Link dump for now folks. Post coming later. I’ll try not to make this too long, because there’s plenty for you to read here.

The Citizen Kane of Gaming: a debate that has been raging across the internet, though you may not have noticed because you may not spend time around people who care about Citizen Kane. Arguments on the subject have largely died down, and I haven’t read anything so amazing it HAD to be shared (in fact I’ve been avoiding the subject because it is a stupid argument often full of stupid people - METROID PRIME TRILOGY IS CITIZEN KANE OF GAMING, SERIOUSLY) but I’ll share these two with you today because they’re not dumb.

• Rosebud Was His Horse - real purpose of the term “Citizen Kane of Gaming” is a game that accomplishes the same level of mastery and storytelling, but the argument is dumb so stop it
• Keep On Asking About Citizen Kane - no, argument is worth having, because someone will make a game that good

The Disc Is Not Enough: trying to combat used game sales by making a new game worth more than a used one, and how on-disc DLC is a nice bonus, but not the greatest solution.

Size Doesn’t Matter Day: indie devs declare that short games are good too, some even admit that they may be wrong and that it’s possible gamers at large really do think short games are bad and will hate any game that only lasts a few hours no matter how good it is. There’s a lot to read here and maybe your favourite indie dude wrote about it. Most of these posts contain links to every other post on the subject, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find others to read. I’ll link the ones I read, starting with the one that sent me off to read all of these things in the first place. Check out others and let me know if they’re great!

• The Long Game - long games can still be good games, even if most people don’t finish them, and long games should still be made for those few people who do make it all the way
• Judging Games On Length - how and why people start to think length matters in a game, and how it can be hurtful - if you read only one, read this
• Why Aren’t Video Games Satisfying? - giant video games take forever to do anything good, and sometimes do nothing good at all, aka the argument everyone has against FF XIII, that they shouldn’t have to play a 10 chapters of tutorial in order to get three good ones afterwards
• Size Doesn’t Matter Day - ramblings on who thinks what, and why, about different types of games and their length - bonus scary thought about getting old and never playing video games ever nooooo
• Too Short - World of Good dev calls out lazy reviewers who say a game is “too short” and simply lower the score, rather than explaining that it didn’t handle its ending well or that they wish there was more to play

There’s what I read this morning! Now I stop reading for the rest of the day! Goodbye for now!

Did you hear about the man with five peckers?

Apparently his underwear fit like a glove.

        That’s pretty much the best thing I have to say about my white water rafting trip today. Literally I went white water rafting today and I’m just like yeah cool that happened. I went last year, and it was the same then.

        Get up for 6 am, pick up the other people who are going with us, drive an hour and a half over to where we’re meeting our guides and everyone else going rafting today. Hop on a bus with a guy from Switzerland named Martin, who has an amazing beard. Have a long bus ride to where we’re getting into the river. Sleep on bus, fake it for the camera and get myself a moment of glory in our $55 DVD of the day. I’ll share when I get it.

        Our guide, Matthew, was a pretty cool guy from South Africa. For the record, last year I was with a man named Kelly. He was here this year, according to our video, but I didn’t remember his name until it was too late. Anyway, our guide this year. He was the guy in charge of everything. So we left last, because he had to make sure everything was good to go.

        Then we had to be FIRST in line, meaning we had to paddle hard all the way up to the front. I forgot how to paddle over the last year, so my biceps were sore when we got there. Then he taught us how to paddle (leaning backwards as you paddle to use your weight) and it was all good.

        We went down some rapids, wee, we get wet, yay. It was supposedly 20 degrees (though at 9 am when we started, maybe not) but it was so cloudy you wouldn’t know it. The threat of rain has been very aggressive for the past few days, and it’s going to be bad when it finally starts. Not a very good choice of weekend, I guess. But by the time lunch time came around, my brother and I were freezing because we didn’t have wet suits or magic waterproof clothing like our father. We cultivated a fire, had hot chocolate and warm soup (as well as wraps and some other food stuffs) and just barely started to feel our fingers again and get dry when the call came to leave.

        Probably around 12:30, we have a 45 minute bus ride back to the beginning so that we can run a different channel of the river now that the water levels have risen a little. We make a tour of the bus, shouting out our name, where we’re from, and a joke/embarrassing story (can be about anyone on the bus!)/whatever. Many people had nothing. I spoke my name and location loudly, and shared a story about a bus full of awkward people who couldn’t come up with anything funny off the tops of their heads. Some awkward chuckles were had and then we moved on. Eventually people started yelling out jokes, and that’s where that gem comes from.

        Early in the afternoon, we begin the hard rapids. The ones where you have to paddle instead of hide in the boat. The ones where one side of the river is a bunch of pointy rocks and you don’t want to go over there. Starts off with one to get us nice and wet (great, now we’re cold again) and then a little bit later we get to The Butcher’s Knife. Inside The Butcher’s Knife is a wave called The Chopping Block. There are three options for proximity to The Chopping Block: far, medium, or close. My dad volunteered us for close. We went straight for it.

        The wave “hit [him] like a literal punch to the chest,” and the left side of the boat plus the guy in the front on the right were all pushed off of the raft. I was nearly pushed, from the middle right side, off of the left side. I caught myself on the side of the raft and managed to stay in, leaving myself, our guide, and an incredibly tiny, incredibly frightened woman from our group behind to manage a rapid aptly named The Butcher’s Knife. He handles it like a pro, while I react instantly and rescue people as they appear. My brother pops up first, then my father, then another from our group, then the guy from the front right is rescued by my dad as I rescue the third person. Scared woman, not so much on the reaction times. We managed to keep all of our paddles and recovered quite well. Life went on.

        The part where 4/7 passengers (guide included) fall out of our raft is on video, so you can see that in a couple of weeks. The rescue, not so much, because rescues are ugly and not good on film. But I’m proud of myself at least, both for staying in and being useful to the rescue. I paddled until there was no longer water beneath my paddle, and then I was almost dying and then I was rescuing. In the span of a few seconds. Some people might have been terrified, or felt an awesome adrenaline rush, or whatever. Nah, not me. I just liked the rescue part, from a strategic point of view.

        We did some more rafting in the afternoon and went back and I didn’t have a beer even though I’d be old enough there, so one was available for me. It was across the border of Quebec, not that most of you will understand that, but the important thing is that I was in another province and the drinking age is 18 there. I drove us home because my dad figured, sweet, I can have some since we have another driver.

        I drove us home, we had two bits of difficulty, but we got home safe and sound. White water rafting: completed. I’ve done my duty. The end.

        It’s not that I’m a boring person, but that I’m not a physical, adrenaline person. I don’t need something more exciting than rafting to get my blood pumping. It just doesn’t pump that way. I could jump out of an airplane, or go bungee jumping, or go on a crazy hiking trip. I could do all kinds of crazy adventurous things, I’m not afraid of it, because I’ve faced my fears before and I have yet to regret it. These people are mega safe. That’s their job. It would not be an option for you if there were any serious danger. I just wouldn’t enjoy it enough to justify the cost, or even the time. I wish I could go adventuring for a living (as some of the raft guides do, and I’m not kidding) but it’s just not my life. Mother Nature won’t keep me company at night, unlike some of those dudes.

        I’d love to do that stuff with a friend though. It’d be fun with someone else, especially if we’re both terrified. Or in the case of week long expeditions, starving and cold and devoured by tiny, tiny predators. Someone to keep me company, right? That’s more like my life.

——————————————————————-

        So with a move to a place with actual facilities comes the questions about why I don’t take advantage of them. Why not come to the gym with me? Why don’t you go bungee jumping? Why don’t you go ride the public transit around, as if that’s important when I’m not going anywhere? The problem is that I would rather be me, than go out of my way to please other people.

        This is something that’s been on my mind recently, as my dad revs his Be Like Me Machine, and even more so the gym thing. My dad used to be tiny like I am. Then he gained a hundred pounds of muscle. Then his metabolism got old and he suddenly had a hundred and fifty pounds of fat instead. I don’t want that. I’m underweight, but I’m fit enough and I work on that in my own way. If I start going to the gym, and try to beef up like he did about ten years ago, I do fear that I’ll end up old and fat. My main issue comes back to preferring a leaner body for myself, and not feeling the need to go out and beef up at all. I don’t need fifty more pounds of muscle on my frame. I’ll do definition, so I look pretty, but I (me, as a person, Matt, Demi, the core of what is me) do not need to have muscles like my father, or even like a friend of mine with a similar build. He’s tall and lanky, but from all the physical labour and sports he’s done over the years, he’s lean and wiry. He doesn’t have bulging muscles, because of his height, but he has the strength. I’d be alright with that, but it’s not me. It’s not who I am. It’s not even something I need to be.

        I’ve just come off of an argument with my friend Max about whether or not I’m fit, where he judged me to be unfit because I’m underweight and my ribs stick out. Instead, I should be doing those triangle push-ups and gaining weight/muscle mass enough to cover all (most) of my protruding bones (har har), in his opinion. He’s an adventure guy. He’ll go biking for hours and just love it. Run so long and far that he pukes, and just shiver from excitement. Or dehydration, but don’t tell him the difference. The thing is, that’s not me. That’s who he is. His definition of fit is someone who feels fat if they sit around playing video games all day, and gets so sick after doing that for a while that they NEED physical activity.

        That’s not me. I will never, in my entire life, be able to cultivate a feeling like that in the core of my essence. I forget about not dong my crunches (didn’t have time for those today, but I don’t like to do it right before bed either because I have a hard enough time settling in to sleep as it is) far easier than I forget about all of the things I haven’t done yet when it comes to video games/anime/articles to read/whatever. Of course an hour or two each day, or even most days, is a paltry amount to dedicate to physical activity. Seven hours a week or something? There are plenty more in there. But how high is it on the priority scale? Do I sacrifice my workout (or gym time, which could be the same thing) or do I sacrifice whatever else I need the time for?

        For me, it’s quite low. Low enough that making a dedicated routine would be pointless as it wouldn’t last. Not because I’m incapable of getting off of my fat ass to do it, because I did it for a long time, every single day, when I wanted to impress a special someone. Eventually I slowed down because I realized I wasn’t even doing it for my benefit, and she wasn’t really looking anymore to begin with. I just end up doing other things that I value and it’s like eh I’ll write a nice tumblr post tonight instead of doing crunches and flicks. Even though the tumblr post takes longer. To illustrate what I mean about the priority thing: I couldn’t convert tumblr time into workout time. I couldn’t dedicate the same amount of time to it. I’d just end up doing other things with most of it.

        I spend, oh, half an hour to 45 minutes on the computer in the morning running through a routine of daily browser based games and a few news sites. Nothing super disruptive, and I can do it later in the day obviously. But if I stopped doing that, I doubt I’d convert the time into early morning workouts instead. I value the games for different reasons and I like to know stuff, but I value those on different levels than I value being fit when no one will even see nor will I need to apply the fitness. I can get by a day or two without working out. But how could I possibly miss a day in my daily games! That would be inefficient!

        Anyway I hope I made my point. I already knew what my point was. But I wanted to think out loud a little so I can respond better to the inevitable returns to this subject. The basic idea (me trying to be me) was there, but I hadn’t needed it yet so I never really expanded on it.

———————————————————————

        Also I just quit Opus Deorum (probably only took a minute per day, but I wasn’t getting anything out of it - just grinding stats) and Freewar (idle grinding a passive skill in a game I don’t care for - simply because I could) but I can’t bear to part with any others. Billy Vs SNAKEMAN, Dragon Tavern, and The Ruins Of are all games I spent money on for a damn good reason. I’m about to spend $50 more on Billy Vs SNAKEMAN to get myself 17 months worth of tiny bonuses. Nearly three bucks a month. Nothing wrong with that, and the guy deserves my money. I love the game and I have a friend who loves the game and we spend twice as much time talking about it as we do playing it, if not more. The Ruins Of is just a cool little thing, and for that the money spent on it is far lower ($10 so far, and probably forever - I doubt the future involves spending on it) but the guy deserves that too. Dragon Tavern is raking in the cash, and it’s also the heaviest time investment, and it’s also where I’ve spent the most money. Jeez. More than a hundred and fifty dollars, for sure, but I have no definite number. It sounds really bad as a lump sum, but at one point it was 2x the credits, and in general I’ve built up bit by bit. I don’t regret it, though. Psychological tricks though they may be, I’m ok with spending that money. It is nothing when you consider all of the money I have held and spent in the last two years-ish of playing it?

——————————————————————–

        Also my backspace and space bar keys are getting a little squeaky on my laptop already. Space bar, not sure about that one, probably just hitting it badly or something but it’s not like it’s been receiving heavy use. Backspace, though… Well… Just how I write, and this includes instant messaging.

        edit: also I included the square brackets thing like a proper journalist because I realized what they mean. It’s when you’re rephrasing someone to put the sentence into proper context. If they say it, you quote “[the wave] was like” instead of using something unspecified, or in the wrong person if they say I or whatever.

FORM OF: ANGRY, REBELLIOUS TEENAGER

I haven’t felt so much like an angry, rebellious teenager since my parents disapproved of my girlfriend in 9th grade. I want to act on that and rant and insult and fight da powah, but no. I am better than that now.

Instead, I will link to a Cracked article because that is how mature people do immature things. This article, 6 Of Your Favourite Things That Are Secretly Making You Fat, comprises my mother, essentially. Except the caffeine one. Especially the saving money one. But we’re getting to that.

My mother has begun doing her grocery shopping at Costco (BJ’s or Sam’s Club or whatever for you Ah-meh-ree-kan types) because now we live near one. As a result, it takes her three hours and hundreds of dollars to go out and buy some milk and a loaf of bread.

I mean, we had half a loaf of bread left. No milk, but we did have cereal. It’s not like we were going to starve.

And now we’ve acquired so much food, much of it will go bad, or be eaten simply because it WILL go bad, rather than for sustenance. “That chicken’s going to go bad soon, I may as well have another sandwich…” And suddenly it all makes sense.

I’m going to have to take over grocery shopping duties. Hopefully the responsibility doesn’t crush my will to live. We’ll implement a “grocery list” system whereby I buy the things on the list, and everything else is left in the grocery store.

Meanwhile my mother has 16 large plates (sneaky large portions) and 4 small ones, but it’s ok because we have a lot of big plates, right? And hey, are you already full? You didn’t take very much, you know, and there’s plenty left and it might not be very good as leftovers…

Then she watches Big Brother After Dark (in case you want to watch boring people sit around and be bored for your entertainment) all night out of boredom. Complains that the house is a wreck and nobody is helping her keep it clean.

PS: That article is a dirty lie because it says misery makes you burn calories, which is patently not true. Also try not to be overly offended by single, one-off sentences and forget the meaning of everything else that was written.

In Which I Debate The Use Of Free Time, or, a long post that ultimately goes nowhere

The point of that long explanation (last time, on my tumblr…) was to lead into my discussion of “worth” or “value” in terms of how free time is spent. As much as I try to do things like “relax” or “have fun,” the efficiency that has ruled my life so far can’t help but extend into my free time. It’s always a to do list of accomplishments, things to finish and then things to start after that. The two contributing factors to this are that the list grows far faster than I can work on it (12, 25, 40, 60, etc. hour games coming out before I’ve finished the last) and I’ve always been able to afford the next shiny game to release. Even then, I’ve looked for ways to make my money go further - efficient to the last - so that I can now download games for every system I own save the PS3. Well, and the Wii. So, theoretically, I have access to infinite video games, infinite books (assuming someone has uploaded them online), infinite amounts of manga, infinite episodes of anime to watch, infinite amounts of data and ideas to mentally digest… Never will I lack for entertainment, surely, but rarely am I truly entertained. The calculation of where to spend my time drains all of the fun from the media I consume voraciously, incessantly.

        I try to see the world, and especially all the digital worlds I experience, with a little sense of wonder to keep from getting too jaded. It’s difficult to do that when I’m rushing from one game to the next, almost always picking the game to play based on how guilty I feel over not finishing it yet, and secondarily how much is left to play. When I finished Portal a month or two ago, when it was free for a couple of weeks on Steam, all I could think was “finally, I can say I’ve done it.” Most people will tell you it’s something you “have” to play, and I’d gone a long time without playing it simply out of indifference. I’d already absorbed most of its content through osmosis anyway, it was just a technicality that I hadn’t actually put my hand on the mouse and done it myself. I did it, though, but for me it just wasn’t the amazing, joyous experience I know many others have had with it. It was just one thing crossed off an endless to-do list, another example that I’m eternally catching up on gaming history. I think the fact that I saw two or three hours invested in Portal as practically a waste because there would be nothing new there for me is bad enough, but the fact that I played it and didn’t enjoy doing so says everything about the problem I have with my free time.

        Portal is pretty much a sacred lamb of gaming at this point, but perhaps the worst offence I’ve committed as a gamer, in my mind, is to not like multiplayer gaming. Party games, yes. Local co-op with friends, yes. But competition against faceless strangers? Count me out. Not in an RTS, not in an FPS, not in an MMO, not in a flash game, not even in a browser-based game. Yet all of the most hardcore gamers thrive on these kinds of games. Final Fantasy XIII and Dragon Quest IX may be huge, expansive games, but when I finish them, that’s pretty much it. It might take 60 hours, or it might take 100. But StarCraft II, Modern Warfare 2, Team Fortress 2 - funny how they’re all sequels - as well as World of Warcraft and all the other MMOs, they’ll consume countless hours far beyond the sixty or one hundred hour mark. When the vast majority of the medium lives on the crushing - or being crushed by - your opponent, how could I possibly be allowed to simply “not like” multiplayer? It doesn’t help that I see very few people saying the same thing. It seems as though I must be wrong, spending my time finishing Persona 4 or actually playing through Final Fantasy X when I could be shooting people in the face day after day.

        Yet this ties into my problem with having too much media available, and the question of what it’s worth to spend my time on something. Perhaps some people will get far more time out of their $60 purchase of StarCraft II or Modern Warfare 2 than I ever could out of the games I buy. Perhaps they only had $60 and had to find a game that wouldn’t just end. It’s hard for me, with my rather large collection of games, to imagine playing a game because I have nothing else to play. But then, would I really want to spend all of that time just to feel as though I accept the largest portion of gaming today? Would it be “worth” my time to be a master of unscoped headshots, or would I just be “wasting” my time when there are so many other things to experience? I wanted to write this as a way to find the answer to that, and yet I still don’t know. It seems almost rude to dismiss something as a “waste,” to say that a form of entertainment is completely invalid because I don’t enjoy it or don’t partake in it. In theory, to spend my time doing the same thing over and over again would be inefficient when I could be working on something shiny and new. In practice, fun is fun, and there’s really nothing wrong about finding fun in a different place.

        If I hadn’t just rediscovered some small measure of why I love single player games and why I love playing through the beautifully crafted environments and stories that my $60 unlocked for me, I might still be worried about all of that. But now I’ve got things to do, and I have a stack of games in front of me that I could, if I’m lucky, finish before going back to university. It’ll take some dedication to righting my wrongs - how could I stop playing Persona 4 in the middle of the last dungeon in the entire game?! - but I don’t know when I’ll find the time again. So I’m going to use it properly and remind myself why I go hunting for PS2 games in the bargain bins in the first place. Why, you might ask? They’re games I can’t imagine I’d regret playing, and I want to give my money to anyone who will take it in exchange for them. I want more of these games to exist, and so even if I never even play this instalment, perhaps I’ll play the next. It would be a shame if we ever lost Atlus or Grasshopper Manufacture, or even Insomniac, so I will gladly throw my money at them. And I will gladly throw my time into their churning machines of glorious entertainment.

———————————————————————-

        On an entirely different level, but loosely related by the main “theme” of this post is the matter of writing, and this tumblr itself. Its value. The time I spend on it. I’m above a hundred posts now, at least a dozen of those long, rambling trains of thought much like this one. I’ve spent hours writing for a few close friends and a handful of their friends. Yet I don’t feel that it’s been wasted time. Perhaps it’s a legacy of my ADHD, but I don’t often sustain trains of thought as long as posts like this would have you believe. Writing makes the foundation solid enough for me to keep building, to keep writing and communicating and thinking instead of running in circles all the time. If I forget where I was going, I just scroll up. If that doesn’t help, either I stop or I forge ahead and let the words take their own course. But the act of sharing all of this, making it public and available for anyone who cares to read it, is a marked improvement in transparency for me. It used to be that I had few close friends, only as many as necessary to stave off loneliness and disappointment, and only they could know what really went on inside my head. Even then, I couldn’t always force myself to express what I wanted to tell them, and plenty of half-formed conversations went forgotten because I wasn’t satisfied that they would be… well, good enough. That by starting them in truth I would end up exposing something wrong or displeasing about myself and sour my few solid relationships.

        So to write and share everything about myself is thrilling, terrifying, and satisfying all at the same time. I feel perfectly content saying that this tumblr is all of what I am. That it’s available to all, if they want to read it. I used to hide behind a plethora of personas, and now they’re unified across all of the content I put here. All of the facets of me, converging in one little part of the internet. If I try to put on an act of being “just” a gamer, or “just” a metalhead, or otherwise put the spotlight on any one of those facets - all it takes is this tumblr to shatter that illusion. I like the idea of forcing myself to change for the better. I like the idea of bringing more people into my Precious Little Life. If they don’t deserve to be here, chances are they won’t bother to read any of this, and the point is moot in the end.

        I would bring up the matter of writing fiction, but then I do it so rarely that it would be… yes, a waste of time. I’ve only written two letters so far, and I’m supposed to be writing again, but I have yet to start. I haven’t been able to figure out what time in my schedule to dedicate to it. Soon, I’ll start. When I run out of things to write about for my tumblr, I think. But then I won’t have anything to put into the letter, so it may have to wait until the excitement level rises a little here in my new home. But then I already know that’s a worth investment of time, so long as I have something to write about.

———————————————————————

        Like most of my posts, this one would be “selfish” if I believed you would all feel compelled to actually read it. Thankfully, I know that you’re a human being and will happily stop reading if you find it too long and boring. Like every other post I’ve written for my own benefit and shared for yours (at least if you want to learn more about me), I’m glad that I’ve written it. It comes as a result of several conversations with vael about multiplayer gaming (something he enjoys a lot), which tended to go in circles as he stated his case and I proceeded to ignore it and say what I really wanted to say. For the benefit of us all, then, I hope that I’ve managed to put that to rest for now. If you’ll excuse me, I have some beautiful ruins to explore.

No More Heroes 2, and Final Fantasy XIII

On the 26th of January, 2010, No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle was released in North America for the Wii. I purchased it with glee, and played it for around ten hours before realizing that I simply could not complete the strength training minigames near the end of the game with the basic Wiimote. It didn’t feel smooth enough, the buttons were awkward. So I stopped playing the game and waited for the release of the black Classic Controller Pro on April 20th, the release date of Monster Hunter Tri. This I also purchased gladly, an investment perhaps. Yet I never picked up No More Heroes 2 until this afternoon. August 17th, 2010, I managed to finish No More Heroes 2 in a matter of hours. An hour, or more, of that was spent collecting money to pay for strength training, and then practising constantly in 30 second bouts of painful 8-bit torture. When I finally maxed out my strength, the remaining bosses fell in quick succession. The second form of the final boss was brutally irritating, but not difficult. Certainly nothing compared to the true final boss of the first game. Thus, with sore biceps from hours of frantic waggling, I’ve finished a game I’ve owned for nearly eight months.

        Next step is to read the four Destructoid articles I bookmarked analyzing the metaphors in the game.

        After that? Looks like I might be exploring the abandoned ruins of an advanced civilization in Final Fantasy XIII. Last night, I thought I was done with the game, and felt that another dozen hours of grinding on top of the sixty I’d already spent on the core storyline might simply be a waste. Sure, there were missions and bits of flavour text to collect, but why would I spend time increasing numbers in a digital world I hardly care about? Trophies aside, there would simply be no reward. Not to mention the guilt over time wasted. Yes, I know I haven’t unlocked any of the ultimate weapons. I haven’t even killed a nigh-on immortal dinosaur whose little toe is twice my height. Fighting ten random battles to gain one stat boost, one out of some two dozen left, would be such a huge waste of time in exchange for being able to say that I had nothing better to do than collect digital trinkets. There are, to my knowledge, no flashy, secret bosses in Final Fantasy XIII. At least not like the secret bosses of old. There are enemies with obscene amounts of health, and there are missions that require you to defeat enemies with obscenely high stats, but aside from the correct choice of party members there is rarely any preparation involved. The fact is that these things aren’t difficult; they don’t require any amount of skill. Just an investment of time, so that your numbers are big enough to take on the numbers of the enemy.

        Thinking of the endgame in such a negative way was depressing for me, especially because I really liked the rest of the game. Fully prepared to hate it and shut the game off for good, I looked up a guide to the endgame content to see what I had left to do. I knew there was a mission that unlocked chocobo riding, so I tried to look for that. Only it was in an area I had never heard of. Wait a second - in an almost exclusively linear game, I missed an area? It must just be that it was so unimpressive that I forgot its name. So I set out to find this area and complete the couple of missions I actually wanted to do.

        Imagine my surprise when I walk over the top of a hill and see the sun rising over the cracked and shifted concrete remains of a Gran Pulsian city. Imagine New York City after a devastating, cataclysmic earthquake. Roads thrown upwards to create cliffs, buildings toppled, street signs sticking out randomly from the ground. Flying above it all, giant birds, larger than a full grown man. If you’ve seen Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, take some of the ruins of Midgar, mix it with the desolation and industrial look of Edge, and then craft a playable area out of that. That’s what I would have missed if I had quit Final Fantasy XIII without giving it another chance.

        I didn’t even go in to complete my mission. I back out, saved my game, and turned off the system and went to go run errands. I’m saving it for tomorrow when I have more time.

        I don’t believe I’ll grind my way through all of the post-game content, but I will do what I can at my current power level. When I run into an enemy that’s just too powerful for me, I’m done. If I’m lucky, I’ll get enough experience points from the missions up to that point to pull through without having to spend time grinding.

———————————————————————

        Yesterday, I planned for this to lead into a discussion of “worth” and “value” in terms of how free time is spent, but a bit of work on that topic has led me to believe that this is better split up so it isn’t excessively long. I will work on posting that tonight, or sometime tomorrow. It’s all very meta because then the worth of time spent on writing for tumblr comes into play and stuff. See you next time, folks.

        Oh, and I read those articles about No More Heroes 2 and that was cool but there were supposed to be seven and only four were finished. Oh well. I know what that’s like. I also read about comorbid depression in children with ADHD, which will get its own post after I post fewer giant posts, and about the impossibility of “converting” homosexual into heterosexuals. Also has a sentence about the belief that homosexual relationships are somehow different from heterosexual ones. Article from Psychiatric Times here.

        Oh, and if you actually read what I wrote about essays a few days ago - note the passive voice. Note it and notice how hard it can be to figure out what they’re saying, how you may feel tempted to skip through the fluffy bits that don’t actually present or evaluate any actual information.