The lows are low, but the highs are home
Month
Looking at the comments on an excellent Destructoid piece about Final Fantasy IX, I came across someone who puts me to shame with his FF Nerd power level. I knew from the beginning that I wasn’t going to blog my way through the games, but I’m even happier now that I chose not to do that, because I could never hope to do it better than this guy.
I spent a couple of hours last night just skimming through all of these, so take that as a warning about how much he wrote. Check out a couple, you’ll get a good idea of how dedicated he was to this. He’s got a good sense of humour, and the writing is solid too. He also chose to play the original versions of each of the games, in some cases requiring fan translations, which boggles the mind. I’ve been playing the GBA releases of FF I-VI (DS release for FF III), and they’re a whole lot nicer than what he had to deal with. The game I remember as FF II is radically different from the one he describes (in terms of gameplay), but then I haven’t played the game since I was twelve, so that might have something to do with it.
So yeah, this guy is my hero.
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The Final Fantasy V And Pitchfork-related Section Of This Post
It seems like everyone has the exact same reaction to FF V’s job system. Pitchfork captures what vael and I felt nicely:
Final Fantasy V’s two-dimensional characters get tossed around by an implausible scenario with more plot devices and contrision than you can shake a moogle at. This seems to be the main reason a lot of players aren’t too fond of the fifth installment. A week or so I was talking about this with Polly, who is not a Final Fantasy V fan. “So what if the plot is silly,” I told her. “It’s still a pretty fun game.”
“Pat,” she answered. “A little kid running around with a cereal bowl on his head is silly. Final Fantasy V’s story is just retarded.”
“WHAT?” I asked. “WHAT WAS THAT? I’M SORRY, I CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER ALL THIS JOB SYSTEM.”
I’d be really surprised if he didn’t know about it, considering how in-depth his knowledge of the games are, but FF V’s job system has a feature he doesn’t even mention. I don’t the game ever actually tells you what happens when you “master” a job, but something very important happens, and it’s probably the best part of the game’s design. Nevertheless, the “oh my god this is so well designed” reaction can only reach new heights when you find out about the connection between Freelancers and mastered jobs.
When you reach the maximum level of a job, it’s considered to be “mastered” by that character. At the start of the game, the Freelancer job is pretty lame: you can equip anything, but you don’t really have any abilities. Later on, you can mix and match any two abilities you like.
Now, by default, you can use all the passive abilities of a job when you’re using it, without taking up your second ability slot. A Monk can use Counter without equipping it, and a Thief can use Sprint the same way. But when you’ve mastered a job, this ability extends to the Freelancer job. If you master both the Monk and Thief jobs, as a Freelancer, you’ll have both Counter and Sprint innately. On top of that, you get the best of their innate stat boosts, too. So you get great strength, stamina, and agility.
So the Geomancer job may have a pretty lame ability (and some helpful passive abilities), but it only takes 175 ability points to master it, as opposed to something like 600 for the other magic jobs. That means a really easy boost to your magic stat towards the end of the game for your fighters. The other magic jobs, for obvious reasons, give better stat boosts than the Geomancer job, so your Summoner/White Mage won’t get much use out of mastering it.
Playing the end of the game as a dual-wielding Ninja with the Ranger’s Rapidfire skill is pretty awesome. But playing the end of the game as a Freelancer, with Rapidfire and Spellblade, and the best stats and skills of the Ninja, Ranger, Geomancer and Mystic Knight is amaaaaazing.
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The Final Fantasy V And Update-related Section Of This Post
Looking over yesterday’s post, I had a quick thought about the characters in Final Fantasy V, who are interchangeable from one another barring a few minor stat differences - they may be roughly identical in the gameplay, but they still have their own personalities and look (unlike in FF I or III, each character has their own “look” when using a certain job) and the player defines their own gameplay roles for the characters based on your progression through various jobs and customization of the characters.
By contrast, in FF I the party you choose in the beginning only has meaning to the gameplay, while choice of job in FF III is fluid and contributes nothing to the actual character. They may get names in the DS remake, but you can make your job level 99 Black Mage a Ninja and your job level 99 Thief a Magus, and it makes no difference.
On a final note, which will spoil a bit of FF V’s story, swapping a character for another wholesale is a difficult thing to pull off. In the beginning of FF V, you have Galuf as a party member - he’s a tough old man, well-suited to being a physical fighter. Later in the game, your progress with his character is transported to a character named Krile - a young girl, best used as a mage. If you’ve been training Galuf solely as a Monk up until this point, suddenly you need to change the role you’ve defined for the character. On the other hand, if you know it’s coming, you can train him as a more general character such as a Blue Mage or Mystic Knight.
There’s something I’ve been working on for a few years now, but I’ve never actually mentioned to anyone. A personal quest of mine, I guess. It’s not really a secret, I’ve just never bothered to explain it. I told someone yesterday, though, and I think he was impressed, so I feel like posting about it now.
My goal is this: play every game in the main Final Fantasy series to completion. A dozen games right now, thirteen if you include FF X-2. I’ve finished some of the earlier NES titles in 20-30 hours, but the newer games are easily twice as long. More if you run around doing sidequests and finding secrets, which I tend to do. I’ll post my final times when I’m all done, but let’s just say I’ve put hundreds of hours into this series.
At the moment, I have three games left to finish: Final Fantasy V, Final Fantasy VI, and Final Fantasy VIII. I’ve put a few hours into FF V already, but I haven’t started the other two at all. At a wild guess, I’d say 40 hours each for FF V and VI, but VIII could take a while longer than that depending on how much extra stuff I do. It’s looking good, though - I think I can finish before the end of the year, even if I get a job for the summer.
I don’t know for sure when I started doing this. I think it was a little over a year ago that I told myself I’d actually finish them all, but it was a few years before that when I decided to collect all of the games. I still remember when I got each of the games, but the thing is - I rarely ever finished them. I actually did complete II, VII and IX before dedicating myself to it. But since last spring, I’ve finished FF I, III, IV, X, X-2, XII, and XIII. Most of those games only took 10-20 more hours to finish from when I’d stopped playing, which may sound ridiculous if you don’t play RPGs, but it means I was pretty close to the end.
Here are a few things I’ve learned so far:
There’s probably a lot more to be said than that, but I haven’t thought of it yet. You really need to compare individual games in order to notice this stuff, because the strong points of one game can shed light on the problems of another. So even though I’m almost done playing the games, I’m nowhere near finished thinking about them. I could easily write this much about Dissidia Final Fantasy, the fighting game that pits characters from across the series against each other. I intend to write a whole lot more about the stories and characters of FF XII and XIII.
I mean, someone’s gotta do it.
For my 300th post, I thought I’d go a little high-brow and talk about a book I’ve been reading called Beyond the Profits System by economist Harry Shutt. The subtitle is “Possibilities For a Post-Capitalist Era,” so that should give you a pretty good idea of what he’s about. I’m really not interested in economics and things like that, but I picked up the book for five bucks when I was buying a textbook, and it was certainly worth the price. It’s a pretty rough read, though - the writing is very academic, and I think it might actually be intended for use as a textbook. Considering I’ll never take the class it was used for, I can’t really verify any of what was in it. A cursory search reveals pretty much no information on it or the author, but that’s normal for a textbook.
With all that being said, I’m going to assume the book is credible until proven otherwise. The basic idea is that the current model of capitalism, focusing solely on growth and profits, is doomed to fail and needs to be replaced for the sake of public good. First of all, there’s the matter of absurd inequality - not only do we have countries that are far more prosperous than others, but within individual countries, there are people starving to death and others making money faster than they can spend it. Second of all, there’s something called “the business cycle” inherent in capitalism: eventually profits bottom out, and in order to get back the huge growth rates of the past, there needs to be a huge recession. I won’t get into it too much, but from what I understand, the idea is that capitalism revolves around investing excess capital in order to continuously get more. But eventually profitable investment opportunities run out, because there’s too much excess capital. So then you have crashes like the Great Depression, followed by comparatively amazing recovery.
The part that I found most interesting was a section on how companies could survive without pursuing maximum profit. Ideally, in whatever new system would replace capitalism, non-profit ownership of enterprises would be encouraged. Privately owned companies like we have now would be encouraged in different ways to not accumulate profit, such as tax breaks for distributing the money to their shareholders or employees. New companies could be publicly owned (nationally, or even locally) or owned cooperatively (for example, social enterprises). It’s hard to say which is more interesting - the problems this shows with capitalism, or the good that could be done by the alternatives.
The way things are currently, the shareholders and so on who create companies basically receive all the profits the company makes. I.e. the people who have lots of money, get to make more money. Employees get more or less the same salary regardless of how profitable their work has become for the company. Meanwhile, the goal of the company is to do one thing: maximize profits. Doing the “right” thing doesn’t matter, unless it happens to be the most profitable thing.
There are some pretty big parallels between the business of book publishing and video game publishing, so I’ll use those as examples. Some of the similarities are…
There are probably more similarities, and there are differences too (for example, authors are usually expected to promote their own books these days) but you should see the problems here. Economically, it makes perfect sense that only the most popular products actually turn a profit. It makes sense that writers/game developers wouldn’t get anything from the sale of their product until it actually turns a profit. They wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t make economic sense, right?
But it doesn’t make any logical sense, or emotional sense for that matter. Authors who don’t become massively successful with their first novels are basically forced to write until they can somehow pay off their initial advance. Game developers that don’t put out a huge success are shut down, and hundreds of jobs are lost. Publishers can gamble with people’s livelihoods by deciding what books and games are published. The vast majority of the time a game developer is closed down by a publisher, it’s really not their fault - see the Guitar Hero series, wait for the Call of Duty crash, and the closure of Pandemic Studios after the release of, arguably, their best game. Then we as consumers have to pay heavily inflated prices, mainly because of things like production costs that could be avoided through digital distribution.
This is why it’s so interesting to imagine how books and games could be funded in other ways, and in a way that puts the focus on the actual creators. I love holding a physical book, but I don’t like paying thirty dollars for a book - especially when the author gets, at best, a few dollars of that. Reading on my Kindle is wonderful, and paying ten bucks for a digital version of a book is lovely. I like to have a game’s case in my collection, too, but getting an indie game from Steam for ten bucks is almost absurdly convenient. Steam and Amazon probably take their cut from this, but otherwise, someone could create a game or a book and get actual money for it, right away. These services already exist! We don’t even need to change anything to take advantage of them!
As for funding, Kickstarter is pretty much the perfect example, although it could probably use some more accountability from the people getting the money. The Kickstarter for the PC version (and enhanced 360 version) of Cthulhu Saves the World is a perfect example of this. They only needed $3000, but they got twice that much. Now they’re going to sell the game, and a previous game they created, for $3 on Steam. Two games for three dollars. Development funded by the kind of people awesome enough to donate $750 dollars. If you look at the page, what amounts to a “pre-order” of the game was originally $24. They only needed 125 people to pitch in $25 in order to fund the game, and they got 110. The other fifteen people gave fifty dollars instead. And I’m going to get the game for three bucks! I really want to donate $25, but three bucks is a lot better for my budget :(
It’s probably a little bit harder with books, but I guess a great idea for a game could easily turn out badly, just as a great book idea could be poorly written. Even so, you create a Kickstarter or something, ask people to pay for the product in advance, and then you have enough money to survive while you’re creating it. Everyone wins in this situation. There are, literally, zero downsides. Except for publishers and retailers, who are no longer necessary in this system. Darn.
Just to wrap up, think of it this way: if you were a self-employed game developer or writer, you wouldn’t really need to “profit” from what you make. As long as there was enough money coming in, you could pretty much keep doing what you love forever. No need for a fragile salary based job, no need to worry about publishers, just a direct connection between the money and the creation of the game.
What a beautiful world such would be… - The World Ends With You
I’ve collected some links to post, but there’s something personal I’d much rather post so I’m doing that instead. It’s not the least bit interesting, but if I’m going to be selfish and talk about something uninteresting, I may as well give people the choice to hear it or not. I feel bad whining about stuff to people I know, anyway, so here’s me avoiding that… while also doing it in the most economic way possible. Hah!
Oh, and if you were terribly excited about me posting poetry, I don’t have my hands on it yet. You’ll see it when I do, though.
So anyway, I’m still unemployed. In theory, that should be great, because I “could” sit around all day and play video games and just enjoy life. Then when I magically get a job, I’ve already had my vacation in advance. Problem is, that job isn’t coming along, and it’s getting harder and harder to keep looking. There are no metaphors severe enough to describe my rapidly sinking standards, but still, no job. The odds get worse the more time goes on, really: January was probably prime time for applying, April was probably an ok shot given that I’d have four months of work, and the start of June is really pushing it.
It’s very easy to be pessimistic and say “nobody wants to hire me in a full time position for three months,” or “nobody is really hiring at this point anyway,” and things like that. It’s also easy to be a naive teenager and say things like “well, I might make two thousand bucks, but if I finish university with only two thousand bucks in debt, I’d be pretty happy.” Plus those things are a lot more fun than applying for jobs endlessly, either sending out e-mails or walking in and asking a manager if they’re hiring. That’s mainly just to make me feel better, though, and it feels a little bit false anyway.
The whole crux of the problem is that my mom is being overly rational and future-oriented about all of this. I wouldn’t really be stressed out about not having a job if I didn’t have someone breathing down my neck saying “well what are you going to do? take the summer off and play video games? go on a trip with the last of your money and not be able to afford to do anything while you’re there?” My mom is awesome, first of all, so I’m not about to say “yo screw off MOM, I’m an ADULT NOW RAAAH.” It’s not that she doesn’t have a point, either. Even so, this cycle of feeling-good-and-applying > not-getting-the-job > feeling-terrible-and-useless > not-applying-to-jobs is not that great.
Having money would be great, and jobs give you money, so in theory that would make having a job great. At what expense, though? Do I really want to flip burgers for three months?
Anyway, you’ve now been spared the trouble of thinking of something new to say about this whole topic. Not for the first time, probably, since I don’t have much else to talk about lately. There are more jobs to apply for, and I’m sure one of them is finally going to be the one I get, but I’m not really feelin’ it.
I’ll at least try to feel better about that, though. Makes life easier.
I watched Thor last night, and it was pretty good. Made my dad stay around so we could see the post-credits stuff, with the other nerds. I think they’re getting better with the whole comic book adaptation stuff - the first Iron Man, the Hulk movies from 2004 or whatever, most of those felt pretty incomplete. Iron Man 2 and Thor don’t really like an advertisement for the comics, or some kind of abridged version like novel adaptations. So that’s all good, and I would recommend seeing it for sure.
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Apparently my dad found a poem I wrote about the Halifax Explosion some years ago, and an unbiased third party told me that it was really good. He’s mentioned recently that I wrote such a thing, and I was slightly skeptical… But he told me enough about it that I accept it as a thing, so I’ll post it soon for you guys.
I actually wrote a number of other poems in junior high, mainly for/about Brittany. Perhaps luckily for you, they’ve all been lost. Eaten by my dog, actually. But I think a few of them were really, really good - to the point where I actively wish I could find them again. I remember a few lines, themes I used… It’s incredibly frustrating to know that I wrote these, but all that’s left is the little bits I remember.
I mean, if everything I’ve written on here were to disappear, I wouldn’t think years later “wow, that was some great stuff, I wish I could show it to people." I accept the possibility that if I were to find one of these poems, they wouldn’t be as good as I remember. Even so, I just feel like one of the best things I’ve ever written was eaten by my dog. That’s a crappy feeling, man! At least I’ve got the one, anyway.
I had told Cameron a while ago that I would make a post about my views on abortion. I’m finally doing that! First of all, I’m against abortion. There are many reasons to why I’m against it.
http://www.angelfire.com/ca/trance12/abortion.html
All of those facts are true. I did a lot of research,…
Right, I’m in a pretty argumentative mood, so I’m going to call this website out on its bullshit with its stupid fucking shitty music in the background and the spam of god-damn christian propaganda.
- A fetus, at as little as ten weeks old, already has all major organs in place and functioning, has developed or is developing these major organs, and features such as fingers and toes. The fetus has also developed a brain AND a complex nervous system, thus respond to stimuli and even feel pain.
Right, this here is wrong wrong wrong.
At ten weeks the embryo becomes a fetus.
This ‘article’ has already shown that they’re going to play with their words and that they’re anti-choice.
[Most pro-choice articles don’t give you bullshit, they’re not pro-abortion, they want people to have a choice and they generally have no/less bias because of certain things like religion. ]Edit: I’ve found a back-up of the article: http://www.plannedparenthood.org/files/PPFA/Facts_Speak_Louder_than_the_Silent_Scream_03-02.pdf
I’m so glad I wasn’t wrong about that website. I mean, it’s on angelfire. That alone was enough to keep me from looking at it, never mind my fairly solid belief that people should at least be able to make their own decisions on what’s right for them and their (potential) family.
Also I didn’t read any of the rest of what you posted from that article because the formatting was terrible. But it’s ok, really, because I don’t really want to argue about abortion. Realistically, most people aren’t ready for kids or will just be terrible parents. You could argue about the joys of being a parent and so on, but I don’t think bad parents feel that stuff. Kids know when they’re resented or unwanted, and it’s awful to raise a child in such an environment.
In short, if everyone had good parents, everyone would be awesome and life would be great.
I got a PSP recently, and I just finished FF VII: Crisis Core today (great game, a lot of its features and aesthetic were carried on to FF XIII, but even Sephiroth is more likable than everyone from the latter). I’ve been playing a lot of Dissida 012, too, which is also great and probably the only fighting game I’ve ever loved. Mainly because it’s pretty much 100% an RPG.
The third game I own, which I bought in order to snag a $50 discount on the cost of the PSP, is Dynasty Warriors Strikeforce. Let me tell you about this game. It’s going to be a lot less funny to read about, but I’m going to write it anyway so I never forget.
When you select “new game” from the main menu, you’re given the choice between three dynasties. There’s a green guy (benevolent), a blue guy (likes talent?) and a red guy (noble, possibly evil). The nice guy sounded like an ok dude, so I picked him.
Then I had to select from one of ten other guys. Wait, what? There’s a bunch of stuff that doesn’t make any sense until you start playing the game, so you just pick a guy that looks cool. I picked a guy with a big sword and maybe a spear hidden somewhere. Apparently, his name is Mu Chao.
For choosing the green guy, I got to watch a little cinematic about how he wants to help people and some warriors united under his banner. Then the narrator tells you “they gathered together and rose up like a dragon.”
Ten seconds later, they start glowing, turn into a dragon, and fly away.
A clear sign that this game is going to be well worth the negative ten bucks I paid for it. The ancient Chinese art of “turning oneself and companions into a dragon.” A lost art, obviously.
Some general tells you to go check the notice board, so you do, and there’s a mission to go beat up some bandits. Great, tutorial mission!
Or not, because the game doesn’t tell you the controls. In fact, it doesn’t tell you anything. You just press buttons and people die. You get points the more people you slaughter, and at the end of a mission, your points are converted into something else and you get experience points. I levelled up, and either because of that or from the mission, I gained proficiency points in a few weapons and ability points (defense, attack, life, etc.) and I still don’t know what any of that means.
Will I play this game for more than an hour? Who knows! As long as it’s easy and silly, it could be worth firing it up every once in a while.
Speaking of the creator of AVALANCHE, he’s got a long (but very interesting) article about the consumption-based nature of the gaming industry and the problems it’s causing. It’s called Of Games and Swine, for some reason, and I do recommend you read it. The crux of the issue is that not only are most gamers critically unaware of the medium (like the kind of people who only watch summer blockbuster films), nearly all the critics are, as well. I think this sentence about sums up the problem:
Our standards for professional videogame reviewers in this industry end right after “do you really like playing videogames and do you know how to write?”
Either most people don’t look at games as something with the same critical depth (not a great term, but hopefully you get the idea) as other mediums, or the people who do understand these things aren’t sharing their knowledge with enough people. It’s pretty easy to learn how to critically analyze a film or a book, but that’s not the case with games. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to analyze. The people who understand these things are going to have to explain it to the rest of us, so we can all get past the basic, literal understanding of the games we’re playing.
For the most part, any time someone tries to critically analyze a game, they limit themselves to tools available from other mediums. It’s easy to analyze the music in a game, or its art, or its writing. But few people seem to understand how to analyze the gameplay, or the level design. Or they just aren’t doing it in public. I’ll admit that there are probably plenty of games designed simply based on how player feedback - “oh, they tend to run out of ammo here, we’ll have to add a supply station” - but that doesn’t mean every game is designed without any deeper meaning.
One final note on this, Clint Hocking (known for Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Far Cry 2, and being a super smart guy) is one of those people with the knowledge to critically analyze a game. I actually don’t know where I read or heard this, but it’s probably somewhere on his blog… Anyway, he mentioned somewhere an encounter he’d put in one of the Splinter Cell games where the enemy soldier begged for his life and mentioned his family. From what I understand, you can either kill enemies or simply knock them out, and the idea was to make the enemy more than just a tough, anonymous grunt. Then he said “if one single person even understood the reason I put that there, I’d be happy.” Out of hundreds of thousands of people who likely played the game, he figures not a single one will understand what he was getting at.
Turns out that a number of people did get it, and have spoken about it in various places, but I can’t decide which is more tragic: the fact that we don’t truly understand the games we play, or the fact that the brilliant minds behind them don’t take the time to share their knowledge. If they would collaborate, create a place to share knowledge and spread the kind of critical understanding that allows them to make great games… If such a thing were to happen, I’d say it would only take ten years to establish the kind of widespread critical understanding found in other mediums.
It’s Sunday, and I have Some Things for you! First, some good news: PSN is back up in the US and Canada, coming with a firmware update that does nothing but inform you that you should change your password.
Next up is FromWhereToWhere, a firefox extension that “threads” your history, showing you how you got to a specific page. As in, if you were on your dashboard and click on the link for the extension, then go to wikipedia, then go through a bunch of articles, it would show each of the steps along the way. I used to use TreeStyleTabs in a similar way, but this is far more useful. I highly recommend it. If you’re worried about security, they say it just uses firefox’s existing history tracking. Theoretically, you should be able to use it on older history as soon as you install it.
On a much more niche note is AVALANCHE, a fan-made brawler based on Final Fantasy VII and starring Tifa for no real reason. This game actually introduced me to OCRemix, as it uses music from the stellar FF VII remix album, Voices of the Lifestream. It’s a decent game, and if you actually want to try it out, there’s a recent beta available on the creator’s website. You may also want to download the font changing mod here.
Back to general interests, I’d like you to watch the Extra Credits video from last week, Gamifying Education. If there are any teachers you particularly like, you should share it with them. If there are any teachers you dislike, you should definitely share it with them! I doubt one video on the internet is enough to reform the education system. However, it’s more than enough to help individual teachers, and that’s better than no progress at all.
Also on The Escapist is an older Extra Considerations article about console gaming. Extra Considerations has Yahtzee, the writer(?) behind Extra Credits, and another smart guy called Movie Bob discussing various topics in gaming. Guest writers come in sometimes, too. Anyway, this particular article is all about how little innovation there is in the industry, and how the Wii came and went without many games actually using its controller for anything interesting. Also, how video games shouldn’t be limited by what the player can physically do in real life. Could you play Final Fantasy VII with Kinect? Of course not, because you can’t jump fifty feet in the air or use a sword as tall as your body.
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Wrapping things up, I’ve got an anime recommendation: Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica, aka Madoka Magica. I don’t want to say a lot about it, because it’s best left as a surprise, but check it out and don’t be fooled by the cute and cuddly exterior. It’s not on crunchyroll, sadly, so you’ll have to find it yourself. This tiny paragraph doesn’t do it justice, but I liked it a lot and I think it’s worth your time.
It’s been a looooong time… since I’ve done a music post, that is. I’d kind of forgotten about doing them, until I started going through my archive last week. So today I bring you The Attic And The World Of Emotions by death metal band Sadist!
The first songs I listened to by Sadist were from their latest album, Season in Silence, and I liked them immediately. Off the top of my head, their other albums haven’t grabbed me as much, considering I don’t remember them much. But I really like Season in Silence, and the rest is at least good enough. Or I haven’t listened to them enough.
Lyrics here, because I still like DarkLyrics and viewing an entire album at once is awesome. How am I supposed to read a concept album’s lyrics, or notice some recurring theme, if it isn’t all on one page? Come on, internet.
So instead of being productive last night and this morning, I went through all my old posts and tagged them. Then with the help of my lovely assistant, Vael Victus, I edited my theme a bit to add a link to my ask page (which has always existed, but never been used, because I never mentioned it and didn’t know how to create a link in HTML) and a tag cloud on the left to make use of those wonderful tags.
I wish I could embed the cloud in a post, as a way to show you all the tags, but I can’t think of any way to do that. So go here and wait for them to load, over on the left. Then click the tag you’re interested in!
I just need to remember to tag all my future posts, so that the tags continue to be useful. If you don’t share every single one of my interests, it’ll save you from having to read through absolutely everything I’ve ever posted. My only regret is that by trying to avoid making multiple posts per day, I’ve made a lot of posts that cover multiple subjects. So you’ve got posts that are tagged with anime, books, links, and gaming. If you’re looking at the books tag, you’ve got this giant post and only the last paragraph really matters to you. Sucks for you, I guess.
I still need to fix up the colours, and then I’ll be marginally happy with the design. Actually, I’d be happy with the design if the colours weren’t atrocious. FINISHED! Still, now I’ve got tags and you can see them and use them maybe!
This post is going to be really short to make up for the last one being really long. I didn’t realize how long it was D: But that’s ok, nobody was forcing you to read it.
I’ve been “relaxing” a lot recently, which is to say “doing anything except working.” At the moment, the work I need to do is:
1) Get a job
2) Work on the experiment I’ll be running in the fall (write 62 more sentences, work on ethics proposal)
So this is me admitting that I’ve been screwing around for a few weeks and need to stop for a little while. Sadly, these two things are more important than writing beautiful tumblr posts, playing video games, and watching anime.
I’ve set up LeechBlock to keep me in line again, and now that I’ve publicly stated my responsibilities, I’m hoping for some help in sticking to them. So my job is 1) and 2), and your job is 3) abuse me if I tell you I’m not working.
I’ll be back in a week!
I’m calling this Bad Writing Showcase 1 because I can’t think of a better name, even though I hope there won’t be a Bad Writing Showcase 2. Still, I could screw up another post, and I could also showcase writing that isn’t mine. Bad Writing Showcase 1 just gives a better sense of closure than “Bad Writing Showcase.”
Moving on. Below is a post I wrote a little over a week ago, which I never published because I felt pretty bad about it. I spent a lot of time writing it and trying to make it good, but as it is now, it can’t be what I want it to be. I’d have to do a complete re-write of it (my old Persona post is in a similar situation) and I just don’t really feel like doing that. When I say it isn’t good, what I really mean is that it isn’t good by my standards - I know I can write better than this. I’ve made these same mistakes before, and learned how to fix them. In fact, it’s eerily similar to the MacBeth essay I wrote. I’ve also made the same mistakes a ton of times in other blog posts, but it’s getting to the point where I need to do better.
Much like my MacBeth essay, if it’s taken paragraph by paragraph, the writing is pretty solid. But much like my MacBeth essay, it was written without a thesis or an outline. It’s just a bunch of slightly related thoughts strung together, with a sloppy introduction and conclusion that try desperately to make some cohesive point out of all the individual paragraphs. It’s ok to sit down and throw out a big rant, because I can post whatever I want and who cares if anyone likes it or thinks it’s good? But I kind of want to take things I’ve written and say “hey, look at this, it’s really damn good and incredibly smart.” Also I fantasize about being paid to write smart things for video game blogs but that’s a risky proposition. So, in short, if I wanted to do those things, I would need to apply all my knowledge about writing to at least a few posts.
That means taking the time to plan out my thoughts in advance, starting with a clear thesis and making sure everything I write serves to support it, and revising to fix the messy spots. I’ve been working on that for a while, and I’ve got a couple sheets of paper covered in notes for when I sit down to write one of these wonderful posts. It’s getting to the point where the individual paragraphs I had planned are becoming essays in their own right. I need to get other things straightened out first before I can start writing seriously, though.
Anyway. I’m not going to go through this and point out everything that’s wrong with it, because I wrote it and I don’t want to tear my own work apart. Plus I don’t want to be tempted to improve it. I may start over at some point, but for now, it’s testament to the day I realized I can’t expect perfection to simply flow out of my fingertips. If you’re really bored, check out older posts and see how I couldn’t find a way to write a solid conclusion because they suffered the same problems.
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Inspired by a MovieBob episode I overheard my brother watching, in which he has the following to say about film critics and the general population:
It’s often said that the problem with film critics is that we’re out of touch with normal people, because we see hundreds of films a year and thus get tired of formula quicker, and bored more easily, than people who only see a dozen or less. As such, we tend to overpraise certain films for things like narrative abstractions, explicit sexuality, taboo subject matter, or creative violence, because we’re just desperate for anything that surprises us - and conversely that we’re overly dismissive of otherwise solid films because they aren’t different enough to keep us awake.
He mentions gaming, as well, to say that if every gamer were like Yahtzee or the Extra Credits crew, we wouldn’t get things like Halo: Reach (as he called it, just Halo 3 with a jetpack added). I don’t think that’s anywhere near as interesting as a subject, though - it’s just simple economics, and it applies to games, movies, books, television… If it sells, you make it, even if it’s derivative/unoriginal/starting to get stale after eleven iterations/not even that good/etc.
Gaming is in a worse position than other mediums, because it doesn’t have the long history of great examples that break the mold that other mediums have, and it’s still a commercial industry at its core. Most games today are made as merely average commodities, as opposed to the exceptional (Portal 2) or the intellectual (), and that’s just how the industry is right now. There’s nothing wrong, per se, with making your game based on mechanics or “fun,” but it’s not really enriching anyone’s life if you have nothing interesting to say beyond “look how realistic our explosions are!” If you don’t have any issues with that, by all means, make what sells.
But what I’m really here to talk about is the gaming public (your parents, perhaps your children, your co-workers who don’t know what a ‘source engine’ is) and the way they’re different from gamers. It’s not just the gaming media that have completely different ideas and expectations about games from everyone else - the gaming media is for gamers, by gamers, and we share their ideas and expectations. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they share ours. But to be accepted as a medium and an art form, games are going to have to deal with the radical differences in its audience. Things are better than they used to be - smartphones and the Wii have brought gaming to the general public, but compared to books and film, it’s still a niche.
People like your parents and your “non-gamer” co-workers and friends probably play as many video games per year as I watch movies: a handful at best. “Gamers” either play or keep up with more games per year than so-called “non-gamers” have played in their entire lives. We may scoff at minigame collections for the Wii, or cry that “Angry Birds is just a reskinned version of a flash game I played years ago,” but for the average person, these are totally new to them. We may have played similar games in the past, perhaps even better games, to the ones “non-gamers” buy in droves. But there are only a few million “gamers.” Meanwhile, there are billions of “non-gamers.” Very few developers can afford to cater to the gamers now, because the audience isn’t big enough to sustain the costs of development for modern systems. Of the few million gamers out there, how many only buy strategy games? How many only buy shooters? Each genre has its own niche audience among the greater gamer population, while “non-gamers” don’t even know what those terms mean - they just buy the fun games.
Hollywood makes films for people who only watch a few movies per year, and film critics complain about it. But film is accepted as a medium because the average person still watches some movies, and they’ve probably even watched a few really good ones. The absolute gems of film are just as accessible to them as the summer action films - all they have to do is buy a ticket (or DVD) and sit down to watch. Video games still aren’t accepted as a medium because they’re foreign and strange to most people, who only play those few accessible titles. The difference is that games made for people who have been gaming for years are NOT as accessible as Wii Sports Resort, and the average person can’t get over that hurdle. My dad will occasionally take our Wii and Wii Sports Resort with him when he goes out, and play it with people who have never even seen it before. Could you do the same with Starcraft 2 or The Witcher? Of course not, because they rely on you knowing a lot of other things that you’ve learned from previous games.
(Side note: among the people who play games on their computers at all, I would guess that the proportion of “gamers” to “non-gamers” is far more skewed than that for dedicated gaming consoles and handhelds, making core games and complication the rule rather than the exception)
MovieBob said that film critics are “out of touch” with normal people, but he went on to justify that in the context of a film critic. To him, being out of touch and having higher standards for films is no problem, because it leads to a greater appreciation of the medium that “normal people” don’t get when they only watch movies like Transformers 2. But that justification only works if you care about film as a medium, and aren’t one of the people who just want to see something fun or interesting. Hopefully something fun and interesting that blows up. The average person will still see the film critic as out of touch, because to them, Transformers 2 was still fun to watch, and the film critic is just too jaded to enjoy it.
So what happens to video games? A medium built on us, the gamers, all of us out of touch with what normal people can handle? If you tell someone who hasn’t been gaming for years to “press the L3 button” on a PlayStation controller, they’ll just glare at you. Using a piece of plastic that has four directional buttons, four face buttons, four shoulder triggers, two analog sticks (which press down to provide two more buttons) and now three “control” buttons (start, select, and the PS/X button in the middle of 360 and PS3 controllers) is not a skill most people have. Swinging your arm to swing a sword is much easier to understand, with the next best thing being a button that says “kick” used to make your character kick. Why is it any wonder that normal people like my father can play games on the Wii or in an arcade (granted, not very common these days, but they can handle it), yet he can’t figure out how to watch a movie on my PS3… or how to turn it off afterwards?
And now, I realize the solution is incredibly simple. Just wait. In another decade or two, everyone will have grown up playing video games. Problem solved. When most people were illiterate, books didn’t have much widespread acceptance as a medium. “Moving pictures” were probably incredibly frightening to people who didn’t grow up with them. Now that video games are in the hands of an audience at least ten times the size of what it used to be, it’s only a matter of time. Yes, video games are complicated. Yes, most people don’t understand them. But that’s changing, as more and more games fall somewhere between “dead simple” and “requires fifteen different buttons to play.” Before long, there will be plenty of games for people of every skill level, and then the medium will be accepted by the general public.
On friday I had the wonderful pleasure of experiencing Video Games Live - basically, music from video games performed by an orchestra (with choir). First of all, holy crap, the music was good on its own. When you knew the piece, that was just a bonus. Second of all, it was a pretty sweet event all told, music aside - they had booths from Microsoft and Sony, demo hardware, a Guitar Hero tournament, a costume contest… It’s pretty much the closest thing to a gaming convention Ottawa will ever have. I highly recommend you see them if they’re playing in your area.
Let’s move on to the summary of all the fun I had (that you didn’t :( ), shall we? I don’t know about you, but that sounds great to me! From what I understand, here’s what Video Games Live does: play shows anywhere there’s an orchestra willing to play the music, with video accompaniment of cutscenes and gameplay from the games. They travel around and play with local orchestras, playing an assortment of the 80 or so songs the creator has arranged for the project. They try to play different songs everywhere they go, so it’s worth going more than once. They take suggestions on songs, too, so if I got to choose I’d love to see Assault of the Silver Dragons from FF IX, or Eternity ~ Memory of Lightwaves ~ from FF X-2, or even Destati from Kingdom Hearts. I would have been the happiest boy in the world if either of those were played.
Well, life is full of minor disappointments. They played lots of other great stuff, though! In no particular order, they played a medley of retro games (Joust, Centipede, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, etc.), the opening sequence for Assassin’s Creed 2 (literally, they played the video behind, and did the music as it played), a similar video-and-music arrangement for God of War 3 (not sure if the video is from the game or not, as I haven’t played it, but it showed stuff from all three games so the song may have been a mix as well), an arrangement of songs from the Halo series, a medley of vanilla Megaman songs (from Megaman to Megaman 10, but no Megaman X or any of that stuff), an arrangement of character themes for Street Figher 2 (if Guile’s Theme is in SF 2, they played it) a piano medley of Final Fantasy songs (this made me so happy, I knew every song XD), a piano medley of Mario songs (half of which was played while blindfolded, and received the night’s first standing ovation), and maybe a few others I’m forgetting… There’s more, but the others bear special mention, so I’ll get to that.
They picked two people out of the crowd to compete for a high score in Frogger, while the orchestra played the background music. The ultimate winner was a man lovingly nicknamed “Jesus” by the crowd. Jesus only hopped on the lady frog once. What a great monogamous example for us all.
After the intermission, the winner of the Guitar Hero tournament was brought on stage to play a song alongside the orchestra (on Guitar Hero, obviously) - if he could score 175,000 points on Hard, playing Jump by Van Halen, he’d win some stuff. His response: “I want to play it on expert!” He got 200,000 points in the end. Pretty cool.
They also played Baba Yetu (the song from Civilazation IV that won a Grammy, the first for any video game), accompanied by the original singer for the song, because apparently he’s from Toronto. Pretty sweet.
The vocalist for all the songs was Laura “FluteLink” Intravia, who (I think) was recruited by the group after they saw a skit she’d performed and uploaded to youtube. She did the skit live, with a plush Navi over her shoulder, which was cool.
Now I’ll give you three guesses what the finale was. Here’s a couple of hints: the title ends with the word “angel”, it had to be played by an orchestra and a choir, and it’s more than ten years old.
If you called it before the end of that sentence, congrats. If you didn’t, you need to brush up on your gaming history and dust off a copy of Final Fantasy VII - the finale was One Winged Angel, and it was great. Lots of people did their best to sing along, mostly poorly, because who remembers all the lyrics anyway? You know, except the Sephiroth part. While it was an obvious choice for the finale, that certainly doesn’t make it a bad choice, because it was a totally fitting finish.
Everyone stood and cheered, and a chant for one more song rose up around the room. It continued for a minute or two, and died down a little when it started to seem like we weren’t going to get it. Then it got a bit stronger, and finally they came back for an arrangement of music from Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross. Everyone pulled out their backlit screen of choice (DS, cell phone, PSP) and waved them around. Probably looked really, really awesome from down on the stage. One guy was waving a laptop. A couple of the guys we’d met up with while we were there waved the copies of Chrono Cross they’d bought just before coming to the show. Lucky bastards got them for twenty bucks…
All jealousy aside! After that song was done, everyone stood again and clapped and clapped until they said “if you guys keep standing, we’ll just have to keep playing!” Spoiler: we stood. For our second encore, we got a rendition of Still Alive, with lyrics up on the big screen for the two people who didn’t know them already. Everyone sang along, and it was great.
Everything about it was great.
vael:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/92000/
Yes, it looks bad. That’s what makes the game look so delicious, because you can tell they have an official marketing person who wrote the content for that page.
BREATHTAKING VISUALS
I had my breath taken once in portal, when I saw that you can put…
Here’s what Jim Sterling had to say about Hydrophobia: Prophecy:
Nothing is yet known about the game, other than it is a thing. Episodic games can have a habit of disappearing before reaching their conclusion, so this is terrific news for the three Hydrophobia fans on the planet, otherwise known as “two engineers from Dark Energy Digital and one of the engineers’ autistic kids.”
Jim gave the game a bad review, basically saying it sucked and was boring and lame, and someone from the company called him repeatedly to complain about his review and tell him he was playing the game wrong. Yes, their game is actually wonderful, but you won’t realize it unless you play it properly. Too bad the developers didn’t include instructions for their way to play the game.
A couple of weeks ago, I set off from my house with a backpack full of games I knew I’d never play again. My brother had agreed with all of my choices, and we’d had them sitting in a box, waiting to be disposed of in any way possible, for a long time. This was stuff like Ape Escape Pumped & Primed, Pokemon Battle Revolution, games we either picked up in a bargain bin or as a well-intentioned gift. Maybe a few that seemed like a good idea at the time (Star Wars Force Unleashed, Ridge Racer 7). We’d tried selling them to our friends, through a yard sale, and we just couldn’t find anybody willing to give us any decent price for them.
So I took them to the one place I knew would be forced to take even the worst game off of my hands: GameStop. I looked at the pile of games, and I said to my brother: “I almost feel bad for making them take these games. I’d refuse, if I were them.” I apologized when I went in, and the guy (the manager, I think) laughed. I unpacked all the games, he rang them in, and the total came up to around $90. If you buy a used game when you trade something in, they give you an extra 50% credit. New total: $134. The catch: I had to use all the credit right away.
So I bought Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood used, which was 100% worth it. Then I bought Final Fantasy Tactics A2, also used. With $70 left, I couldn’t think of anything to get, and ended up getting Dead Space and Dead Space 2 - both used. I didn’t really want Dead Space 2, given that I haven’t played the first, so I asked my brother and we agreed to return it in exchange for a Portal 2 pre-order.
This was definitely a great deal for me - I got rid of a box full of junk, and scored four games in exchange. But does that make it right? I got, literally, dollars and cents for most of the games. I got Arc the Lad: End of Darkness for $10 in a bargain bin, and they gave me $0.37 for it. That Ape Escape game got me $0.45. Pokemon Battle Revolution was worth about twenty bucks, and Yoshi’s Island 2 was worth $15. All of the games I sold them will be sold for a much higher price, the profits going solely to GameStop. The three games I bought used didn’t contribute anything to the developers beyond what they got from the first sale. Some people like to make the argument that “used game sales drive new game purchases” - yet GameStop gave me $45 just for buying one single used game from them. I could have just bought a $10 used game from a bargain bin, and gotten that bonus credit. There are no restrictions on it, except with pre-orders I think. You think they’d be doing that if it didn’t make them a profit?
So, in short, I may be a bad (or at least selfish) person. I made a profit for a large corporation, and I contributed nothing to the people who genuinely deserve the money for the games.
edit: I traded in exactly 30 games, if I counted the receipt properly - so an average of $3 each
You already know that I used to be depressed, right? If that’s a surprise to you, read that first. I haven’t read it since I first wrote it, so I don’t know how I feel about it. I’m sure it’s ok though.
The reason I say that is because I’ve been kind of doubtful for the past month or so since we got into the psychological disorders section of my psychology class. The “worst case scenario” they describe for depression is being absolutely incapable of functioning normally. Not getting out of bed for weeks, stuff like that. “Heaven forbid, you might even become suicidal” quipped my professor. Given that I always managed to scrape by, I guess that means my depression wasn’t really that bad.
That is, if you accept the “it could be worse, so it’s not that bad” form of logic. It’s probably better to place depression (I’m sure the analogy would work for other problems, too) on a sort of exponential scale similar to the Richter scale used for earthquakes. A 2.0 earthquake is 10 x 10, while a 4.0 earthquake is 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 - a lot more than twice as bad. Being unable to get out of bed is a totally different level of magnitude than having a life devoid of joy and happiness, but I don’t think that changes things. It’s way worse, but the latter is still bad.
The other thing I kind of want to rail against is what my professor said about becoming suicidal being the end of the line for depression. That’s really not the case. Again with a math analogy, because they’re super easy, becoming suicidal is probably more like the area of a rectangle. Being depressed for a long time (length) is just as bad as being extremely depressed (width). A rectangle that’s 10 x 4 has as much area as one that’s 4 x 10. Claiming that only people who are as depressed as you can be will become suicidal is just false.
So, in sum, I’d still say that I was depressed and that it sucked a lot. It feels pretty distant to me, now, so it’s easy to say it wasn’t so bad - but only if I forget what it felt like at the time.
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Now here’s where this post becomes relevant: my brother is incredibly similar to me. All of the reasons I became depressed, all the despair I had in my little ten year old mind, are just as relevant for him as they were for me. I know this sounds stupid, but it’s hard being a smart kid, especially when being smart doesn’t mean you’ll succeed. He’s as smart as I ever was, probably smarter when it comes to math and science. But he isn’t getting the grades I did, which is just unfair. He wants to be an eccentric math professor, and I can totally see him being that eccentric math professor, but the universities aren’t going to see it that way when they look at his marks.
Making matters worse is the fact that my parents expect everything out of him that they expected of me, and he’d naturally have as much trouble dealing with that as I did. It’s hard being perfect all the time, you know? But I escaped that by taking those expectations into myself - my parents would probably accept 80’s at university, but I want the 90’s for myself. And I get them, with enough effort. Or with very little effort (usually) in junior high and most of high school.
Except he isn’t getting those grades all the time. My dad gives him a really, really hard time for that. My mom is better with it, but she still pushes him.
Plus we moved away from all his friends. He’s got a couple here, but I don’t think there’s anyone he’s really close to. Certainly nothing like what I had at his age, which was an immense help to me.
In short, my brother is depressed.
My mom brought it up with our doctor (or some doctor, at any rate) and they said “we’ll get you to a psychologist in a month or so.” Ok, great. Give him someone to talk to and work through his problems. Then they said “in the meantime, have him take these antidepressants.”
You can probably guess I have a problem with that. You don’t just give people treatment without any sort of diagnosis! If someone walks in and says “I have a heart condition,” you don’t give them pills and send them off for a month. Pills are meant to solve physiological (chemical, biological, etc.) problems, and they do that by making physiological changes. Changes in your physiology, especially in brain chemistry, screw with your body until it can adjust. That’s why medication has side effects. You know why antidepressants sometimes say “may cause suicidal thoughts”? Because they mess with your neurotransmitters (like hormones, but in the brain), and if the problem isn’t related to neurotransmitters, you’ll be creating symptoms that were never there.
Long story short, on average, people tend to become more suicidal in the first few weeks of taking antidepressants. He’s been on them now for about two weeks, with some pretty bad side effects (incredibly dizzy, slept all day on sunday) but I don’t think he was suicidal to the point of actually hurting himself. What if he had been? What if he never got to see that psychologist in a month, because he didn’t adjust well to the pills and couldn’t take any more?
Even aside from all of that, there’s the simple fact that psychological disorders are caused by more than just neurotransmitter problems. There are social issues (family life, friends, etc.), cognitive issues (bad thought habits > depression > bad thought habits), pre-existing conditions to consider (personality disorders, general physical problems) and plenty of other things that contribute. Antidepressants aren’t going to help someone with an inferiority complex, or an abusive partner, or a bad habit of blaming themselves and being pessimistic. That is why a psychologist studies for many years to make a diagnosis and (hopefully) take all the possibilities into account before beginning the appropriate treatment. And that’s without even getting into the possibility that there’s a vicious circle going on (negative thoughts > low serotonin levels?), leading to treatment of symptoms instead of the underlying cause.
Anyway, people are sometimes bad at their jobs and make irresponsible choices.
I love how they’re against spending money on things they don’t agree with wasting money, deficit spending, national debt… and taxes. So what, if the government would just quit spending their darn money, they wouldn’t need to tax anyone?
Let’s run the government as a not-for-profit organization! Donations only! Yaaaaay!
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On a related note, I think I should be the guy on the left in the BTP picture.
Before it stops being topical, I’m going to post a couple of Ars Technica articles rather than make one of the posts I have floating around in the back of my head. I’m not sure how much I want to say about this, because it’s all information I’ve cultivated from intelligent people writing blog posts I couldn’t hope to source now. At any rate, here’s the first link:
Or, in plain English, more properly called “Self-Entitled Whining, Lack of Industry Knowledge, and Free Bonus Stuff Isn’t Good Enough For Me.” I’m going to look at his points in order, because the fact is, these things don’t happen just to piss you off and keep you from playing the game you bought. Not only that, but none of these things even have anything to do with “new” games! Buying a game used doesn’t solve any of these issues, except perhaps that you don’t get the free DLC codes that the previous owner probably used.
Or worse, you DO get the codes, and they’ve already been used. Jerks.
I don’t want to install the game, or an update.
A) Installing a game is one thing developers use to make the game perform better. You know how load times are practically a thing of the past? That’s because we don’t have to load every new area off of the disk when you move across some arbitrary boundary point. A lot of games will make installs optional on PS3, which is nice, but it’s probably easier for them to force you to do it. Go make lunch or something.
B) The code sent to the manufacturer who makes the physical discs you buy (or to the publisher who controls the digital platform you’re downloading on) is likely months old, in order to give enough time for the discs to be made (or the content to be reviewed by Sony/Microsoft/Steam). Is the development team supposed to twiddle their thumbs until release, or start working on DLC expansions (or the sequel)? Not only that, but patches cost a lot of time and money to push through Sony/Microsoft on consoles. That’s why they don’t release patches to fix every little problem, because it’s just not worth it. For example, a problem people had with Costume Quest was fixed if you bought the DLC for it, because it just wasn’t worth the money to patch it.
So there’s two things at work here: it’s more economical, and that’s important when you’re spending millions of dollars on developing a game. And the second thing is that you get a better product after the patch, and the game can be released six months sooner, so why complain about it? Unless you have a dial-up connection, it’s going to take you two minutes to get the patch. Go to the bathroom while you wait.
I don’t want to input a stack of codes.
Gosh, getting free stuff is just awful. It’s hard to say for sure if the content you’re getting would have been on the disc if it weren’t DLC, because that really depends on the individual game. Aside from that, I guess this is the only one that’s relevant to buying new vs used. The goal is to reward people who buy new, and/or punish those who buy used, and packing in DLC is a perfectly fine way to do that. Assuming the content really isn’t on the disc, you are getting free stuff. Now, if these codes were abolished, one of two things would happen: the game a few months later to add some DLC, or you’d have to fork over five bucks for it the day of launch. DLC codes don’t seem so bad now, do they?
I don’t want to watch an unskippable trailer for your next game.
I don’t know about this. Does this actually happen? I’ve never experienced it. This is a good point, I guess. Why anyone would do it is beyond me, so I’m glad I haven’t played a game that does this.
I don’t want to make a new account for your online service.
There aren’t that many services to sign up for anymore. You’ve got an EA account for BioWare and (Dark)Spore and Dead Space, and you’ve got a Uplay account for Ubisoft, and maybe on PC you have an old GameSpy account… I’m sure I’m missing some, but for the most part these kinds of accounts are from publishers or something and not game-specific. Most of them come with free stuff, too, so why not use them? Having an EA account lets you get free Dragon Age stuff, having a Uplay account lets you get free Assassin’s Creed stuff and upload your save data to their servers. It’s really not that bad, and it’s great for them because they can track your stuff more accurately, pimp their brand a bit, and if they’re doing it right give you some sort of reward for using the service. Alternatively, if it’s to sign into their servers or whatever, that kind of sucks. But it’s not different from making an account for an MMO.
The one legitimate argument against this is when the Terms of Service basically say that you don’t own your game, as has happened with Dragon Age II (turns out that was an error, allegedly) and Dragon Age: Origins (server problem) recently.
Boy that was way too much. Well, onto the next link!
This is a long one, but it can be basically summed up by two graphs later in the article:
Mass Effect 2 is a kind of oddity among the group, considering it’s very story driven and a lot of players were probably coming in from the first game. Red Dead Redemption, Super Meat Boy, and Shank, all of which were very well reviewed, have abysmal completion rates. Essentially, most of the people who played those games probably didn’t see the last half of the games. If you’d released the game with half as much content, 30% of the people (a very vocal minority) would have complained, while everyone else would have finished it and been perfectly satisfied.
I don’t know what the solution to all of this is. I know I don’t finish the vast majority of the games I buy. Yet I do like to have more content in the good ones. I really don’t mind the multiple almost-endings in Persona 4, because any extra time spent with that game was just great. On the other hand, I feel kind of cheated that I spent so much time on Final Fantasy XIII, considering I didn’t enjoy it that much and just felt obligated to finish it.
What would be really interesting is if some data like this was available for older games. I’d love to see how many people made it through older, 40+ hour RPGs (western and eastern) and how many managed to finish shorter titles. We know players don’t see most of the content in a game, yet demand that it exists, but we don’t know how things used to be either. Could be that just as many games were going unfinished.
I don’t think we’ll ever see 100% completion rates, no matter how perfect the fit between length and quality becomes. But then a class average of 70% is considered phenomenal in a large first year university class (more people take the course than there are people who care about doing well), and considering the even larger sample of people who play a given game, you could probably expect something a bit lower on any game longer than two hours.
ok that’s enough I’m going to go have lunch now, too bad I don’t have a game to install
Taken from Abstergo Industries phone records
Dated April, 2011
I take a great risk in sharing this audio file with you. But you must know: everything around you has been engineered to keep you subservient - to a master with a million faces. Look as hard as you like - all you’ll find is one of its masks, a mere front, designed to throw you off their scent. The true mastermind controls everything…
except us.
All I can say is awkwardness.
He must not like asians because you’re definitely pretty.
If only every relationship in life could be based on physical attractiveness. The world would be so much better that way!
/awful, totally rude sarcasm
I think guys only insist on asking who a girl likes when they know it’s them. That’s the only reason I ever did it, at any rate. I dunno. High school.
ok look java I know we’ve had our differences in the past
but we’ve had some great times too
so please stop making all of the blue objects in my game go backwards
I don’t even know how you could screw that up
but the red ones work just fine
so yeah
edit1: fixed the blue ones, now the red ones are going backwards
it’s a problem with the sign, if you move something in a negative x/y, the sign gets lost amid all the pythagorean calculations and whatnot
brb fixing it for good
I went to Carleton’s varsity banquet last night, even though I’m not on the actual varsity fencing team. They put my name on the list without even asking any questions, and I actually just walked in and sat down at the table without even showing my ticket (luckily enough, because I didn’t have the ticket). Which is all to say that it wasn’t exactly an exclusive event.
Anyway! The banquet itself isn’t really important, and there’s nothing really interesting to say about it. What is interesting, though, is what happened afterwards. I was there for about two and a half hours, with maybe a couple hundred people there. We were unlucky enough to get the table closest to the speakers, so the music was so loud you had to lean towards the people beside you to talk to them. When all the awards had been given out, I basically just said goodbye to my friend (and none of the other people I kind of know) and took off as quickly as I could. I’m sure it was rude and etc. but I just wanted out! So I left, and I’m walking around wearing a suit, and I was just so glad to be alone. I missed the bus, met up with a guy I kinda know and hadn’t spoken to all night (he was at a different table), and he knew the way to the light rail train station so we could get back to Carleton and I could take the bus from there.
After we got off the train and he left, I just started getting incredibly tired, as well as an instant headache. I’ll blame that part on the music. The other thing is I started thinking about stuff I should have done at the banquet (actually socialized with people, for example) and being lightly miserable. Really just wanted to get home and crawl into bed. So I hopped on the bus and did that, and remembered that, oh yeah, I’m really introverted. And that’s what this post is really about!
I don’t dislike people in general, and I like the people I know. I’m not trying to avoid you! Really! What happens is this: I need to be alone when I work, because it’s really hard to keep up three conversations and write an essay at the same time. When I want to relax, I prefer to be by myself. And then suddenly I’m “too busy” to sign into Miranda and talk to the people I know and love. And I say I’ll be around more often, because being alone all the time is depressing and bad, and then it doesn’t really happen. And that sucks.
The absolute worst case scenario is when I either spend a lot of time with a few people (having friends over for the entire weekend like I used to in junior high and high school) or any amount of time with a lot of people (parties, banquets). Then I get mentally and emotionally drained, and it puts me off for a long time afterwards. When I went to the Halloween party in October, I was miserable literally all weekend. It isn’t as bad this time, though I don’t know why. I’m feeling mostly better, at any rate. Having a hard time getting settled in to work, though.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure this is an actual thing that happens to people other than just me. Odds are it’ll seem familiar if you’re introverted, because I’ve realized in retrospect that it has pretty much always happened and I just never realized it until I really thought about it. Maybe you’ll notice it from now on.
Ok this is getting long and I’m really just procrastinating. Tl;dr I half-ass an apology, rationalize my failure to socialize, half-heartedly justify my continued status as a hermit, and try to remember from now on to accept my introversion. Denial doesn’t really get me anywhere.
I’ve played Diablo II and never got into it… Eventually sold my copy for ten bucks to a guy who’d been banned on his previous CD key. I played Titan’s Quest for maybe an hour, and I don’t even know where that went. Never tried Torchlight or Deathspank or any of the other Diablo-esque games that have come out (actually I tried Hellgate: London a little bit), because they just never hooked me on the “collect rare lootz” premise.
Spore was… ok. I played it long enough to get to the space part, and promptly wanted to leave. Controlling the creatures themselves was really the best stage. So as a game it didn’t really get me. The animation and random creature generation, even the creature editor itself, that stuff was all great. But it wasn’t a whole lot of fun, when you include all the various stages.
Darkspore, first of all, is an inevitability considering they probably didn’t make any money off of Spore. They’ve got amazing procedural generation (clearly a hot topic recently) for both the creation of random creatures and animating them, so why not make use of it? I can pretty much guarantee that 99% of the game’s assets were made by a guy pressing the “generate horrific monstrosities” button and then picking the five coolest ones out of the thousand possibilities that came up. From a business point of view, they’ve hit the jackpot, because the Spore creature editor will probably always be cool.
As a game, though, it’s actually pretty sweet. You’re a Crogenitor (pffffft), and what that really means is you’re one of the demi-gods blessed with the ability to genetically modify powerful mutants. The game doesn’t say this, but you know that it’s true. In your role as “the last surviving god-thing from Spore,” you control a squad of Genetic Heroes (read: deadly mutant creatures) and you upgrade them using the various shiny pieces of equipment you find while running around murdering things.
The heroes have subtypes (Necro, Plasma, Bio, Quantum, stuff like that) which decide their powers (summon ghosts, stun guys, create minions, slow down time) and then classes (Ravager, Sentinel, etc.) which determine your main stats and attack type (strength and melee attacks, dexterity and melee attacks, mind and long range, etc.). Then they have some detailed backstory stuff I didn’t read, which may or may not have been randomly generated too. The equipment you find is equipped to them in the same way body parts were in Spore, and I think you can find new body parts as well eventually. And of course the equipment has all sorts of stat boosts and cool adjectives like “Laseth’s Thunder Claws of Sharpness” and there’s a few levels of rarity. You can gamble your equipment by beating progressively harder levels one after another - double or nothing, essentially. Beating multiple levels in a row also increases the odds of getting rare (rarer?) items.
Collecting some ugly little staff that claims to be a mystical bone wand, but really looks like every other staff, isn’t very engaging. Collecting energy claws, mystical hoods, cybernetic implants, crystal growths, etc. etc. and “equipping” them through the creature editor, however, is a whole lot more awesome. Maybe it’s that, maybe it’s that they took the good parts of Spore and the good parts of Diablo, but I actually liked playing Darkspore. That’s pretty good, since I didn’t like either of those games. I don’t know if I’ll buy it, but the beta’s free until friday, so go check it out. We can team up and stuff and maybe that would be cool?
(some dumb people in the game’s chat were like ‘wait is this game free to play’ and 'screw it if they want a monthly subscription’ because they don’t realize it’s a normal retail game lol)
The game has a campaign mode, with extra unlockable difficulty levels (and, I assume, better lootz) with co-op that increases the shiny stuff you and your team members get. It also has PvP (unlockable through a purchase at like level 9 or something) and I don’t know how that works. I have no idea if the full game is going to have more in it? I assume the campaign is going to the only single-player mode, which is ok I guess but it’s not like it has much of a story or anything. You’ll be hard-pressed to remember what the cutscenes tell you after five minutes of murder.
Anyway! As I said, free until friday, we can team up and stuff if our schedules work out. In fact, I’m free tonight… but it’ll take like two hours to download. I’m ok with this multiplayer because it’s co-op and everyone wins.
I’ve got a bunch of things I want to say, but not a whole lot to say about them. Not enough to make individual posts, but too much to say in a facebook status update. So I’m shamelessly stealing the term ‘quick hits’ from The Electric Hydra podcast (or internet radio show) and presenting a bunch of stuff to you, with shiny bullet points for your reading pleasure.
The moral of the story is you should probably read AltDevBlogADay. I love the idea of “GDC all year round” because there are a ton of awesome people with great stuff to say who wouldn’t get a spot to speak at a conference because they aren’t famous. And they sure as hell wouldn’t be given an hour to talk about best comment coding practices or the glory of “scripting languages” that don’t need to be compiled for ten minutes in order to test minute changes.
Not going to lie, I was actually wishing for a collection like this when I first got my Kindle. I settled for a few books and just left the rest, but now I have this! And so does everyone else who wants it. Does that include you?
It’s a good thing I’m never going to be making charts in Java, because I would probably be screwed if someone thought Excel wasn’t good enough and asked me to write a new chart program. We’ve had two tutorials now on working with these chart program, and in both of these tutorials I’ve spent an hour and a half trying to get past the first instruction. It certainly doesn’t help that every step in the tutorial is meant to somehow summarize half an hour of work - there are only four or five steps in each. Why couldn’t I just spend ten minutes accomplishing the same work with a little more instructions?
It’s not like the notes are any help, either. Here’s the entirety of our notes in the “Graphics” chapter. Think you could make a graphing application out of that? So we have bad notes that probably teach less than the Java documentation does (educate yourselves hurr hurr and we’ll just take your money), and we have unclear instructions that are written with the understanding that you’ll waste your time doing it wrong for a while until you figure out the problem through trial and error. What makes it worse is that every tutorial begins with you downloading at least five pre-built classes and then trying to fill in missing functionality. Last week’s tutorial had… 14 classes to download. Most of these have variables like X_AXIS_OFFSET and YEAR_SEPARATION_WIDTH and they’re used in a few places without giving you any real explanation of how it’s meant to work.
Last week’s tutorial was to draw the chart, and I couldn’t get that working. This week was to do some mouse stuff. Anyway, the chart drawing code was supplied this week, and here’s the formula for the (x,y) of the points on a graph that I spent an hour and a half trying to figure out:
X: ORIGIN_OFFSET_X + i*YEAR_SEPARATION_WIDTH
Y: Y_AXIS_OFFSET + DATA_HEIGHT - DATA_HEIGHT * histogram[i] / maxValue
The code I had, which was drawing everything slightly off for no reason I ever figured out:
X: (i*YEAR_SEPARATION_WIDTH)+ORIGIN_OFFSET_X
Y: Y_AXIS_OFFSET+DATA_HEIGHT-(aDVDCollection.yearHistogram()[i])
Why does that multiplication happen? What’s wrong with my code? I could have asked the TA to write it for me, but that really doesn’t help anything. At best I finish the tutorial without learning anything. Or, wait, what was I supposed to learn? How to use the drawLine() method? Or was I supposed to learn how to make a mediocre program after inheriting someone else’s code? It’s the destiny of your average software engineer, after all. Really, though, it’s not really a useful learning experience.
So what I’m getting at with this boring little rant is this: last semester, I learned stuff in our tutorials and by reading the notes. They were written by the same guy. Clearly he just gave up trying to teach the second course, and figured we’d learn what we need to know through hours spent working on assignments. My instructor (a different guy) isn’t really teaching us a whole lot during class time, either. I mean, there’s some stuff he tells us that’s great, but he’s a professional programmer, not a teacher. If you’ve ever done any programming, you’ll know what I mean by this. You can probably figure out that watching someone do that for three hours every week would be boring as hell.
So as for the title of the post, last semester was definitely a win, and this semester was pretty much a loss. Doing the assignments and looking at example code from class assignments and the notes has taught me plenty, but did I really need to pay six hundred bucks for it? Technically yes, because I need the course to graduate, but realistically, no. Sometimes you just don’t get what you paid for with post-secondary education. That’s the unfortunate truth.
All in all, this just reinforces my decision not to specialize in computer science as part of my cognitive science degree. I may as well just teach myself everything I need to know with a tutorial and the official documentation. Maybe I should steal a few of the assignments for the other courses before they’re taken off the Carleton sites to give myself something to work towards…
So I’m in a philosophy class this semester called “Mind, World, and Knowledge” and we’re getting into the “mind” part of the course. At the moment, we’re looking at the debate between Dualism (the mind and body are separate things) and Materialism (the mind is a material thing) and while there are a ton of different positions within these broad categories, that’s the basic gist of it. Thus far in the course, everything we’ve considered has seemed pretty good on its own, at least until we get into criticisms coming from other philosophers. So I’ve been open-minded and accepted that they may have a point with what they’re trying to say.
Getting into Dualism, it’s been really hard to do that. And that bothers me a lot, oddly enough. What am I learning if I cheer for every little argument against what we’re considering and can’t think of anything but problems with the position? That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, just that I’m looking for it to be wrong, or want it to be wrong, because of my own personal bias. Dualism isn’t literally about some kind of soul or mystical property or another of our minds, but it’s hard to escape the influence when you’re trying to separate the mind as a thing from our brain and our bodies. I’m sure that contributes to my bias against it - in a kind of abstract way, I would certainly say we have a soul or something along those lines, but I’d see that as something that arises out of what we are. As in, you have a soul because you think and hold ideas about things and all of that comprises the “soul” of who you are. I guess I’m saying it’s equivalent to your identity.
At any rate, that’s a Materialist position (or maybe Idealist…? that’s something about ideas making us who we are, or something) and pretty clearly shows my bias against what we’re learning. It just seems wrong and ignorant to look at this as somehow better than Dualism just because it’s the thing I happen to think is right. It’s a totally natural way to be, and just about everyone is that way. But does that make it right? If everyone is wrong, that doesn’t necessarily make it any better.
I’m not bothered by the idea that I could be wrong, really - if some form of Dualism turned out to be right, well, that’s just great. Today’s topic, specifically, was a philosopher trying to show that sensations are proof of Dualism. A few of the examples he used were afterimages and pain. Now, I can tell you that there are specific types of nerve fibres for experiencing pain, and if you get distracted you can actually not perceive the sensation of pain your nerves are actually bringing to your brain. I can also tell you that, because of a certain way your eyes work and the neurons for sight work, afterimages are caused when they fire in reverse after a stimulus is taken away. So you stare at the sun and close your eyes, and you’ll keep seeing some colours. This is a purely physical, or material, thing - you’ve got neurons firing and they’re creating this sensation you’re having.
Dualism is the idea that the mind is somehow separate from the body - so this philosopher was saying that the perception of things such as sounds and etc (sensations) is something that belongs to the immaterial mind, and aren’t equivalent to the causes of the perception - i.e. the sensations. I’m using psychology terminology, but he described it a little bit differently and this is more precise. Anyway, the whole defence against such a “this is what makes you perceive something” argument is this: the cause of your perception (the sensations, neurons firing, etc.) aren’t equivalent to the perception itself. So, the fact that you stubbed your toe and nerve fibres are bringing that message to your brain, doesn’t equal the fact that you, as an immaterial mind thing, realize “ow my toe”.
That’s all well and good, but that’s why the term perception exists separately from the term sensation. They’re different things. You could have perfect vision, and see everything, and yet think you’re blind, because you aren’t getting the perception part. You might even look at someone while speaking to them, and your neurons are reacting, but you’d still say you don’t see them. But I don’t see that as proof that the mind is somehow different from the brain and the neurons in it and the difference cortices and etc.
The fact that you can’t see the mind doesn’t mean it’s not there - if I can track every single little thing leading to you feeling pain, why is it somehow separate and special? That’s what gets to me about this particular argument, anyway, but I let it slide when the professor gave it to me as an answer because I don’t want to get the class off track. Things to do and discuss and whatnot. But, really, it’s not that I think the argument is wrong that bothers me. It’s the fact that I can’t bring myself to consider it seriously because I think I’m so smart and have all the real answers already. Well, not consciously. But on some level that’s obviously going on.
You don’t get a good wrap-up of this post because I have to go to class. Everything I wanted to say is here, so there! Good for you if you wanted to read it. If not, I probably went on for way too long. Ah well.
First of all, I think I’ve already mentioned here that I adore Insomniac. They’re just cool dudes. But second of all, this is actually a good, concise critique of the majority of facebook games (and whatever mobile games there are that take after them). I don’t really have much to say that isn’t already mentioned there, so go check it out.
On the subject of how problems and goals work in game design, here’s an Extra Credits episode more relevant to “core games” on choice and conflict. It’s not a new episode, but I thought of it right away as I was reading the Insomniac post, and I don’t think anyone has actually started watching Extra Credits on my recommendation yet. So I’ll keep linking to good episodes and that’ll be enough.
Because I worried (or hoped) that someone might worry about me and not get the joke, no, I don’t actually think I have a ton of mental illnesses. Sorry guys.
If you still think self-diagnosing is a good idea, check out my notes for today ‘cause my psychology professor spent a good ten minutes telling people not to do it. I didn’t write much down because that would be useless, but there you go - diagnosis is complex and you don’t know anything about doing it, so don’t even try. She didn’t mention it, but I wouldn’t go into a meeting with a psychiatrist/therapist/whatever and say “so I think I have x, y, and/or z” because they’ll look for symptoms of that and probably jump to conclusions just like you did. “You’ll see what you expect to see,” after all. Unless you want to be diagnosed and get meds because you’re sure they’ll help/don’t care if they don’t help, in which case, feel free to continue.
As for the actual reason I’m posting today, I wanted to mention again how much I like WriteMonkey. I like it as much as I liked Q10 when I was working on essays last semester, except a bit more, because it fixes problems Q10 had and adds a number of useful features. For example, something I’ve gotten used to using as a project-specific todo list is comments in my programming assignments - and WriteMonkey allows you to keep track of comments and dims them out a bit to set them off from the rest of the text. It lets you set progress goals (I think for the entire project) and then track partial progress, as in how much you’ve done in one session and stuff. It can do lookups for stuff on google and dictionary.com and stuff. And I haven’t used it yet, but you can create tags it calls “jumps” and automatically find them in the text - so you could have like @[INSERT IDEA] or #[INSERT TODO] or whatever. It also tracks your most frequently used words! So that’s pretty cool, and you can see “hmm, I used the word "something” twelve times, that’s not good".
Also, Ninite has made it possible for people to embed installers in their sites and show only certain programs, which is pretty neat because you can say “here are the programs I recommend using” and people can take whatever they want and just install them without any crap.
So we’ve been covering some cool stuffs in my psychology class recently. You’ll find my notes on motivation (why I became a hermit to do well in school), personality development (raise your kids not to be dumb), and stress (spoiler: it’ll kill you). Next couple of weeks will be mental illnesses - your depressions, schizophrenias, etc. Everyone’s favourite topic, really. On that note, I’ve self-diagnosed myself with every anxiety disorder except Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (though I’m only lightly OCD) and just about every personality disorder. Hopefully they can medicate those away for me.
My other class this semester is phonetics, which will be boring to everyone who isn’t a linguist, aka just about everyone. And if you are a linguist you already know phonetics so you probably don’t care. So that sucks I guess.
But my other other class this semester is philosophy! And that is pretty cool and you’ll probably find interesting stuff in the notes for that. The topic is “Mind, World, and Knowledge” and so far we’ve done Knowledge and we’re about to move into Mind. I can’t really organize those in any meaningful way for you, unfortunately, but check ‘em out anyway. Some of it is boring, some of it isn’t.
The best thing from PHIL 1301B, however, is definitely Pyrrhonian scepticism. There are three basic parts to Pyrrhonian scepticism: making no assertions, the method of opposition, and the four modes of acquiescence.
Check out the last three (or four if you read this on monday) days of notes for more on this. The only really valid criticism we’ve covered would have to be that knowledge of skills - something the Pyrrhonist accepts as “know-how” because it doesn’t involving making assertions - at some point has to involve a bit of “know-that”, or regular knowledge which eventually becomes equivalent to assertions. So being a doctor doesn’t just mean knowing how to treat your patients (know-how) but there’s also knowing facts and things to help you treat your patients (know-that).
I’m writing a paper about scepticism and how, as far as I can tell, Pyrrhonian scepticism is a perfectly tenable (fancy word for “it works”) position. So COME TEAR IT APART so that I can include that criticism in my paper! However please do check out the notes in case I’ve screwed up somewhere.
edit: also I’ve replaced Q10 with WriteMonkey for writing in peace
edit 2: if you google certain things, my notes show up as results - awesome, except when I’m looking for answers and find my own notes
Crunch time, as defined by Urban Dictionary:
The interval of time immediately before a project is due, when it becomes apparent that the schedule has slipped and everyone is going to have to work like dogs to try to complete the project in time. Crunch time usually occurs during the period between the next-to-last scheduled milestone (prior to which everyone was able to delude themselves tht the schedule had NOT slipped) and the final deadline for delivery. During crunch time, workers are in crunch mode. Prevalent in the software industry, but used elsewhere as well.
If you’re not familiar, crunch time is (allegedly, anyway) part and parcel of working in the video game industry. There are any number of reasons it might happen, and according to the bitter folk, you’re lucky if it only lasts a few weeks. Even indie developers do it, apparently (see the link). But they basically work for themselves - nobody is FORCING them to work extra hours with no compensation. If you have a deal with Microsoft to put the game on XBLA by a certain date, you might be stuck, and I’m sure it’s the indies who have teamed up with publishers who get into crunch time. At any rate, these are guys who love what they do, but I’m willing to bet nobody loves their work so much that they enjoy working twelve or more hours per day.
What I realized as I was reading the post and thinking about vael, was that I work for myself too. And I crunch all day, every day, except when I get too stressed out and resort to procrastinating - which only continues the crunch. Why am I always crunching? Because I have nothing else in my life except for school work. I don’t really have anyone to hang out with here in Ottawa, and I’m always so “busy” that I don’t sign in to IM the friends I do have. Fencing is really the only thing I do to relax, and I haven’t been going to that as often as I used to - it’s getting easier to say “I’m too busy to go tonight”. I’m going to go on saturday, for sure, and next tuesday as well. It’s hard to know if I should go on wednesdays and thursdays because sometimes I have nobody to fence with.
I’m doing really well right now, and everything is totally on schedule, and it’s awesome. But I feel stressed out when I’m not working and I could be. Even if I say “this weekend I’ll work for six hours and play games for two hours, then spend the rest of the night relaxing” I’m probably going to feel awful about that “lost time.” It sucks, and I know I’m not the only one who gets that way, and I’m willing to bet indie devs have some form of that too.
But it’s not healthy. And I’m going to work myself to death, probably literally, if I don’t do anything about it. We covered the chapter on stress in my psychology class this week, and Brittany came to visit, and she sat me down to chat about how I always seemed pissed off and a variety of other things. Eventually, I told her that I was going to keep working at better managing my time, and through that I’d easily be able to stop being so “busy” and stop isolating myself. I said the same to vael, and I’ll ask you, faithful reader, to do what I asked them both to do: send me a message every once in a while and ask me where the hell I’ve been. Don’t let me get away with being a stressed out hermit and spend all my time “working” without accomplishing a whole lot.
When I sit down and actually work, stuff gets done, and I honestly shouldn’t have problems getting everything finished. But sometimes I get too wrapped up in working, and when things are going well, I get pretty excited to finish “this one last thing” and then never really stop to relax. So help me out! I’m going to try, but when I slip, I need people to remind me to get back up. Something like that. I’ve always been awful with metaphors.
I’ve been reading a fair bit since Christmas, so I thought I’d make a post about what I’ve read. Let me know if you like the format! I’m trying to give recommendations without getting too spoiler-y, but sometimes you have to give out a few spoilers to tell people why a book is actually interesting.
All You Need is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka: A time-travel sci-fi action novel from Japan. I realize action isn’t a genre for books, but it was a lot like an action movie in book form - but maybe it would be more appropriate to think of it as an action game instead. Basically, aliens are invading Earth and they’re just brutalizing the human race. The main character is killed in his first battle, but then he wakes up the next morning - thinking it was just a dream. He goes off to the battle again, and does something differently from the dream - hoping it will turn out better. But he dies. And wakes up again the next morning. The day of the battle. He’s trapped in a loop, doesn’t know why, and tries a variety of things to get out of it - eventually he just decides to learn from his mistakes and become an alien killing machine. Nothing particularly deep and thought-provoking here, but it was pretty badass and I liked it well enough.
Metagame by Sam Landstrom: I got this one as an ebook for free online, and it was pretty good. It’s a sci-fi adventure novel in a kind of super-internet future, and in a way it reads kind of like MMO fanfiction. The kind where they keep their completely non-fantasy usernames for the character names. The characters have underscores and numbers in their names, they say “noob” and other internet slang that’s getting to be a little outdated… The book is a few years old, I think? So whatever. Anyway, there were a few interesting things in here, the best one I can remember is that in their future timeline, marriage is abolished in favour of civil unions and then all kinds of relationships become ok. Because marriage has such religious connotations, and the religious folk get all upset about the “sanctity of marriage”, their solution is just to make marriage a special option for people who want it and let everyone else be happy and love whoever they want.
Pretty neat, I think. Also at one point in the book the main character hacks the source code of life. That may be spoilers but it’s so badass that you need to know.
Azumanga Daioh by Kiyohiko Azuma: OH MY GOD SO FUNNY
SO AMAZINGLY FUNNY
I laughed OUT LOUD, physically hahahahahaha, on a regular basis while reading this manga and that should be all the recommendation you need. It’s about girls in high school and that’s really about all I can tell you, it’s hard to get more specific than that. But it’s so funny. Oh man.
Buy the official English translation, because it’s localized really well (as far as I know) and you can get the omnibus (the whole series) for like $30. Or you can watch the anime if you prefer that. I’ve been told by everyone ever that it’s hilarious too, so you can’t go wrong.
All That Lives Must Die by Eric Nylund: The second book in the Mortal Coils keeps the same great style from the first book with DBZ our-powers-are-getting-stronger kind of cool. I can’t really give you any specifics about their super duper Immortal/Infernal (gods and devils respectively) powers but it’s pretty sweet. Like the first, it also does the thing I love most about young adult fantasy - mixes and matches myths and cultures from all over the world to get the very best selection of supernatural beings possible. I feel like a lot of “traditional” fantasy either wants to make its own epic mythology (with mixed success) or use elements from one specific place (Celtic, Norse, whatever) and be as “true” to the source material as possible. Which is what makes young adult books that have Norse gods hanging out with Greek gods so appealing.
One other thought about young adult vs regular fantasy: Young adult books don’t play with point of view, and for that reason they tend to be a lot simpler than more mature fantasy books. At least, my favourite fantasy books (Stephen Erikson, George R. R. Martin, R. Scott Bakker) all use point of view to craft incredibly intricate plots and constantly surprise the reader. All that Lives Must Die has a couple of chapters from points of view other than the two main characters, but even aside from that I was actually genuinely surprised by a few things in the book. So hats off to the author for that.
Harmony by Project Itoh: Another Japanese novel, this time a sci-fi thriller set in a hyper-socialist future where human beings are considered public property. Basically, World War 3 happens and nukes are tossed around like spitballs, and nearly everyone dies. Governments are decimated, and eventually dismantled completely as “admedistrations” - health care providers - gain power by offering health and security. Everyone agrees more war would be bad, so standing armies are disbanded along with traditional governments - admedistrative conglomerates become the unofficial government. Because so many people died, humans are the most valuable resource, and so everyone takes care of each other and people start to “suffocate from all the kindness.” Lots of philosophical musing, comparisons to Nazi society and their advances in health care, and ultimately a number of questions about the idea of consciousness itself. Oh, and mass suicides and other thrilling, globe-trotting adventures. It was one of those “can’t put it down” kind of books, so I do recommend it if you want to grab a copy off of Amazon for ten bucks!
I’ve been working with it for a few weeks now - almost a month, I think - so I’ve come to a definite conclusion: Leechblock, a firefox extension for FF 3-4, is awesome. If you prefer chrome, there’s a similar extension called Chrome Nanny or something like that. Here’s what they do:
You set up a list of sites that keep you from doing your work. Be honest: add all the sites you use to procrastinate, all the sites that distract you. You can use * for a wildcard: *.tumblr.com will block your dashboard and any individual person’s tumblr. Then, set out a list of times where you want to buckle down and work. I set mine up to block whenever I’m in class, and almost all day on friday, saturday and sunday (the days I have no classes). During that period of time, the sites listed will be blocked, and by default replaced by a screen saying “You can come back when the site is no longer blocked.” You can set it up to redirect to, say, google or something. Or a file on your computer that says “GET BACK TO WORK”.
As far as other features go, it has plenty: you can set up multiple “groups” for blocking, so you can set up different sites to block or different times to block on different days. You can manually enter a “lockdown” mode, which keeps you out of the sites in the group for whatever period of time you specify. You can also set up a timer and have Leechblock kick you off after that time is up: right now, I have Leechblock set up to give me 45 minutes every three hours to screw around on facebook and reading RSS feeds and stuff.
You can set up different options for “how to block” a specific group of sites: it can actively block pages from your sites (when the site is going to be blocked, it will refresh the page and block it), you can prevent access to options for that group when it’s being blocked (sites can be added to groups under the right-click context menu), and in firefox 4 you can prevent access to your addons page so that you can’t get into the leechblock options. You can also set up a timer in the status bar to tell you how long before a site is blocked, and display a popup message x seconds before a site is going to be blocked.
Honestly, after one weekend of having my favourite sites blocked all day, I stopped wanting to play Echo Bazaar. After a couple of weeks, I’ve forgotten what my daily routine used to be - I have to go into the bookmarks menu to remind myself to play BvS and check on tumblr. It’s actually really nice to get up in the morning and spend two hours working, instead of getting up and spending two hours reading RSS feeds. Ideally, I’ll uninstall Leechblock and have that same resolve to get to work. Then, since I’m actually doing work when I have the time, I’ll have more time to relax and talk to people and maybe live a little.
Note: This isn’t anywhere near as good as I imagined it would be. Send me your ideas for making it better! You may think it’s ok, but I can guarantee it wouldn’t make the front page on Destructoid, and THAT is what I had in mind. Probably asking too much there.
There’s a pretty unfortunate trend in big-budget games these days: creative new IPs don’t sell, and sequels do. So every game that comes out is a “franchise opportunity” if it sells well, and it’s abandoned if it doesn’t. Rather than publish something like Brutal Legend, publishers like Activision will put their money where they see potential profit: Call of Duty and Prototype. They’re allowed to do that, of course, because video games are a business and businesses want to make money. But they’re leaving gamers like me behind.
When Dead Space 2, Mass Effect 2 (and soon Mass Effect 3), Uncharted 2 (and soon Uncharted 3) come out, you can’t spend two minutes on the internet without hearing about how great they are. I’d love to play them, but there’s one problem: I haven’t played the previous games. I just don’t want to play sequels without playing the previous games and understanding the context and the characters. That’s even more true for games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age where you literally transfer your character from the previous games to the new one.
I barely have time to play one game, and I certainly don’t have the time to play one game and its prequel (or two). So instead I buy games like Stacking, Costume Quest, Inside a Star Filled Sky, Super Meat Boy - games I can play in short sessions and know I’m still making progress. Or I play freeware games like Desktop Dungeons or Cave Story. Five minutes here, five minutes there, half an hour during a boring computer science class… That’s how I game these days.
So when I look at the list of releases for 2011, discounting any sequels to games I haven’t played, here’s what I see that I might like to play: Okamiden, Portal 2, The Witcher 2, inFamous 2, Resistance 3… Then there’s five times as many sequels I’ll never play. I’m sure they’re great games, but they’re great games for someone else. Maybe Dragon Age II will be unanimously declared the Game of the Year, but I’d have to play Dragon Age: Origins first in order to enjoy it.
Of course, I’m part of the problem too. There are still new games coming out in 2011, but none of them really catch my eye… because they’re new IPs and I don’t know if I’ll like them. If I have to buy only one game, like most gamers these days, I end up going for the sequel I know I’ll like over Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom, or Singularity, or any of the other good new IPs that came out last year. That’s how I got into this situation in the first place. Dead Space, BioShock, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Uncharted, God of War, all those AAA games that are still getting sequels years later - I looked at them, wasn’t sure I’d like them, and played my part in the vicious cycle.
I’m not here to make dire predictions about the future of the industry. I can’t honestly say “we need more new IPs to keep the industry alive,” because people like me will keep those games from selling. I can’t honestly say “sequels are killing the industry,” because if it weren’t for those games, there wouldn’t be any money to fund new IPs. But I’m buying fewer and fewer games, and the games I do buy aren’t the AAA titles. What’s to stop Call of Duty or Uncharted from being the next Guitar Hero? How many sequels can they make before people stop buying them?
Coils (0.618…) by Transcending Bizarre?, an avant-garde/black metal band.
I haven’t posted music in ages. But I was listening to this and loved it enough to rush to tumblr and post it, so there you go. Enjoy it if you’re into that kind of stuff.
I have homework to do :/ So I’m not going to start writing massive and wonderful posts just yet. I have plans, and I’m writing them down and organizing my thoughts, so it’ll be even better when I finally write. Later, that is.
