With it being October and all, I decided I would play an adventure game that deals in the cartoonishly spooky. I discovered Champy The Useless Vampire. It turned out to be a much shorter game than I anticipated, so I can hardly use it as my October-long Halloween game, but it turned out to be a bite-sized little game clearly made by someone who loves the genre. The puzzles felt competent, but never actually challenging. My main complaint is that the title is wrong. Champy isn’t useless, he does the whole adventure. Saves the day and all that. He’s more competent than Roger Wilco, based on this game. The game was just a bit of welcome fun.

Anyway, a short game, so what could I possibly muse about from it?

Well, it did one thing I liked a lot. Point-and-click adventure games get a lot of flack for “pixel hunting” and that is sometimes justified, sometimes not, but there have been attempts to fix it. My favourite way games have tried to make it easier to find what’s on the screen is when you can highlight the hotspots. Any time I’m in a new point-and-click I find myself hitting tab or shift or spacebar just to see if that’ll do it, since I’ve had games do that in the past. In Champy though, it isn’t a separate button, but rather you hold down the left mouse button and it shows you everything! And it feels so right!

That button is already the primary means of interacting with the game world, so using it to look around, which is what highlighting the hotspots essentially represents, makes it feel I’m still interacting. Having a devoted button for it was always fine, but I realize now that it breaks the continuity of being in the game world in just the most minor way, but holding down the button doesn’t. It appeals to me greatly.

I don’t love HOW the game highlights its hotspots. It puts a little theme-appropriate bat icon on them, which isn’t terrible, but I’d prefer something that didn’t cover up the thing being shown. Since we’re supposed to be seeing the things, seeing less of them isn’t ideal. I’d probably prefer just outlining them in red or something, but still, the system is good.

It’s very likely this system has been used in games of higher profile that I have just not played yet, as much as I’d love to credit the innovation to a small game like this. But no matter what the case, I can credit the makers of Champy for picking the right way to do it.

If I ever get back to trying to make an adventure game on my own, this is the way I’d want to handle it.

This one really does its job of showing us how David Vincent has to live a life of constant paranoia. David Vincent is trying to bring proof of the Invaders to some UFO researchers at Munroe University in Illinois, but it sure seems like there is a mole in the organization preventing it from happening. The episode gives us all kinds of reasons to mistrust Laura Crowell, the daughter of one of the UFO researchers. Laura and her father had been separated for fifteen years, and Vincent has seen cases before in which the Invaders have replaced someone who hasn’t been seen in a long time. Laura has a scar on her hand, right where it might have been done to correct the stiff pinky finger some Invaders have. Laura is seen speaking to someone who runs away when he sees Vincent. And also Laura is just generally kind of harsh toward David Vincent and his claims of aliens. I took all of this at face value, but there is a swerve and it turns out that the actual Invader is another researcher who is also Laura’s boyfriend. Just scenes before the reveal Vincent was yelling at that guy accusingly and I was like “Hey, leave him alone, it’s clearly Laura manipulating him” but no! I was wrong! I think this proves I could not do what David Vincent does. I’d’ve been hit with the cerebral hemorrhage early on for sure. Anyway, after Vincent does accuse Laura she is almost killed, but our hero puts it all together and comes back and saves her. The Monroe University crew realize that the alien mole has probably been diverting information away from them for some time. But now Vincent has more allies, ready to join the fight!

Also, there’s an Invader here posing as a cab driver. He tries to steal Vincent’s briefcase, but survives the episode. I like him. Bring him back.

As I continue to keep track of the nature of the aliens, we learn some interesting things in this episode, though they are things not about the true forms of the aliens, but of their human forms. We already knew they don’t have heartbeats and they don’t bleed when they cut (and I have personally advanced the hypothesis that they ain’t jizzin’), but the macguffin of this episode is an X-ray of one of them. They don’t have bones. The Invaders’ human forms do not have skeletal systems! Neat.

Also, I need to note that during the scenes at the airport, there are a lot of Black extras in the background. It’s unfortunate that I feel I have to note that, but it’s simply true that the number of Black people that have been depicted on this show in its season and a half has probably been tripled by the extras in this episode. Look, I’m enjoying this show a lot, but it has been a very white show and the whole conspiracy of people hiding among us and destroying our society leans directions I want the show to avoid.

I noticed that Marvel had a comic come out today called Amazing Spider-Man #1000 and though I haven’t been a regular reader of Spider-Man in a long time, I thought it might be nice to see the most important Marvel Universe get celebrated, and this might just be a book in which that happens. And I was right! The Rocket Racer is in there!

I just had this idea that a milestone issue like this could do a scene where we get all sorts of cameos of characters who have appeared over the years, so I was happy to see the panel above. And to be clear, that is the only panel in which Bob appears. But what a panel! What a reveal! In the Marvel Universe, there is going to be a Rocket Racer movie? I need more details!

Look, I know this is a joke, I know that. It’s just funny that a character as silly as people think the Rocket Racer is would have a movie. I know. But I also take the character more seriously than anyone else. As I’ve said before, there is nothing in the character of the Rocket Racer more inherently silly than there is in Batman or Captain America or most other supposed “cool” characters in the genre. If we treat the character seriously, we can be amused by his situations and care about what happens in the stories. So here I go.

Possibilities:

1. This is good for Bob.
2. This is bad for Bob.

If this is a good scenario for our hero, what does that mean? Well, it means he’s getting some respect. Bob is someone who likes to show off and joke around while he’s doing his thing and he has been a bit performative about his antics (getting into fights for money while rich people watched) more than once in the past. Note that the billboard makes no mention of an actor portraying Bob and Spider-Man identifies it as “Rocket Racer’s movie career” so to me sounds like he’s talking about the guy he knows being in that there movie. This movie is not only about Bob, but stars Bob (could be sort of half documentary, half action film). I think this is the best chance to show off that he has ever had and it could very well be bringing in much-needed money to his family.

If this is a bad scenario, it could be something that Bob doesn’t want. In spite of (or, probably, because of) his desire to show off, any time he fails, Bob takes it hard. Maybe he doesn’t want this movie to happen but someone has forced him into it. It could be a thing where he needs to maintain the rights to his costumed identity. It could be that he’s being forced into it by threats to his family. Basically, I’m saying there could be a villain or worse a corporation that is making this happen and Bob isn’t getting much profit from it at all. What if the time he was consulting She-Hulk for legal advice, he was trying to stop this from happening? And whether he thinks it is good or bad, how is he gonna take it when it inevitably flops?

We don’t know. Nothing in this story tells us. I think we will mostly only be able to infer what happened here by where Bob is in life the next time we see him. I, for one, can’t wait.

But my favourite part is Parker admitting “I can’t even remember if we left it as friends or enemies.” I genuinely think that Bob falls into a tier of person that Peter knows where they aren’t quite close enough to be real friends and Peter thinks they are “lame” enough that he will make jokes at their expense. Look at what he did to Will O’ The Wisp after all. Peter likes Bob when he helps him, but otherwise barely thinks of him unless they have to fight. This is accurate.

Okay, this time the Invaders try a sort of religious tactic to get their conquest of Earth going. Brother Avery is an Invader posing as a preacher or something who does a trick for his congregation: he takes a pill that starts killing him, then he starts to glow in the way the Invaders do as they die. But instead of burning up, after he shows off the glow he heads off the stage to one of the regeneration chambers they use to not die. It’s a pretty effective scam, so he’s got a whole bunch of people showing up to his performances. What’s more, he’s preaching that they should prepare for “the coming host of angels” so they will accept saucers bringing people from space with glee instead of trepidation. It’s a good plan, but obviously David Vincent is on the case.

Vincent knows the alien red glow, so he sees through this one immediately, including understanding that they’ve probably got the regeneration chamber backstage. He offers his services to Now Magazine (We must sadly assume that in the universe of the Invaders this magazine is not owned by J. Jonah Jameson’s) to get pictures of Avery’s whole operation. To get into the church, he actually bothers to use an alias! He almost never does that! He poses as Dennis Victor and, though the Invaders see through, but he focuses on a non-alien member of the church, Sister Claire.

Most of the episode is typical Invaders stuff, with Vincent doing action hero stuff like dodging a car and sneaking around, but the Claire stuff is interesting. It’s clear that Claire has made a lot of mistakes in her life and that Brother Avery’s miracle has given her a faith that has helped her turn her life around. She does not want to believe David Vincent and his claims, but the Invaders have no qualms about using her to capture Vincent and then killing her. And the thing about a show like this one is that when Claire is in danger, there’s as much chance that she could be saved or be killed. Watching the episode, I have no way of knowing if she’ll survive or not. One may say that, since the show doesn’t bring back characters like this, it doesn’t actually matter if the guest stars survive or not, but if we go that way we’d say it doesn’t matter in any movie who survives if there isn’t a sequel. As far as this story is concerned, we want the characters to survive, but the fact that the Invaders is willing to kill off such characters means we can’t be certain. That’s what I love about horror, and I’m glad the show does it. Anyway, Claire survives and Vincent ends the episode with another ally ready and willing to join the fight against the Invaders but we presumably never see her again. Maybe Vincent sent her off to help his brother with his underground alien-fighting operation.

A couple of special-effects-related comments on this one: One, when we see Brother Avery regenerating, there is a sort of wiggly mass visible inside him that we’ve not seen before and I wonder if anything can be inferred from it about the Invaders’ true forms. Two, there’s a scene where Vincent shoots through a car window to kill an Invader and to show the bullet breaking the glass they do a special effect wherein they just draw a crack pattern over the window. It’s very badly done and, in a show that usually has fairly good effects for its time, really stands out as funny. It’s better than I’d do, for sure, and I’m sure the people doing it had budget and time concerns to worry about, but it doesn’t change that it is an amusingly bad effect. I loved it.