Reviews for TOME Short: Hackers

[GaruuSpike]

Quite good.

What is wrong with you guys? Have you not SEEN episode 1? Most of the conversation is done via text boxes and game-like animation loops. If you don't like it, you must be broken in the head or something.

I personally liked this. THIS IS CALLED character-building. All the good fantasy TV shows have character-oriented scenes to help the viewer get to know the characters better. I'm starting to think you are all just shallow and stupid.

The five points of a good cartoon:

Animation
Writing & Plot
Characterization
Voice Acting
Musical Score

If all five of them are good, then you have yourself a high-taste, high-calibur cartoon. Characterization is important. It helps the viewer realize that the characters are like people, with emotions, feelings, thoughts & opinions, personalities, and attitudes. Immersing the viewer in a cleverly-built world with realistically-built characters helps them relate, and consequentially, be more entertained.

If you do not realize this, your opinion is invalid. Have a nice day.

[THExDARKESTxLIGHT]

Short

I liked that you made a short that helps explain a little from the first episode

[RagingDragon04]

Haters gonna hate

Everyone is judging this as if it were a television production.

You guys gotta understand that this isnt your deal to judge, nor is it your chance at showing everyone how much you know about the "business". Its a review, about how the video was. How the humor was, how the animation stands on its own. And frankly they are great, and if you dont find humor in this. This is obvioiusly not your thing, I would advise not to watch anymore if you dont like the way the animation and humor is done.

You are but a single pebble amongst the bunch. Im sure Kirb tries to appeal to everyone, but sadly sometimes that just doesnt work.

Im sure Kirb appreciates some of the reviews that point out certain things, but he doesnt need the constant nagging of changing the way he does his work. At least for this project.

Its not something he's getting paid for, so I dont see the reason as to why he has go all out and make it a super animation with -enter your reason for being displeased-.

This by no means, is this an episode 2. Kirb managed to squeeze enough time in his schedule to do this little vid for all you people that complained about not knowing the characters and what made them the bad guys.

If you still dont understand, then Im sorry to say you're a dumb@ss

[savage011]

why?

why would you make like the first 3 seconds well animated with actual lip sync, and then use a shitty loop for the rest of the animation? That drop in quality was extremely noticable. Since you spent $50,000 a semester going to SVA id think youd have something to show for it.

[Zobot257]

Adds a bit of perspective to the first episode.

I respectfully disagree with some of the other reviews, particularly that of DragonXander. I think this short was actually pretty interesting.

In the original series this is loosely based off of, earlier incarnations of both these characters appeared, with a premise of being spammers in a forum or chatroom-based game. It was obvious that they were hackers (Given that TVTOME Adventures showed their stats upon initial introduction and that said stats were outrageous) and the fact that they were "Cheating" on the game and using that capacity to abuse other players set them as clear antagonists from the outset. They're not operating within the conventional boundaries of the game, and this gives the conflict between Alpha's friends and these hackers context, relevance beyond just a PVP conflict between players.

There's a chance I'm over-thinking this (especially given that the original series was very rough and somewhat amature at it's onset. No offense to it's creator but it's very clear that he learned a lot while he went along) but in the first episode of the new TOME the "context" I mentioned about the old series is somewhat lost. We see the hackers causing trouble. We hear them called hackers. One can presume that they've somehow "hacked" the game. But without a great deal of context as to how the virtual world works we don't really see that they've done anything WRONG. We see other players in the game fighting each other without provocation (see Kirb vs. Alpha in the very first scene for a good example). The only difference between the behaviors of the characters (that we see) is that one is destroying terrain while the other isn't. You can't claim that the hackers should be punished for what they're doing because they're being disruptive (because if we did that to everyone who was disruptive on WoW they'd only need half the servers that they have) and we have little basis for knowing how "bad" it is that the terrain of the game is being altered or destroyed. There's a large number of games that allow for destruction or manipulation of the environment in today's lineup of computer games.

This short adds that context again. It establishes what the hackers can do that regular players can't, and establishes that the hackers are clearly operating outside of the context of the game. It's all stuff that someone who thinks about what they see in the first episode would probably be able to get, but not everyone analyzes things like that. That I think that this could probably have been a scene in the first episode is probably indicative of how highly I rate it. In fact, the only reason I give it an 8 instead of a ten is that I feel this should have been in the original episode rather than added later.

On a lighter note, Rockoon and Doubling are just amusing. They make a great zany/straight man combo.