going to take me to a point where I can be a queen with a legacy, or at least a legacy more than ‘pathetic pool of blood and/or ash on a castle floor’.

By all this I mean that Long Live The Queen is an exceptionally clever game which asks a great deal of its players without really seeming to. I appreciate that regularly having a lot of hard graft and concentration thrown to the winds can be acutely frustrating, and that progressing further through the game necessitates no small amount of repetition, but I think that’s part of it. I don’t mean that in the ‘better living through suffering’ mandate of a Dark Souls or Dota, but rather than the duty and despair of it all befits the character you’re playing as.

A regent to be sounds glamorous, but surely involves so much devotion, piety, study, restrain, drudgery in order to deal with the unending politicking, conflict and intruige. The more you suffer and fail, the more you repeat and the more you feel like Sansa Stark just trying to make it through another day with her head still attached to her shoulders.

That said, I think the mortal threats perhaps do get a little too thick and fast at times, and while savegames can get you out of a few tight spots it’s all too easy to make critical errors at early points that can’t be undone without starting over entirely, and all the repetition that entails. That actually bothers me less than the inclusion and later important of magic, though. I’d much rather this was a purer (if heavily fictionalised) renaissance-era royalty sim than falling fully into fantasy. I want to focus on learning horse-riding and history and naval strategy and elegance, not divination and spell-resistance.

LEARN HORSE-RIDING. HORSE-RIDING IS VERY IMPORTANT.
LEARN HISTORY. HISTORY IS VERY IMPORTANT.
LEARN NAVAL STRATEGY. NAVAL STRATEGY IS VERY IMPORTANT.
LEARN ELEGANCE. ELEGANCE IS VERY IMPORTANT.
LEARN DIVINATION. DIVINATION IS VERY IMPORTANT.
LEARN SPELL-RESISTANCE. SPELL-RESISTANCE IS VERY IMPORTANT.

But the magic does open up new paths, new story, new suffering, new successes so I don’t really begrudge its inclusion.

My greatest regret with Long Live The Queen is that I didn’t play it before December 1st 2013, because you can be damned sure I’d have fought for it to go in our games of the year advent calendar if I had. The queen is all kinds of dead. Long live the queen.

LEARN EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING IS VERY IMPORTANT.

Long Live The Queen is out now (and has been since last Summer), either direct from the devs or on Steam.

More than half of the members of US Congress are now millionaires. According to personal financial disclosure data filed last year and analyzed by the Center for Responsive Politics, at least 268 members of the House of Representatives and the Senate had an average net worth of $1 million or more in 2012. This marks the first time in history that the majority of the United States' lawmakers have fortunes totaling more than $1 million.

The data, filed in May last year for the 530 members of Congress at the time, put their median net worth at $1,008,767, an increase on the previous year's figure of $966,000. According to OpenSecrets, at least one of the Congressional members elected since the disclosure data was filed is also a millionaire.

Wealthiest Republican Darrell Issa had a net value of $464 million in 2012

Republican Darrell Issa is the wealthiest member of Congress, with a recorded net value of $464 million in 2012, much of it reportedly earned as CEO of car security firm Directed Electronics. Last year's wealthiest member, Texas Republican Michael McCaul, had his own personal fortune fall from just over $500 million to $143.1 million - but as OpenSecrets points out, the shift isn't the result of a financial catastrophe, but instead indicative of new reporting rules that mean members of Congress can call assets and incomes belonging to their spouses as an "asset over $1 million."

Only 8% of Americans think Congress is doing a good job

McCaul's slide in reported fortune means of the five wealthiest members of Congress, four are Democrats. The party also comes out slightly ahead of their Republican counterparts when comparing Congressional members' net median income: the former are valued at a median of $1.04 million, while the latter reported median personal wealth of almost exactly $1 million. But the Democratic party also contained the only group to note a drop in wealth: the median net worth of party members in the Senate dipped, likely due to John Kerry's new position as Secretary of State, and the death of Senator Frank Lautenberg - worth a reported $87.5 million.

As their personal fortunes rise, Congressional members are beginning to invest again. Real estate remains the most popular market, with the combined investment between $442.2 million and $1.4 billion. General Electric is the most popular company for Congressional investment, with 74 members pumping cash into the massive corporation.

The rise in median Congressional fortune comes as American public opinion of their elected officials is at a staggering low, with only 8% of likely US voters canvassed by Rasmussen Reports reporting they think Congress is doing a good or excellent job. But it appears the US public can't stop electing millionaires. "Despite the fact that polls show how dissatisfied Americans are with Congress overall," the Center for Responsive Politics' executive director Sheila Krumholz said, "there's been no change in our appetite to elect affluent politicians."

One of the most significant — and to many readers, one of the most exciting — developments in comics in the last few years has been the new direction of Image Comics, with many of the most popular talent in the industry currently producing much, if not all, of their creator owned work through the publisher. As such, Image Expo has become a highly anticipated event, as publisher Eric Stephenson uses the annual show to announce several upcoming books from established and occasionally new talent.

Today’s Image Expo was no different, as more than a dozen new titles were announced, from Ed Brubaker, Grant Morrison, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Chris Burnham, Matt Fraction, Rick Remender and more.

Stephenson kicked off the the event with his keynote speech, in which he reflected on Image’s recent success. Describing 2013 as Image’s “best year in a decade,” he noted the company’s increase in market share, as well the fact that, for the second year in a row, Image had the number one comic of the year — The Walking Dead.

“Image Comics has changed the marketplace forever,” said Stephenson. “And as you’ll see today, we’re not done yet. Our plans for 2014 are our most ambitious yet.” And with that, he began to welcome creators on stage to discuss their new work.

First up was Robert Kirkman. The writer discussed the upcoming The Walking Dead #111, an issue he says will take the popular series in a new direction. He was then joined on stage by artist Paul Azaceta, previously announced as the artist and co-creator of Outcast with Kirkman, a horror book inspired by stories focusing on exorcism. Kirkman then announced the revival of TechJacket, his previous series that he now feels perhaps ended too soon. To that end, he brought writer Joe Keatinge on stage, revealing that Keatinge would be writing the new TechJacket miniseries. Keatinge will also write Shutter, a new ongoing series about starring Kate Kristopher, a “contemporary Indiana Jones.” “We’re looking at the 21st Century, where it’s at and where it’s going, and considering what the Adventurer for its time might be like—what would Indiana Jones be like if created in 2014? What’s after Lara Croft?” Joining Keatinge on the project is artist Leila del Duca.

Brandon Graham was in attendance to discuss his latest Image project, 8House. Similar to the approach on Prophet, 8House will feature Graham collaborating with several other creators on “a shared universe, a magic fantasy thing about these eight magical houses that control everything.” Mariah Churchland and Emma Ríos will contribute to the series, among others.

Joshua Williamson came out to discuss Nailbiter, his new project with Mike Henderson, starring a serial killer who eats his victims nails. Williamson said the series was inspired by a real life story he was told by a woman who broke up with her boyfriend when she discovered his uncle was a serial killer.

Morning Glories writer Nick Spencer revealed three new projects he’ll be publishing through Image: The Great Beyond, illustrated by Morgan Jeske; Paradigms with Butch Guice; and Cerulean with Frazer Irving.

James Robinson, whose new series The Saviors just began, discussed plans for a “semiautobiographical” story, with artist Greg Hinkle. Titled Airboy  and starring Robinson and Hinkle, the series chronicles their attempt attempt to revive a once immensely popular Golden Age comics character now in public domain.

Nightwing writer Kyle Higgins will have his first Image work published this year. Titled “C.O.W.L.,” “the Chicago Organized Workers League,” the series is co-written by Alec Siegel, and based on concepts from “The League,” a short film the two previously collaborated on.

Morrison and Burnham, the creative team behind Batman Incorporated, are taking their new project, Nameless, to Image. Burnham was in attendance, and he described the book as “the ultimate horror comic,” pointing out that this is a genre that Morrison has yet to really explore in comics. “I think it’s going to be awesome and terrible, and hopefully some 11-year-old kids will steal it, and it’ll ruin their lives forever.”

Remender was also in attendance, and he stepped on stage to discuss Low, his new series with artist Greg Tocchini. “When all hope is lost and there are only a few cities left, a probe crash lands on the surface, potentially with the solution they’re looking for — an inhabitable world,” says Remender about the sci fi title, which takes place in the distant future. Notably, Stephenson described the series to those in attendance as “your new favorite comic.”

Perhaps the biggest surprise at the event was Scott Snyder. An established and popular writer for his work on American Vampire and Batman, among others, Snyder had yet to publish anything through Image. But today he announced Wytches, a title that will see him reunite with his Detective Comics collaborator Jock. Much like his Vertigo series The Wake with Sean Murphy explores the mythology of mermaids, this title will explore the legends of witches and, according to Snyder, “scare the living s**t out of you.”

Fresh off announcing the upcoming conclusion of Fables, Bill Willingham surprised those in attendance by coming on stage to announce Restoration, his new series with artist Barry Kitson which will feature “magic and gods and creatures” all released onto the world in one day.

Kelly Sue DeConnick introduced her new series, Bitch Planet, with artist Valentine De Landro.Bitch Planetis inspired by DeConnick’s love for exploitation and women in prison movies from the ’60s and ’70s, dealing with the things she loves about the genre as well as the things that make her uncomfortable, wondering out loud how she’ll do “the obligatory shower scene.”

Fraction announced Ody-C, a book that, as you may have guessed, is a retelling of The Odyssey. But this is a sci fi story, taking place in space, in which all the male characters are women and the women characters men. Joining Fraction on the series is artist Christian Ward. Further, Fraction announced that Casanova, his series with artists Gabriel Bá and Fabio Moon, will be returning to Image. As previously revealed, Pulitzer prize-winning author Michael Chabon will provide back up stories, illustrated by Bá.

Last was Brubaker. He joined Stephenson on stage and revealed that he and his Fatale co-creator Sean Phillips had signed an unprecedented deal with the publisher, such that they will have total freedom to publish any projects they like, as well as total creative control, over the next five years through Image. Following the conclusion of Fatale with issue #24, the two will launch The Fade Out, a title he says is “loosely based on things that happened in Hollywood in the ’40s.”

Following last month's news that 40 million debit and credit card numbers were stolen in a hack, Target today disclosed that a huge number of personal details have also been compromised. The retailer says up to 70 million names, mailing addresses, phone numbers or email addresses were stolen as part of last November's hack.

The company says the stolen data is "partial in nature," and it will attempt to contact everyone whose email address has been compromised to warn them of the dangers of scam emails that could be on their way. Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel notes the company is "truly sorry" its customers are having to "endure" the effects of the hack, and announced a company-wide policy that he hopes will soften the blow.

Free credit monitoring and identity theft protection for all customers

As previously announced, customers affected by the data breach will not be liable for any resulting fraud. Target is extending that offer, now saying that any customer who has shopped at its store will be able to sign up for credit monitoring and identity theft protection free of charge for a year. Sign-up to the safety measures will be open for three months, after which the offer will expire. Target will share more details on how the program will work next week, and advises any customers worried about the breach to visit its data breach portal.