Jim Sterling of Destructoid infamy rants about the need for developers to cut it out with their crappy, tacked-on multiplayer and just make some damn good single-player games. A man after my own heart, he is. He doesn’t necessarily address any of the issues I was having with only liking single-player and etc., but perhaps if there were more shining examples of solid stories and amazingly well crafted worlds, it wouldn’t be such an issue.

Truth be told, simply for sheer volume alone, my collection of amazing PS2 games is where almost all of my amazing single-player games are. It was cheaper to make games for the PS2, and so it was much easier to make a game that would only appeal to a small group of people and that wouldn’t have much long-term replay value, either through an open-ended story or what have you or through multiplayer. Most of those games have since migrated to the DS, or the Wii. A lot of jRPGs that come out for the PS3 and 360 get bogged down by $1 DLC costumes and bullcrap like that, and the games end up sucking anyway so they try to capitalize on the customers they do have. It’s too bad I have such a hard time being motivated to go out and buy random Wii jRPG X, because there are plenty. I am all over the DS though. For good reason - the first main instalments in years of beloved jRPGs such as Dragon Quest and Shin Megami Tensei are being released on the DS instead of next gen consoles. Hell, a “new” Monster Rancher game was just released in english for the DS, and it doesn’t suck! You create monsters by drawing, writing, or speaking into the DS microphone. Pretty cool, right? Too bad nobody knows it exists, so it’s doomed to be appreciated only by people like me who think to check wikipedia for a release date every once in a while.

There are DS games that I would honestly recommend emulating on PC, if you don’t own one. They’re just that good. I’m hoping the 3DS can continue the same level of cheap success, because someone, somewhere has to make me video games.

Jesse Schell on the future integration of gaming and technology into our daily lives. It’s nearly half an hour long, but stick with it. He starts off a little slow - blah blah facebook numbers - but then your mind will be blown. It may not be a huge, catastrophic mind=blown, but when you think about it, you’ll realize just how crazy this stuff is. Maybe you’re freaked out that Big Brother seems inevitable. Maybe you’re excited because you’re going to be the one making this stuff. But if you can watch that and not feel much about it, you clearly don’t know enough about technology.

Speaking of exactly that, fuck yeah to-do list RPG!

I actually had that talk bookmarked to watch for a couple of months and hadn’t gotten around to it. Now I have, and I am glad that article reminded me of it.

In other news, a USB Dongle claims to turn your PS3 into a debug console, allowing it to copy games to external (and internal) harddrive for playback. Not to mention homebrew shenanigans. Will it actually work? Who knows. Either it REQUIRES a debug console, or it makes your console INTO a debug console. The internet can’t quite decide. Anyway, it’s $170 AU, and I’m too lazy to google up a conversion for that, but suffice to say it’s probably not worth your money just yet. Hell, I spent $80 getting an R4 (a thing for pirated DS games) that couldn’t accept a MicroSD bigger than 2 gb. What a caveman I was. Now you get flashcarts with built-in processors, allowing emulation of GBA, SNES, and more, not to mention xvid video playback and e-reader capability. Did I mention that it plays DS games, too? It lets you save text files as walkthroughs and access them as an overlay while playing the game. My god, the future, it has arrived.

Alleged PS3 Jailbreak here. Comments have more info and stuffs if you’re really interested.

Meanwhile, Engadget is disappoint that magical Sharpie is not so magical after all. Reminds me that I should buy some eraseable pens to circumvent my terrible, terrible handwriting. Not that it will improve how I write, but it will be easier to see. Legible? That’s questionable.

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.

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        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.

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        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.

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        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.

Insolent rogue! Knave of the western horde!

Alright, first of all, this is a 1080p rendition of the opera scene from Final Fantasy VI. So make sure you watch it in 1080p and full-screened. Second of all, the music is performed by The Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, so make sure you crank the volume and enjoy it in all of its glory.

If you’ve played FF VI, you will want to watch this for glorious nostalgia and beautiful upscaling. If you haven’t played FF VI, or like me haven’t played it enough to reach the opera scene, you will want to watch this for glorious music and delicious sprites. I have the Black Mages rendition of this song, from their album Darkness and Starlight (a reference to the song itself) which is great, but it’s also in Japanese so I have no clue what’s actually going on. This is in English, and I assume follows the best available translation of the text from the game. The singing itself is simply amazing. It’s been a pretty warm day today, yet I had chills every time someone was singing. It was just that good.

Video linkage courtesy of Destructoid.

This post has several pre-requisite knowledges that you must have in order to find it remotely funny. Number 1: Watch anime, or at least know what it is. Number 2: Know what a “bad dub” is, whether you’ve watched it yourself or watched youtube clips of particularly embarrassing shows.

        Now, on average, most immigrants will continue speaking their original language after they move. If the children were born in Canada or the US or wherever, usually their parents will teach them their language (even if they speak english themselves) and they’ll speak that to eachother. Apparently, not everyone does that. Some of them try to improve their english by speaking it all the time. As with most people learning a second language, they don’t speak it as easily as someone who’s been speaking it all of their life. Engrish, lolol, etc.

        Now, the thing about learning another language is that not everything translates perfectly. If you’ve watched a bad dub, you know what I’m talking about. In Japan, they have a thing for using sounds rather than words. Rather than yell “Oh my god, Jason! Nooo! Jason! Oh my god!” they will instead yell “AAAAAAAAAAAH” for a minute and a half. While things like “ugh” and “meh” are relatively common in english, we don’t have an easy equivalent to a lot of their exclamations.

        So, this all comes together in one hilarious incident when I was in Home Depot today. An asian girl was standing near the entrance to the store, alongside a very disinterested asian girl fiddling with an MP3 player. A slightly older asian guy brings a huge cart in the door, and the first girl yells (what I assume was) his name, surprising everyone in the vicinity. Then she runs towards him and jumps on the cart, plonks herself down and sits cross-legged on the cart. Then she yells “eeeeeeehhhhh I wanna go for a cart ride!!!!!” at which point everyone is like wtf r u doin? Even the cashiers were leaning around their stall things to take a look. Then she looks at the second girl and yells “sister! join me! we’re going for a cart ride eeeeeeeee!!!”

        It was just such a perfect moment. My grandfather and I looked at eachother and he just shook his head, a little dismissive shake along the lines of “I have no time for this foolishness.” I didn’t want to laugh because it would just ruin it. But like, just hearing her speak with the right words in the wrong way like any crappy dub, and the other girl’s expression, and the whole spectacle of it. I swear if someone dubbed real life it would be the greatest thing ever.

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        PS: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World: The Game is a fun side-scrolling brawler like any you may (or may not) have played before, with a lot of neat little features that are probably pilfered compiled from all over video game history. Also it’s really great as a co-op game. You can revive and heal your teammates, or pick them up and use them as weapons. You can work together for super attacks and combos, and you can lend eachother money to purchase power-ups and healing items. Should your teammates suck and fail to help you, you come back as a ghost and can steal their extra lives to revive yourself. They don’t get to say no!

        Also as a word on how awesome this game is, Scott’s late-fees are an actual thing in the game. As in you go to the video store and there’s a $500 item called “Scott’s Late Fees.” I don’t know what paying them off does, but it has to be awesome. Also I bought a game called Speedy the Porcupine and it gave me +50 speed so I’m awesome now. I was $8 short of buying Never-Ending Fantasy :(