The New Carbon-izer

When I shut down my old blog, Two Way Roads, it was because I didn't know what to do with it. Envisioned in 2007 as a smarter take on the late "X-Entertainment" website with topics (including what I dubbed as "cool thoughts", look, I was younger, okay?) very similar to the current Carbon-izer type layout (in fact, the current website is probably more to the vision of what I originally had back then for TWR), it eventually became a mess of various topics that never gained a following with the exception of a few well-researched articles on topics like the Houston Auchan or the defunct The Learning Company, as well as being one of the first websites that really talked about Yoot Tower in detail. In 2010, I formed Carbon-izer (initially Carbonizer), designed as a less ambitious project to document my college career.
Perhaps I didn't know what I was doing, and Carbon-izer fell flat and I wondered if killing TWR was the best of plans. Most of the new posts just seemed to be more of the same as TWR, and to make matters more interesting, X-E, one of the major inspirations for Two Way Roads to begin with years ago, shut down due to basically the same reasons TWR did. Go figure.
Even the "more mature" take on the blog didn't work, so a lot of the archives (now being purged) consist of things like this:

...So I was in line at a gas station, just pulled behind a car. Apparently the car had just gotten there because a college-aged girl (about my age, maybe slightly younger) got out and began to use the pump. Used her card, punched buttons (credit or debit? our "engine-enhancing" additive? receipt?), and began fueling. So, after sticking it in her car, she walked back into her car. I thought she was just sitting there, maybe even going so far as to record her gas refueling (yeah right). But then I noticed that there was exhaust coming from the car. That's right: she turned on her engine (possibly for A/C) WHILE HER CAR WAS REFUELING, one of those they tell you explicitly NOT TO DO.

So I drove over to the opposite end of the fuel island (with no cars ahead of me) to fuel up MY car, which in addition to having no one in it (it was rush hour, after all), in the event that her car blows up due to her incompetence, I could have an escape route to flee before the entire station went kaboom. Fortunately, no explosion occurred, which was good because I feared more for the other people fueling their cars than for her. And luckily for her she's probably at home right now instead of being a crispy skeleton.

And this was the same trip that on the WAY to college, someone almost ran into me, I swerved, and I accidentally bit my tongue, which hurts still, but at least my car's intact.

It's cringe-worthy stuff like this why my brother pretty much wiped the contents of his blog after academia. Writing personal crap is either boring or potentially harmful. The more you leave stuff around on the Internet for people to find, the more they can use to attack you. This is just generally good practice. For most of us, the fear is potential employers. It's unlikely employers are going to reject you if you use a screen name and keep your Facebook hidden, but for more "unique" individuals, this is the sort of thing that builds dossiers on darker corners of the Internet (Encyclopedia Dramatica, Kiwi Farms, or certain Reddit subs), and they're never going to give up their hold on that.

I tried doing other stuff with Carbon-izer but never managed to really get into it. I even promised that Carbon-izer would be a home for new content while the main site was being updated. That didn't work either.

The new site will be a partial reconstruction of older concepts. It will be mostly about video games, but not exclusively. Sometimes little bits of other stuff will pop up as well, and that's just fine. Happens for every blog. Magweasel.com, a defunct (as of 2013) blog run by the same guy who ran |tsr's nes archive, once had a picture of Waco for a podcast picture. When I left a comment to no response, and that's just as well. Sometimes a bit of randomness and mystery is needed for these things. Besides, I'll take it as is (nearly everything in that picture is demolished or significantly altered).

While I reconstruct the site to fit this new purpose, I'd like to say that as of this writing, I am almost done with the new version of Carbon-izer.

Back to the Future: The Game: The Review: Part II

Hi. I write game reviews (among other things) on Carbon-izer.com, my website. Most of them are one page. I initially didn't plan on continuing the Back to the Future: The Game review, but I ended up teasing it on the last update of the site (or shortly thereafter) with the screengrab of "To Be Continued", and decided to make it a trilogy. I had written most of the review and had a number of screenshots throughout to make the page just not being text (my notes from playing were quite extensive, and only a small part of that I actually transcribed). Unfortunately, due to me not preserving the right files during a Steam re-installation, not only was BTTF:TG's status in Steam lost (it was from GOG) but all the screenshots I took. Also, yes, this contains spoilers.

Pictured: my reaction when I figured out what happened.
For one thing, when playing it a bit more, I did find a few of my questions answered, like some hand-waving for Clara's absence (apparently Jules and Verne, Doc's kids, are now getting close to college ages, so he's at least in his mid-80s at the minimum...though a visit to the "rejuvenation clinic" in the early 21st century (as explained in Part II) means that he's more like more in mid-40s in terms of functional age), and in a somewhat less believable hand wave, the DeLorean's reappearance was created as an exact duplicate when the DeLorean was struck by lightning in 1955 at the end of Part II. Let's face it...the DeLorean as it appeared during II was a lot cooler than it was in III as by that time, the DeLorean had to be repaired with a bunch of 1955 components because it was abandoned in a mine for 70 years. But it also introduces another problem as the flying circuits were fried with the lightning strike. If they hadn't, then Marty would never have had to go out in the middle of nowhere in III to get to 1885, the fuel line would not have been compromised by an arrow, and the plot to save Doc before his untimely death via "lead poisoning" would be far simpler.

The gameplay is still pretty weak as far as puzzles go, but I'd rather have the puzzles be simple and the game move along rather than obtuse puzzles shoehorned in without intuitive answers, though sometimes it fails at both. The music is also great, with a variation of the theme in the early 1930s. It reminded me of those times back in 2003 (see the original review, or the gas station post below) and why I really liked Back to the Future to begin with (talk about traveling to the past).

Like in the second film, in the second episode, Marty dons a ridiculous and rather unconvincing disguise. (YouTube)As previously mentioned, I took a great deal of extensive notes, and in that revealed some more problems and paradoxes, which made my head spin. The end of the second chapter has Marty start to disappear because of problems with Arthur's "chance that he'll live another year", saves him, finds out that he left town and didn't testify against Arthur, creating a situation in 1985 where Kid Tannen runs the town as a mob boss (big fish in a small pond, apparently), and because of attempting to fix THAT problem, jeopardizes Jennifer's existence due to having one Officer Parker (what are the odds, right?) see the DeLorean and be disgraced by everyone (including his fiancée) thinking he's a lunatic.

"Officer Sadsack" as he appears in official art.

Once again, that messes up things through a grandfather paradox. If she never existed, then she wouldn't have written her number down on the clock tower flyer, and Marty wouldn't have kept the flyer (or at least not remembered it) to help him go back to the future. Like I mentioned in the first part of this review, the game shifts between obeying movie canon, acknowledging movie canon, and ignoring movie canon. Marty and Doc's meddling seem to fix everything, but a pivotal moment where young Emmett Brown was supposed to see Frankenstein and instead falls for the young Edna Strickland, a moralistic reporter who was hot on the case of finding the real "speakeasy arsonist" which Doc (the Doc from 1985) was accused of. It also introduces Trixie Trotter, Kid's squeaky-voiced girlfriend (who really has the hots for Arthur) and nightclub singer.
Anyway, the disregard of movie rules comes apparent in the third chapter of the game, where due to Edna and Doc hooking up somehow creates a cult/fascist "gated community" dystopia, Doc is now "Citizen Brown". When Marty meets up with Citizen Brown and tries to talk some sense into him, Citizen Brown digs up a picture he had from the 1930s, with Marty and Doc Brown in the background, and then Marty gives Citizen Brown Doc's notebook to fix the DeLorean (apparently, they forgot the whole "disappearing photo/paper" mechanic that the movies held dear). In the films, the DeLorean stayed intact for the return visit to 1985-A in the film but so did Doc, who had been committed in this timeline.

In addition to the Citizen Brown chapter being glitchy (you can walk around the town square in 1931 freely but there's invisible walls in the Citizen Brown), the other problem is to find out really what's going on is by talking extensively to everyone, including the alternate version of Jennifer (now looking like like a stereotypical 1980s punk rocker), but she is voiced by the ORIGINAL Jennifer (Claudia Wells) so that counts for something, I guess.

It was also in this chapter that the game is cleaner than the film...there's no mentions of "ass" or "shit" (it does use "damn" and "crap", though I think there is a "bullshit" in Episode 5), even though the game (or at least the episode where I noticed it) is rated T. The original Back to the Future was rated PG in a pre-PG-13 world meaning it could get away with a whole lot more (the first two Indiana Jones films, Airplane!, and the 1984 Dune come to mind), but it didn't.

The fourth episode, Double Visions, was a letdown, and basically bridged the gap of rescuing Citizen Brown (now having fixed the DeLorean and referring himself as "Doc" though it's not the "real" Doc), but it ends with C.B. feeling sorry for young Edna after Marty sabotages her and young Emmett's relationship, causing the start of C.B. ultimately betraying Marty for Edna (even though Marty reminds him that Old Edna was literally torturing him), to the point where Marty has to nearly suffocate C.B. by stepping on an airhose to expose the man in the diving suit not as the Jacques Cousteau stand-in but as Citizen Brown (long story). There was another scene that I screencapped literally a dozen times where a character's teeth were green. I honestly thought this was a bug, but it turned out not to be if you went through the conversation tree long enough.

Anyway, the game has a reasonable number of turns and twists to make it interesting enough to stay toward the end though the foreshadowing is clumsy. Edna is actually the arsonist? Trixie Trotter is actually George's future wife? GASP! SHOCK AND AWE! Just kidding...if you were older than 6, than you saw all of it coming several episodes before the twist is revealed.

This is not the twist, this is just a scriptwriter's asspull. More on this scene later.
The penultimate scene in the game has Marty come across the DeLorean after 50-odd years and it's completely stripped down, with no time-traveling circuitry or Flux Capacitor, sitting in Edna's yard. Unfortunately, it conflicts with the theory of the DeLorean being underground and mostly fine after 70 years (just bad tires and other minor components that could be acquired from an automotive parts supplier), and Edna has lived alone and has scared off anyone that dares to venture closely.

So either she must have taken out the parts herself and they could theoretically be salvageable/found, or they're trying to tell me that being outside for decades has trashed the interior of the DeLorean by that alone...and if the latter is true, then the BTTF-verse shouldn't have problems with trash.

Ultimately, the day is saved, and Marty and Doc (a different Doc, who returned from 1986 after remembering the catastrophe Marty caused in 1931 with no memory of his time from the first two episodes) return home to find some odd but harmless (and perhaps better) changes in 1986. Guess you'll find that out later...in our next installment! (Click the link)