My weekly mission to read as much Black Panther comics until the movie comes out continues. Our latest stop takes us to a pretty important stop in T'Challa's history. BACKGROUND:
I've only read a couple of issues from this run, so this is as good as new to me. SUMMARY: This complete collection has a whopping 20 issues in it, so I'll break it down by arc. The first six issues chronicle Klaw's grand attempt at taking revenge on T'Challa. Here, he enlists the help of various supervillains in hopes of finally conquering Wakanda. Both the Nigandan government (a neighboring country with a shitty dictator for a leader) and a rather underhanded US military operation that involves an army of Deathloks join the fray as well. Shit gets quite chaotic, though as you may expect, Klaw's plans do not succeed. Along with the main plot, you get flashbacks to T'Challa's early life, which includes a change to the exact circumstances T'Chaka ends up dead by Klaw's hands. You also get a few scenes with US government officials plotting to take over Wakanda for their vibranium (which feature Everett Ross in a consulting role). The team of villains Klaw recruits for his cause is quite the ragtag team: Rhino (classic Spider-Man villain), a version of the Radioactive Man (no, not the guy from The Simpsons), Batroc the Leaper (everyone's favorite loser villain), and a Vatican-sanctioned version of the Black Knight (who is, for some reason, super obsessed with converting people to Catholicism). There's also this body snatcher known only as the Cannibal who joins their ranks, and their whereabouts in the aftermath make for a fun dangling plot thread that they tease in later story arcs. Another fun result of this arc is that by the end, Black Panther has possession of the Black Knight's Ebony Blade (and he actually gets to use it at least once in this book). We then get one House of M-adjacent issue where Magneto makes a play at taking out T'Challa. He calls in some help from fellow monarchs Namor, Storm, and Black Bolt to fend off an attack by Sabretooth and Apocalypse. The moment with Black Bolt is awesome. Next, we get the Wild Kingdom arc, which spans four issues (two of which are actually X-Men titles and not Black Panther comics). The events of the first arc caused the nation of Niganda to plunge into chaos, and this happened to release what appear to be heavily mutated animals. A team of X-Men (Havok, Storm, Rogue, Gambit, Polaris, Iceman, Wolverine) come in to investigate, and they are surprised to find T'Challa already on the scene. The mutated animals wreaking havoc are apparently the doing of Doctor Paine, a geneticist who worked under the Nigandan dictatorship by experimenting on humans, turning them into mutates, and enslaving them. Paine is working alongside the Red Ghost, a Soviet scientist (and a decently obscure villain) with intangibility powers and a squad of sentient apes working under him. The sentient apes have a Planet of the Apes-style agenda of their own, because why not? Anyway, the X-Men and T'Challa team up to take all the villains down, though not without a bit of misunderstanding at the start. Even from the first arc, the comic is fully establishing that there is romantic tension between T'Challa and Storm. Storm mostly tries to blow off T'Challa's attempts at courtship, while he is busy worrying about competition from other would-be suitors/trying to find the words to reconcile with her. We'll get into more detail about that a little later. After Wild Kingdom, T'Challa is badgered by his mother Ramonda to go find a wife. For some reason, he decides to go to America to find someone suitable despite it being obvious to him that he only wants one person. He tries to reconnect with his old flame Monica Lynne, and when that doesn't go well, he... goes clubbing? He ends up running into Luke Cage at the club, and that somehow leads to the two getting attacked by ninjas. They are taken to the lair of "Han", who is Shang-Chi's criminal father, and he abducted T'Challa because.... he wants to arrange a marriage with T'Challa and his daughter? It's weird in a really funny way. And yes, Shang-Chi shows up briefly to kick some ass, and Falcon makes an equally brief appearance that has no real impact on what's happening. I liked the hilarious reference to "Han's".... controversial comics history. This team-up with Luke Cage goes on for two more issues, as T'Challa recruits him to help out with Hurricane Katrina survivors in New Orleans. Turns out evacuation isn't the only trouble down in Louisiana, as the hurricane has caused a band of vampires to come out of hiding and take advantage of the disaster. Cage and T'Challa team up with Blade, Brother Voodoo, and Monica Rambeau to eliminate the threat. I liked this little team, and it was cool to see the heroes be heroes in a real-life crisis. The last arc covered in this book features a defining moment in T'Challa's history. After the events of Wild Kingdom, Storm decided she'll stick around in Africa doing the thing she used to do before she was recruited into the X-Men: serve as the weather "goddess" to the impoverished and taking down slavery rings along the way. T'Challa finds her on one of her adventures, and after a scuffle with a ripoff Arabian Knight (another... interesting comics rabbit hole in the same manner as Shang-Chi's dad), T'Challa finally does it: he proposes to Storm. Spoilers: she says yes. In this arc, we get a decent summary of Storm's backstory (her parentage, her early childhood as an orphan thief, her early relationship with T'Challa when they were teenagers), which is perfect if you're not that familiar with her story. In the issues leading up to the wedding, T'Challa helps Storm reconnect with her surviving family members, announces their marriage publicly (which leads to a wide range of responses from various characters), and gets dragged into a bachelor party by his super-pals. There's also a funny moment where Storm goes shopping with some friends and gets into a fight with Princess Zanda (a seemingly one-off character from the '70s comics that I never thought ever appeared in anything else). The announcement of the marriage is interesting, as the reactions range from excitement, apprehension (some of the X-Men are worried Storm will not fight alongside them as much, for example), and intrigue (the union will be the highest-profile relationship between a human and a mutant, after all). We also get some reactions from T'Challa's ex Monica Lynne (who expresses her feelings in song) and Storm's ex Forge (who only hopes that Storm is happy). My favorite reaction is from SHIELD, whose officials get stressed out at the notion of all the superheroes gathering at the wedding and leaving themselves open for attack. The last issue in the collection is the wedding itself, and it's got quite the guest list. Many big Marvel characters show up (including the fucking Watcher), deep cuts like Isaiah Bradley were invited (and a couple of Black heroes were deeply impressed by T'Challa inviting him because of his history), and many world leaders join in on the festivities. Hell, M'Baku (who was going to go on a ballistic rampage because he wasn't invited) got an invitation, and he was (mostly) chill for being one of the few villains in the party. Doctor Doom (who wasn't present) was even nice enough to send an actually sincere congratulations, too. The ceremony itself was beautiful (Storm had a hell of a dress), and there's also this awesome moment when Storm faces the panther goddess and is accepted as T'Challa's wife. Interestingly, this issue takes place in the early stages of the Civil War event (so there is a bit of tension in the wedding), and T'Challa actually has Captain America and Iron Man face each other in an attempt to have them reconcile (it obviously ends poorly). A multitude of artists worked on the comics in this collection, so I once again have trouble really talking about the style as a whole. I will say that most of the issues have art with great detail, with the variations coming in the form of how such detail is achieved. The early issues employ some hatching for texture, for example, while later issues employ a wider color palette or higher contrast shading. VERDICT: This collection of Black Panther comics has quite the variety of stories, from fun team-ups with other Marvel heroes, another epic defense of Wakanda against a villain team of invaders, and the culmination of T'Challa's most iconic romance. Wakanda itself isn't the main focus this time around, but I enjoyed reading about how Storm and T'Challa finally come together, and I was impressed by both the volume and variety of other Marvel characters who appear in the story (from big Avengers cameos to super deep cuts). I also liked the additional plot threads sprinkled throughout the story (like the Cannibal subplot and the Ebony Blade ending up in Wakanda), and I hope to see those explored in the later issues. The whole marriage with Storm is easily the biggest part of this collection, so if you're interested in T'Challa's decades-long history, I think this is worth reading based on that alone. Other than that, I think many readers would find the many team-ups T'Challa gets involved in entertaining, and in addition, you needn't trouble yourself with prerequisite material to understand everything (except Civil War, I guess, but even then, you just need the gist of it). Oh, and speaking of later issues: throughout this entire month, my Black Panther reads will exclusively cover the comics from this run. Expect Vol. 2 next week, and I'll split Vol. 3 to cover the last two weeks of August. I'm pretty excited to be able to read full volumes from start to finish this time around, so look forward to more ramblings like this. - end -
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We get a singular NES game for the Switch Online July update, and it's an interesting one. BACKGROUND:
Considering this game is fully in Japanese and I can't find anything on a Western release anywhere, would it surprise you that I don't know what this is? Additional reading reveals something interesting about the fact that this is the "sixth" story: there are seven of these games, and they appear to each be on a different platform. It's astounding how little I could find about this franchise on English-based online resources; this is niche as niche gets. I was so mystified by how little information there was about this game that I did even more digging. I encountered this blog entry by a content creator called Mackerel Phones who appeared to know a great deal more about the subject, and through them, I learned of a book titled The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Vol. 2, which is a series of interviews with many relatively unknown devs. One of the interviews was with the principal developer of the Daiva series (their insights quoted and paraphrased multiple times in the above blog post), and the story is utterly fascinating. Long story short, the Daiva games each have the same story, but told from the perspective of different characters. And each game (again, released on different platforms during the '80s) apparently isn't just one game ported across seven systems with minimal changes. As I'll get into in the next section, Daiva has two main gameplay aspects, and while the first of those aspects is more or less the same across every game, the other was coded by a different person per system. Plus, the whole idea of releasing similar games across different systems had a cool philosophy behind it: the devs wanted to create a version of Daiva that made the most of its home system's hardware, as well as encourage players who own different consoles to socialize by sharing passwords (that work for any version of the game). Reading about the ambitious idea that is Daiva was among one of the most fun rabbit holes I've ever jumped into in a very long time. Not only did I learn about this completely obscure game series from a now-defunct game development studio (which itself is probably not well-known to people who aren't hardcore video game enthusiasts), I was enthralled by the concept of releasing this massive saga across different platforms that you needed to talk about with other players to fully appreciate and understand its story. I don't think an idea on that grand a scale has ever been attempted in video games ever since, and that alone makes Daiva a very special part of video game history. Also, I learned that the entire series is available in a collection on PC, but once again, it's Japan-only. Someone localize this and release it outside Japan, damn it! I wanna know what's going on! SUMMARY: DAIVA Story 6 is a sci-fi game where you fly around in a spaceship and stop by 14 planets in the star system to take them back (or conquer them?). I would wager the story explains why the player is doing this, but the little dialogue I encountered in this game is in Japanese, so I can't tell you what's going on. In the overworld, you control your ship and move around the star system. You start out on your home planet (where you can switch out your ships and such once you acquire resources), and you move around towards specific spots on the map in order to find the 14 planets. Once you make contact with a planet, you're taken to this pre-game screen where you choose which section to deploy your mech, where you want your support (which is health and some sort of enemy-clearing attack) to land, and where you want a barrage of homing missiles to strike. You also get info on the threat level in terms of enemy frequency, as well as the planet's gravity. In execution, I had little reason to deploy everything near the end of the map, but on paper, I like the concept of strategic preparation before going down to blow shit up on a hostile planet. The action on the planet itself is a side-scrolling platformer where you jump in shoot in a mech and blast various enemies. This bit is kinda mindless, since every level is an auto-scroller, there's no reason to jump other than to occasionally avoid enemies (there are no hazards or bottomless pits, and you get pushed through terrain that you'd assume would block your path), and most enemies are easy to dispatch or avoid (only one or two enemy types ever registered as a threat to me). At the end of every planet is a boss, and they all work exactly the same (the boss is just a number of stationary weak points that spit out projectiles). I really wish the platformer aspect were more engaging or challenging, because you almost don't need the support that you strategically deploy before the start of every level. And because the game is pushing you along via auto-scroller (plus walls practically don't exist), the varied platform layouts hardly mattered unless there are enemies in your way (and almost all of them are easy to avoid to boot). As you explore the star system, you'll also run into enemy fleets. If you bump into them, you're thrown into this rudimentary tactical RPG grid where you move around your ship. Each turn, you're able to position your ship on any tile on your side of the map, and once the turn ends, the ship will fire two shots directly in front. The enemy ships will do the same on their turn, and you'll have to hope you blast them first. I thought transitioning into a tactical RPG for spacecraft battles was a novel idea, but the actual implementation of it was too simple for me to really get into it. All I had to do was hope the enemy ships position themselves in front of me on their turn and hope my shots (whose chance to hit appear to be dictated by chance) land. There are potentially interesting elements like asteroids (that block missiles but not lasers) and the small variety of ship types with different armaments, but they hardly mattered in the grand scheme. If you manage to build up a massive fleet by conquering planets, your numbers will easily overwhelm any encounters with enemy ships. There are also a bunch of meters below the map in the overworld that increase over time. I didn't get far enough to see what happens when they top up, but I assume it's bad. If I had to guess, these meters pertain to the enemy gathering strength, and there's a race against time to conquer all the planets before this happens. I'm also not sure if conquering planets or destroying enemy fleets do anything to slow their progress. I feel like this mechanic would have been engaging if it were presented more prominently. VERDICT: DAIVA Story 6 has a lot of cool ideas (especially for its time), but I feel like the actual gameplay doesn't realize the full potential of those ideas. Both the platforming and the tactical space battles felt too easy for me to be fully engaged, which is a bit of a shame since I enjoyed the ability to strategically plan out your planetary missions and deploy a massive, varied fleet respectively. I also enjoyed the whole conceit of moving around space tackling missions in any order, though Star Fox 2 ended up executing this idea better especially with the mechanic of how your home planet is under threat if you don't act quickly. I can't say I was invested to the story, either, since I understood none of it. Overall, I still appreciated what they were going for in terms of their ideas, even if the actual execution didn't engage me as much as I would have liked. Honestly, reading about the mostly unknown history behind the game (and the series at large) may be more fascinating than actually playing it. That said, I still think this is worth playing to see and appreciate the rather ambitious ideas it attempts for the gameplay. It also plays perfectly fine anyhow, and it would be an OK way to kill an hour of free time if you don't mind a relatively easy game. - end - There's a big comics anniversary this month, and I have just the theme for it. THE THEME: August 2022 marks the 60th year since Spider-Man's original comics debut in Amazing Fantasy #15. Naturally, I have a spider-themed entry prepared today, but I've decided to spice it up a little by selecting five comics that feature a distinct Spider-person (or a variant of one, at least) instead of just having Peter Parker across the board. I think reading about multiple versions of Spider-Man is a fun way to showcase how far the character has come ever since his origin tale back in 1962. THE COMICS: PETER PARKER: THE SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN (2017-2018) #309 Publisher: Marvel Writer: Chip Zdarsky Artist: Chris Bachalo On the surface, this seems like a routine faceoff against Sandman, but things get weird when it's revealed that Spider-Man is facing off against a Sandman from an alternate timeline. They expand Sandman's power set in an impressive way, and they give the main Sandman even more of a sympathetic character as he faces his desire to be mortal. SPIDER-GEDDON #0 Publisher: Marvel Writers: Christos Gage, Jed MacKay Artist: Clayton Crain, Javier Garron This comic features two stories. The first sees Superior Spider-Man (Otto Octavius as Spider-Man) recruit the Peter Parker from the PS4 game as one of many Spider-people to fend off the Inheritors. The second features a bunch of Spider-people playing jail warden to a bunch of Inheritors. I quite liked the first story since the Spider-Man of the PS4 game had to deal with a Doctor Octopus of his own, and him meeting Superior Spider-Man made for an interesting dynamic. SPIDER-GWEN: GHOST-SPIDER (2018-2019) #10 Publisher: Marvel Writer: Seanan McGuire Artists: Takeshi Miyazawa, Rosi Kampe The Gwen Stacy of Earth-65 is Spider-Woman/Ghost-Spider in her universe, and her powers (which currently come from symbiote-based sources) are on the fritz. She travels to Earth-616 to seek help and ends up fighting Swarm with Peter Parker. SPIDER-MAN 2099 (2014-2015) #1 Publisher: Marvel Writer: Peter David Artist: Will Sliney Miguel O'Hara (the Spider-Man of the 2099 continuity) is currently stuck in Earth-616 and has decided to work in Alchemax (the company he works for in his timeline) in the meantime. Unfortunately, an agent from the future has arrived and is looking to erase him, and to make matters worse, someone in Alchemax already suspects that one of their employees is Spider-Man. WHAT IF? SPIDER-MAN: THE OTHER Publisher: Marvel Writer: Peter David Artists: Khoi Pham, Sandu Florea The Other is a Spider-Man storyline that saw Peter Parker confront the "spider" side of his being (there's not time to explain, just roll with it). In this What If? scenario, Peter chooses not to embrace that side of him when given the choice in the dreamscape he's trapped in. That leads to Peter in the real world (currently in a web cocoon after his presumed death; long story) to remain in stasis, and the Venom symbiote exploits that. The result is... horrifying, to say the least. Many Silver Age characters and teams have had or will celebrate their 60th anniversaries this decade. Fantastic Four's anniversary was last year, several Avengers members like Thor or Hulk have theirs this year, and both X-Men and the Avengers first assembling will celebrate next year. Spider-Man may be one of many in this case, but he's arguably the most monumental of all, considering he ended up being Marvel's most iconic character. There are six decades of stories out there to explore, so if you enjoy Spider-Man stories like I do, go and read some to mark the occasion. PANEL(s) OF THE WEEK: - end -
I'm making some good progress with this EGS backlog. Hopefully I can keep the momentum going. BACKGROUND:
I remember seeing snippets of this game at one of Nintendo's Indie World Showcases and I thought the gameplay looked intriguing. It was never a big priority on my wish list, however, so I never got around to buying it. Just my luck; EGS made it free for a week. PLOT: You play as a BOT-C engineer, a robot originally designed to maintain an ancient facility hidden deep within a mountain. The bot wakes up many decades after said facility has fallen into ruin, and now it must go through the facility to restore it. Unfortunately, the facility is guarded by the eponymous creature, who is hellbent on making sure that the facility never comes to life. It is made clear early on that the facility is meant to stop the unending sandstorms that plague the surrounding area, and thus provide respite for the denizens of Mirage, a nearby desert village. The creature, for whatever sinister reason, will stop at nothing to make sure that doesn't happen. As you explore the facility's many sections, you'll encounter various data logs and notes left behind by the person who led the development of the facility. You'll learn more about what each section is meant to do (and a few details on how it's meant to go about performing its functions), the origins of the engineers (plus details on the technology they use, and the fate that befalls them), more insight on the storms that are wreaking havoc on the area (and the sense of urgency people have when it comes to controlling them), and the eventual discovery of the creature (who is adversarial from the start). I thought the game's world was interesting overall. I liked learning about the initially mysterious facility and its inner workings, and while the player character itself is just a robot that only seems to be driven by its programmed purpose, I was still invested in the journey to restore the facility despite the opposition of the creature. PRESENTATION: The game is visually striking, boasting a cel-shaded style with bright, mostly flat colors that really pop out. It looks like a highly stylized comic book, and I love it. And despite most of the game taking place within the facility, there is still variety in the environments, with some areas overgrown with plant life, and others looking like the interior of the Death Star. That's not even mentioning the desert outside the facility, which feels extra desolate thanks to all the sandstorm effects. I also must note how the game loves to play with the camera and shift the view as you move along rooms in dungeons. I thought this was neat, but it's a little disorienting when you need to refer to the in-game map. The music goes for a chill, moody tone that adds to the feeling of isolation as you navigate the abandoned facilities. Can't say I find too many tracks memorable, but I think the soundtrack did its job just fine. GAMEPLAY: On the surface, Creature in the Well looks like one of those hack-and-slash dungeon crawlers where you go through dungeons and beat up hordes of enemies. It certainly controls as if it's a game like that, but its main gimmick is where it gets wild: it's actually a cross between a dungeon crawler... and pinball? You do swing a melee weapon around, but instead of doing so to inflict damage, you do so to whack orbs around. These orbs will bounce around, and you'll want to direct these to bumpers in the many rooms you'll run into within the facility. Hitting the bumpers will charge them up, and fully charging all the bumpers will often unlock doors and activate puzzle elements. Additionally, hitting bumpers will charge you up, and that power acts as a sort of currency you'll need to spend to open doors. Aiming your shots is a quite tricky, and the default arrow that shows where your shot will go doesn't take into account angles. There is a way to get around this, as in addition to your regular swing (which just sends the orb flying), there's a separate charge swing where you swing at the orb and it starts to glow white. Not only does this empower the orb (making it so any bumpers it hits in this state charge up faster and give out more power), but this also holds the orb in place for a second, allowing you to carefully reposition it or yourself so you can make the best possible shot. It took me a while to get the hang of the main mechanic, though. Almost every door in the dungeons is locked until you spend a specific amount of power to unlock them, so there is actually good reason to go apeshit on the bumpers and hit them with orbs. Truthfully, this manner of design makes progression a grind, but I was enjoying the act of playing this game's take on pinball (and finding great satisfaction at racking up the equivalent of points) that it never really felt like grinding to me. Though many of the bumpers you run into are simply for the purpose of racking up power, some do serve some other purpose. Some rooms are time-based challenges where you try to power up all the bumpers before time expires, others throw out hazards (and you'll often have to hit the bumpers that shoot out the danger to deactivate them), while others are accuracy checks where you try to aim your shots at a well-protected target. Completing these challenges will usually just reward you with bonus power (and a ton of it at that), but a few unlock secret paths that lead to neat rewards. I liked most of the challenges, but some of them can be pretty rough when you aren't used to the mechanics yet. While it may seem like everything in the game is building up to some intense boss fight with the creature, you don't actually fight him directly. Instead, at the end of each dungeon, the creature attempts to thwart your plans to restore the machine by throwing you into a gauntlet of three or four challenge rooms, where the goal is to clear out all the bumpers without dying. It's perhaps the closest thing to full-on combat you'll get in the game since you really have to mind your position both to get your shots in and to avoid damage, and some of them were pretty tough. Thankfully, dying isn't that punishing, since dungeon progress is saved (the bumpers in individual rooms reset, though), you can heal up in the hub world, and you can even spend power to open up a portal so you can quickly warp to the boss encounter without running through the entire dungeon. On that note, bumpers come in all shapes and sizes, and some offer gimmicks. There are bumpers with timers on them (which you'll have to charge before the timer expires, else the room will reset), bulb things arranged in a line that you have to light up in a single, well-aimed shot (often involving bouncing an orb at the right angle against something), bumpers that spit out damaging fire orbs when you hit them, bumpers that shoot out lasers on a predetermined cycle, bumpers that spit out slow tracking projectiles that can be destroyed by a moving orb, and even bumpers that explode if they happen to get hit by a ball. There are also other mechanics on top of that, like tracks on which certain bumpers move about, a switch that changes what bumpers are currently active in a room, and turrets that shoot out the orbs you need to wallop. The variety is solid, I would say. The secret rewards are well worth finding, in my view, as they allow you to customize your robot dude. You can find alternate weapons for both your regular attack and your charge attack, and many of them offer unique passive to change up the way you play. For example, the Focus Hammer makes it so if you hold the regular strike, time slows down to give you a brief moment to line up your shot. In the case of the charge tools, one example is the Magnetic Fork, which attracts orbs flying close to you when you're charging. I do wish there were a greater variety of these tools to try out, but what the game did have, I thought was neat. Plus, there were instances where switching out my tools worked to my benefit, and I really like that there's no one optimal loadout. In addition, you can also find capes (which are purely cosmetic) and Old Cores, which you can take to the engineer in the desert town to power up your robot core. Doing so allows any orbs you charge to hold more energy, thus allowing them to charge bumpers much faster and yield more power on contact. Upgrading your core costs power, and this is the only other thing you can spend it on. It did make me wish there were other things to spend power on (since I ended up with quite the surplus towards the end of the game), but I'm just glad there was even one other thing it was good for. There are only around eight dungeons in the game, and most of them are quite short (especially if you skip the optional stuff). I did go out of my way to fully explore every dungeon, and I'd say it was worthwhile to collect everything. And I also like that, while there is usually nothing to do in the hub world, there are some secrets hidden about within it, and I was a big fan of how clearing one of the main dungeons unlocks something special in the desert town. VERDICT: I thought Creature in the Well was a fun, new take on the usual dungeon crawler, eschewing the typical hack-and-slash combat for a fresh spin on pinball, of all things. Though I did find struggles with the controls, I really liked the core mechanic of walloping orbs to hit bumpers, and I enjoyed the variety of gimmicks and challenges they constructed around this gameplay. I also quite liked the game's art style, and I was pleasantly surprised by the ability to swap out your gear to change up your orb-whacking approach. Perhaps the only things I could say against the game are how I wish it were longer and it had more stuff in it, but I think that only speaks to how much I liked it and want to play more of it. If anything about what I described in terms of the gameplay sounds interesting to you, I recommend giving Creature in the Well a shot. I don't think there's any other game quite like it, and that uniqueness alone merits checking it out. Pick your poison, PC players: - end - |
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