Dress-up Dissidia

I tend to spend most of my time playing video games with new ones. Yes, I love going back to the classics, but they’re really just diversions from whatever my latest purchase is. That said, when it comes to my PSP, I have two phases: Dissidia: Final Fantasy and Monster Hunter Freedom: Unite. Over the last month or so I’ve been in the Dissidia phase.

When the game first came out, I thought it was completely retarded. I initially wouldn’t have touched the thing if you’d paid me to play it. I was also at a point in my life where I mostly looked down upon the Final Fantasy franchise as a whole. That really didn’t help Dissidia’s case. But time went on, and I found myself staring at the game’s case, looking at the characters portrayed on it, and wondering. Then, years later, I read this and immediately ran out to the Best Buy to pick up a copy of Dissidia (which was at the $20 point by then). Not that that series of articles references Dissidia very much, but it surely re-ignited my interest in Final Fantasy. It also got me started on Final Fantasy XIII, but that’s another story entirely.

So, Dissidia, if you haven’t read last summer’s posts about it, is a fighting game that incorporates a wealth of assests from the Final Fantasy franchise. I guess I never really explained the concept when I was posting about it before, so I might as well do it now. You know how the Super Smash Bros series takes characters and stages and music and everything else from the entirety of Nintendo’s back catalogue? Just imagine that, but only with FF stuff and with 3D movement.

The whole reason I was posting about Dissidia in the first place is that I’m playing the villains right now (the game’s character roster is one hero and one villain from each of the first ten Final Fantasy games) to earn the Chaos Reports (bits of backstory), and I wanted to vent about the “alternate costumes” that can be unlocked for each character. Whoo single-sentence paragraph.

There are three different kinds of alternate costumes in Dissidia, actual alternate costumes, palette swaps, and somethign in between. A couple heroes get completely different costumes (Squall and Cloud), some get palette swaps with minor changes (Firion and Onion Knight) and some just get recoloured (the rest). The palette swaps are a little disappointing, but at least there are a few actual alternate costumes. The villains, on the other hand, are all just pallette swaps, and none particularly good. Ooh, Garland’s cape is red instead of blue. Oh, I suppose Sephiroth technically gets a costume change, but I wonder if taking off your shirt really counts?

The bright spot in this colour-flipping madness is known as EX Mode. Each character has the ability to enter a super-powered state (think Limit Break) based on their abilities in whichever game they’re from. EX Mode makes the character a little stronger, but the real point of it is that it allows them to use their EX Burst, which is a big, flashy supermove (think Final Smash, but with more quick-time events).

Since the EX Modes are based on each character’s actual abilities in their game, each one is affected differently. Cloud, Squall and Tidus, for example, don’t get a costume change, but rather their weapons are upgraded. Terra transforms into her esper form, and Onion Knight changes into either a ninja or sage. Most of the other guys have cool alternate forms too, and it’s here that the villains really get to shine.

A handful of them still just get lousy palette swaps (Garland, Cloud of Darkness), but the bad guys generally get the best EX Mode transformations. Kefka turns into his God of Magic form, and Sephiroth grows that cool black wing. Golbez and Ultimecia are joined by their Shadow Dragon and Griever summons, respectively. I don’t know what the hell Jecht turns into because I never played Final Fantasy X, but it’s pretty cool.

And that’s about what I wanted to say today. I’ve heard rumours that there are more, better alternate costumes in the sequel, but it’ll be a long time before I’m done with the first Dissidia. There’s just so much game in there!

Separation anxiety

It’s hard to think that in less than a week I will no longer live in the room that I’ve lived in for roughly twenty years. I’m not going to lie; I think I may be more anxious about leaving my home behind than I am excited to be moving into my very own house. I am excited, mind you, it’s just that I have an old soul. An old soul that’s afraid of change.

I spent the majority of my Sunday afternoon last weekend tearing apart the room that I worked so long and hard to build. Given, that just means taking down posters and stuffing all my crap into boxes (and boy howdy do I have a lot of crap!), and I’m still not done yet. I keep hesitating to start packing my clothes because I keep trying to tell myself that I have more time and that I’ll still need them. I know that once my wardrobe is boxed away that it’s just going to get that much more real.

It… it looks so alien to me without all the posters and CD racks and all my other stuff. Those bare walls may not look like much, but they cleave through my soul like a gunblade through Squall’s face.

I know it’s a necessary step, but it’s a scary one. I love the comfortable safety of my parents’ house. I love not having to worry about bills. I love being able to walk upstairs and know that there will be food in the fridge. A month ago I was really confident that I was ready to grow up, and now it’s way too real.

I suppose that if there’s a silver lining in this, something that quells my fear and keeps me from running away and hiding in my room, it’s the knowledge that I’m going to get to live every day from now on with the woman I love. She’s the reason I do everything I do, and this is certainly no exception to the rule. I know that without her that I’d probably be a deadbeat living in my parents’ basement for the rest of the forseeable future. I will never take for granted how good it feels to have someone there who motivates you to be the best person you can be, who brings out all your best qualities. I love knowing that no matter what hardships I face, she will be there supporting me all the way, and that I have the opportunity to do the same for her.

I said it yesterday, and I’ll say it again: I’m lucky to have her.

I may be anxious about moving out, but I have nothing but excitement for my pending marriage.

4 (four)

Yesterday was the fourth anniversary of my first date with Stephanie. Between house and wedding expenses, we were too poor to make it one of those stereotypical anniversary date nights, but I got to spend it with her and that’s all I need to be happy. It was a great night, and I’m lucky to be with someone as perfect as her.

Back in January we splurged on tickets for the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, the corresponding concert having been a couple Fridays ago. They were a little more expensive than I’d have liked, but we agreed to claim that the purchase was our anniversary gift to each other. We went to see TSO a couple years ago for one of their Christmas shows, and I guess I don’t really need to mention that they left a good enough impression on us that we went back for a second round. To date, TSO is the only act we’ve seen twice.

The concert’s theme was Beethoven’s Last Night, and I don’t feel like trying to explain it, so here’s a link to the Wikipedia page. All you need to know up front is that TSO is a group that highly values both metal and classical music, and plays a stunning combination of the two. Despite my hipsterish nature when it comes to music, I really love it when rock acts cover classical music, so this kind of stuff is right up my alley.

The show, as I’d expected, was amazing from start to finish. Having a narrative in your concert might seem like something that just increases the delay between songs, but I find it extremely captivating. Musicals and traditional opera, I have a lot of trouble swallowing, but rock operas are one of my favourite things in the whole wide world. It was also nice that after the story was over, the band just kept playing. I think the total length of the concert was two and a half hours? Something around there, anyway.

I don’t really have any strong opinions left, so here’s a really low-quality YouTube video of a couple songs:

Drawing some things

You may have heard of the super-popular new iPhone game Draw Something. If not, I guess the best way to describe it would be like a casual edition of Pictionary. It’s a two-player game where you alternate drawing a thing and guesing the other person’s drawing of a thing. That’s really all there is to it, and it’s fantasticaly fun and addictive.

It’s also a very universal game. When I introducted it to her, the woman and I sat in bed playing together for roughly and hour and a half. And she still picks it up as often as I do.

In each round, you’re supplied with three random words to choose from and draw. There are no categories provided, but you’ll get a choice between an easy, medium, or hard word. Easy and normal words are usually stupid things like “worm,” “hockey” or “green.” The hard words can be downright challenging though, especially since they’re usually celebrity or character names.

The one to the right there particularly blew me away. I’ve had a few instances of “Mario” and “Koopa,” but never something as nichey as a relatively unpopular Final Fantasy hero. Oh, and Zidane is (debatably) the main character of Final Fantasy IX, just FYI.  I was really, really excited to try my hand at touch-drawing Zidane, but alas, the name showed up in a game I was playing against a girl who probably doesn’t even know what Final Fantasy is, nevermind the hero of one of the most underappreciated chapters. I could have drawn it, but I prefer to play the game so that people are able to guess what I’ve drawn. It’s more fun to keep up a long win streak.

Now imagine my disappointment when I Googled it and discovered that Zidane is also the name of an infamous soccer player. I suppose I’ll never get the opportunity to draw a chocobo now…

Audioddity

At work, I have the luxury of being able to listen to my iPod all day. The only drawback is that I have to keep one ear open so that if my boss is trying to talk to me over the cubicle I can hear her. Having only one earbud in causes a lot of audio loss, excluding me from all the sounds that are specifically piped through one given side. Usually, as long as I’ve got the bud that hosts the lead guitar I’m fine. There are a few albums that don’t use both channels, but those are few and far between.

Anyway, the point of the story is that I was listening to A Night at the Opera the other day, and all was going well until “You’re my Best Friend” came on. It seemed normal at first, but then I noticed a very prominent omission: Freddie’s vocals were only audible on the bud that was not in my ear! The backing vocals were all pumped through my active bud, but I couldn’t hear the main lyrics at all. Actually, it was only for a single verse, so it wasn’t a terrible loss. The song has a somewhat unique stucture lyrically, so I guess it’s the second verse? The one that starts with “I’ve been wandering round” anyway.

I’m used to instruments going to one side or the other, but not the lead vocals. There are harmony parts in “The Prophet’s Song” and “Bohemian Rhapsody” that have lead and backing vocals singing back and forth between channels, but that makes sense. A single verse sung through one side only? A little less usual.

It was a bit jarring, but it seems like it was an isolated incident. I kind of want to listen to the song through the other bud to see if the vocal track used the other channel exclusively at any point, or if it was maybe a mixing error that went unnoticed. I can only assume it was intentional, but it seems like a senseless separation to me.

Xenoworld

I’ve put about a day’s worth of play time into Xenoblade Chronicles since its release date, and it never stops amazing me. There are plenty of great things about the game, but the one thing that keeps hitting me over and over is the gigantic world environments.

Exactly why I’m so impressed by these is beyond me; it’s not a new feature to video games. Hell, I think that in February I spent more time in Skyrim than I did in the real world, and that game is all gigantic world.

It might be that I’m just now starting the really appreciate these huge environments. Hitting the wide open Gran Pulse after spending countless hours of being funneled through linear environments in Final Fantasy XIII was an absolutely exhilarating experience, and the effect wasn’t lost on me. When I first stepped out onto the Bionis’ Leg (pictured above), I got really excited and thought to myself “Oh man! This is the Gran Pulse of Xenoblade! Already! It must be huuuuge!” and then I remembered that I’d just spent almost 13 hours playing in the equally humongous environment of the lake and hillsides around Colony 9.

Colony 9, for those who aren’t yet on the Xenoblade wagon (shaaaaame), is the starting area of the game. And it is humongous. Like I said above, I spent roughly 12-13 hours playing around in there alone, doing sidequests, exploring the hillsides, challenging too-strong monsters. How many JRPGs give you such a large place to play around in right off the bat? Not too many. Unlike Skyrim and its cousins, Xenoblade doesn’t give you free access to the entire world right off the hop, but it does give you a big new playground after every few story bits.

The downside is that even though you have these huge environments to play around in, there isn’t a whole lot to do in them. There are truckloads of sidequests if you have the patience to stalk the townsfolk long enough, but most of them are monster-slaying requests or monster-loot fetch-quests. Monsters in any one area come in many shapes and sizes, but can generally be sorted down into two groups: ones you can kill and ones you won’t be able to kill for a long time. In the Colony 9 area, there are monster groups ranging from level 1-10 and then they rocket up to 70+; nothing in between. So unless you want to grind those weak mooks forever, there is sort of a ceiling to character development, at least in the early areas.

There are also no treasures in the field. Sort of. There are little collectible baubles that randomly appear all over the place as blue wips that you can pick up. You can log one of each in your colletopaedia, and when you complete a category of items or location page, you get a special stat-buffing gem. Once you’ve logged one of each type, these doodads are just good for selling and bartering with NPCs. Monsters drop loot too, including armor and weapon, but they mostly seem to be crap compared to the local shop stocks.

The real reward for running around the world is the thrill of adventure, discovering new places, and looking at those beautiful landscapes. The Bionis’ Leg area alone is so majestic and verdant that I don’t think I could ever get bored of running to the top of cliffs and looking down on the scenery. It also helps that the field music tracks are fantastic and I could listen to them forever. This is most likely because the uber-talented Yoko Shimomura is one of the composers of the game’s soundtrack. I desperately want to import a copy of said soundtrack, but with an Amazon price tag of $75, I can’t convince myself to pull the trigger on this one. It would definitely be the crown jewel of my video game soundtrack collection though…

And that’s all I’ve got to report for now. I’m not very far into the game yet, so I’m willing to bet you that there will be more thoughts on it in the future.

Twist and scarf

To the right of this test box is an image of a bag of Twistos, my new favouritest cracker. If the bag is to be beleived, they’re pretty new in general, too.

You see here the bruschetta flavour, and there are a couple other cheese-themed varieties, but they aren’t worth remembering because bruschetta is the best of the bunch, hands down. The other ones aren’t bad, mind you, they just pale in comparison to the deliciousness of the crumbelievable bruschetta flavour.

The crackers themselves are more like little bits of toasted bread than your traditional cracker, incidentally giving them a very similar texture to actual bruschetta. They’re have a very satisfying crunch to them but aren’t nearly as tough as bruschetta, and they pose little to no threat of tearing up the roof of your mouth. In fact, now that I think of it, they’re almost like croutons, just repurposed to be a stand-alone product.

The really best thing about these Twistos is that they are a semi-healthy snack and they’re cheap! Usually you only get one of those benefits, but the Twistos have got it all. There really isn’t much to them nutrient-wise, but they’re relatively low in sugars, which is my big problem area. They aren’t necessarily the healthiest snack in the grocery aisle, but they’re still worlds better than the crap I usually stuff in my gullet.

I had no idea what company produces these bad boys, and a quick Google search revealed that they were originally a Spanish-language snack that only recently made its way to North American shores. Either that or PepsiCo is ripping those guys off like there’s no tomorrow. There are other snacks in the Twistos catalogue, but give the fact that our version doesn’t have a subtitle, I doubt PepsiCo intends on bringing the other types over anytime soon. Doesn’t bother me though, because those other ones don’t interest me terribly.

I just wrote 300+ words about crackers. New low?

Good job, zombie arm!

The woman and I went to see The Cabin in the Woods last weekend. Perhaps you’ve seen the trailer? It’s the one where it starts out looking like just another slasher flick, but then a bird crashes into an invisible wall of future-technology and explodes into a fireball. Maybe there’s something more to this…

Since I love cheesy slasher flicks, the interest was already there for me. But then there’s the fact that there’s a whole other level there that we don’t really know anything about, and also it’s written by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard? Effin’ sign me up, man! I did read a (very convincing) review in the paper on the Friday too, which at that point was just preaching to the choir.

The Cabin in the Woods was even better than I’d hoped for, and might even beat out Drag Me to Hell as my favourite “horror” movie. If you’ll recall, I really liked Drag Me to Hell. I’d have to watch them both again, but regardless, they’re both amazing films, and I heartily recommend them both. That’s a little too straight to the point though; let’s talk a little more about The Cabin in the Woods.

The movie is played off in the trailer as a pretty generic slasher flick, where four sexy teens and Topher from Dollhouse head off to a creepy, secluded cabin in the woods for a weekend getaway. Does that sound like a million other movies? Yeah, a little.  But there is a second plot! It involves professionally-dressed men (and Whiskey from Dollhouse!) in some kind of fancy complex monitoring and ever-so-slightly controlling the fates of our cabin-goers. It’s not a spoiler, because it becomes apparent that this is happening within the first half-hour of the film.

Eventually the stories truly intertwine, and we see that they’re two sides of the same coin, equal parts of a bigger picture. This is still sounding a little generic, but there’s a lot of subtext here, and the whole movie is really one big deconstruction of the horror/slasher genre. But all pretension aside, what matters at the end of the day is that The Cabin in the Woods is hilarious. Sometimes in a tongue-in-cheek way, sometimes ironically, and most of the time very blatantly.

This is a movie about making fun of other movies, and it is a beautiful thing. You know all those terrible [Genre] Movie parodies that are terrible and should be forgotten from human history? The Cabin in the Woods is exactly what those movies wish they could be. It is poking fun at many, many other movies, but not doing it with an endless stream of references and fart jokes. The closest thing to a reference in this movie is… ah, I don’t really want to spoil it. But I will say that there are a couple short scenes that will leave Hellraiser fans grinning. Anyway, The Cabin in the Woods is funny and very smart, but it’s not inaccessible, which is what puts it head and shoulders above pretty much every other parody ever.

The Cabin in the Woods even spends a lot of time satirizing the people who go to the kind of movie it’s ripping on. Yeah, me. And that’s cool. There’s an element of reality TV parody here too, and I found it to be much more entertaining than the other movie doing that, The Hunger Games. But that’s another story entirely.

So again, The Cabin in the Woods is great. Go see it, and be ready for copious amounts of hilarity and blood. Also a unicorn.