Pour one out

A delicious, ice-cold Pepsi, that is.

Yesterday, Brickroad’s YouTube account was terminated without cause or warning. This is sad for many, many reasons. The most obvious being that Brick was one of the very few video Let’s Players that I could stand to watch for a whole video*. The other big one being that despite the fact that I own the game, I will probably never see the end of Shantae: Risky’s Revenge now because he hadn’t finished uploading that particular LP series before his account was banned. Now I’m actually going to have to go back and play the game. Who even does that anymore?

It should be noted that his current Shiren The Wanderer LP was pretty damn entertaining too. Made me buy a used copy of the game just so I could get in on the action.

But this is a real shame because Brickroad was good at what he did. He was a font of knowledge about most of the games he played, and I am incredibly envious of just how much he knows about some games. I don’t know nearly as much about any one game as he did about several of the games he had LPs of. I wish that there was just one game I could rattle off trivia about throughout a whole playthrough, or that I knew one game well enough to play through at 150% speed. Of course, even if I had the knowledge or skill for that kind of LP, I still wouldn’t be funny enough to keep people hooked. I think I’ve got the reactive humour down, but I’m not nearly as witty as I’d like to be.

I like to think that Brickroad’s influence shines through fairly obviously in my Let’s Plays. Both in style and substance. Just look at my video descriptions: a total ripoff of the Brickroad three-bullet-point system. I dressed it up a bit, but it’s unmistakable.

I’m still not really into reading or watching LPs in general, but there’s no doubt that I’ll pay attention to any new Brickroad projects. That is, assuming they happen. Hopefully this YouTube debacle doesn’t stop him from playing video games for the amusement of others.

The last thing I want is for this post to double as an eulogy.

*As it turns out, most of the Talking Tyrants who do video LPs are pretty decent too. Better than me, at any rate. You’d do well to check them out.

StartSelect Saga

I’ve somewhat randomly decided to start playing Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga again, partly because I had some strange desire to actually use my Game Boy Micro, and partly because I wanted a bus game. By that, I mean a game which I play exclusively whilst riding the bus. Since I spend at least 80 minutes on the bus each day, it seemed like a pretty good idea.

Only problem here is that I seem to have some kind of mental block when it comes to playing video games on the bus. I have no idea why, but I have a terribly difficult time even pulling a handheld out of my pocket, never mind turning it on and actually playing the stupid thing. Totally inverse of where I was when the first DS debuted, when I’d take any opportunity to whip that baby out and get some portable gaming done. Maybe I’m subconsciously ashamed of being an adult playing video games in public. I blame my location. I generally don’t even get StreetPass tags when I walk around with my 3DS, never mind actually see other people play video games in public. Roughly 50% of the bus riders I see have got their noses in iPads, but not a one has ever been playing a game. Never, have I seen anyone over 10 years of age brandishing a DS or PSP when not at Comic-Con.

I should move to Japan.

But the thing I originally wanted to post about is that Superstar Saga is driving me crazy. And it’s not really the game itself that I have a problem with. No, it’s just as enjoyable as it was (almost) a decade ago. It’s the controls that are getting to me.

You know how every game that’s ever been made by Nintendo uses the Start button (in Wii’s case, the + button) to pause? Not this game. In Superstar Saga, the Select button is the pause/menu button. And Start is the button you use to swap between the Mario bros. There is a lot of swapping required, and because of the silly button reversal, I end up going into the menu every few seconds. It’s so incredibly frustrating that I kind of want to stop playing.

But I won’t, because Superstar Saga still hits all the right notes where buttons aren’t concerned. It’s a fun, breezy romp with a battle system that keeps you engaged. The music is wonderful (but who would expect any less from Yoko Shimomura?) and I still have to stifle my laughter at the often humorous dialogue. If I can get past this silly Start/Select inversion, I’m sure it’ll be a wonderful time for everyone involved.

So me. It’ll be a wonderful time for me.

There’s the beef

As a homeowner and husband, I’ve recently been forced to learn how to use a kitchen. Not that I have a problem with that. Cooking has always been something I’ve been interested in, but never bothered to pursue at any length. Prior to the last couple weeks, most of my food preparation skills points had been allotted to toast and Kraft Dinner. Also chocolate strawberry banana pancakes, that one time.

Now I’m branching out little by little, and I’m starting to learn things about making foods that are not associated mostly with single men. Nothing super facny so far, mostly just learning to not ruin the premade stuff that has a more complicated heating process than “microwave = win.” So yeah. Most of my accomplishments can be summed up now by “put stuff into boiling water and wait.”

But! Last week I did something a little more elaborate. And by that, I mean I put stuff in boiled water and pan-fried some beef. Aaah yeah. Here’s a picture of what I did.

I’m very proud of this dish. Not only because I found it edible, but because The Wife also really enjoyed it. So mission accomplished there. I guess I’m pretty happy that rice is so easy to cook too. I can’t think of any examples, but I seem to recall hearing many people over my life claim that rice is hard to get right. But I  did it. On my first try. It’s as easy as reading the back of the box!

The beef, I went a little crazy on. I popped it up on the frying pan and tossed a little water and butter in there to give it a little smoothness. I’m sure there’s a term for this, but I have no idea what it is. I actually made this meal two days in a row, too. The second time around I dribbled a bit of soya sauce into the pan as well, in hopes that the beef would absorb the flavour, and then liberally sprinkled some ginger on top to add one final punch. Then I chopped up a few carrots and tossed them in so that the dish would contain some trace of vegetable.

When all was said and done, I globbed on a bunch of sweet & sour sauce, and mixed that baby up. You may think that I put too many flavours into this bad boy, but that’s not the case. Aside from the ginger, each flavour had its place and I can only describe the result as “tasty.” It certainly wasn’t the best thing I’ve ever eaten, but it was far and away the best thing I’ve ever prepared on my own.

Ryan ANGRY!

I was casually skimming the Globe and Mail at work yesterday, when I saw a tagline that had “Sherlock Holmes” and “mommy porn” in the same sentence. I needed to read whatever caused that. Frankly, I was also a little surprised that the universe hadn’t been ripped asunder by such a contrast of ideas.

What I found was this article. What a horrid, horrid thing. If you don’t want to read it, the idea is that some jerkoff is plugging sex scenes into classic literature. Yeah, take a moment to digest that, and then come join me in finding and lynching this dude and whoever is funding him.

This is wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. And the worst part is that the article’s author defends this abhorrent practice. He justifies it by suggesting that all throughout history we’ve re-writeen stories to better suit our needs. Yes, Disney retooled The Little Mermaid so that kids could enjoy it. They did that because the original is a horrifying and gruesome story. They pretty much changed it entirely. They made it accessible. What Total E-Bound is doing here would be like if Disney had just stuck a song and dance number into the original Little Mermaid. Shoehorning something into a piece of work that it doesn’t belong in is not something to be championed. Nevermind the fact that this butthole is turning Sherlock Holmes gay. Stop changing established characters! It’s not that I even have an issue with gayness in general, it’s just if I’m reading a Sherlock Holmes story and he starts spankin’ it to thoughts of Watson, I’m going to stop reading Sherlock Holmes.

The light at the end of the tunnel is that the article’s author suggests that it’s okay because fan fiction has been doing it for decades. Well, I guess then that these books will just be discredited and the “author” of the sex content derided. I’m sorry, but nobody takes fan fiction seriously, and everybody makes fun of fan fiction writers (with the possible exception of other fanfic writers). Did you just completely miss the internet?

If you want to sell classic literature to a new audience, market it to that audience. Don’t smut it up in hopes of enticing the lowest common denominator. I’ve never read Jane Eyre, but Sherlock Holmes stories are intelligent and exciting enough to stand on their own. The series didn’t need homoerotic fantasies to become a classic, it damn well doesn’t need them to maintain that status.

Also, anyone who uses the term “mommy porn” without any hint of irony or sarcasm needs to be smacked. Hard.

(It does delight me to some extent that The Wife is even more pissed off about this than I am. Being that she’s a huge bookworm, I shouldn’t have been surprised.)

The only game I play online

Hey so it’s Monster Hunter time. If you’re not interested in reading what I have to say about Monster Hunter, now would be the time to go enjoy what exists of the Articles archive.

I spent pretty much the entirety of last weekend playing Monster Hunter 3. For some reason, I felt compelled to go back and hunt Cedaeus, the final boss of the offline mode. I thought that maybe time and experience and better gear would make the fight less frustrating. Not so. Underwater hunting is still awful, and is exacerbated by the fact that Cedaeus is a gigantic (and surprisingly speedy) whale monster. It took three separate outings to get him, but I did it. It’s strange, I guess I’ve never slain him before either, because my hunt log says I only have one Cedaeus kill to my credit. Oh well.

Following that, I got annoyed that my Jaggi+ armor set still wasn’t strong enough, and decided to go online to challenge some high rank monsters, whose item drops would allow me to create better armor.

Monster Hunter 3’s online mode has a ranking system that governs what levels of hunts you can play, called Hunter Rank. I’m currently stuck at the point where I can only play up to 4-star hunts, which is the first tier of high rank quests. What that means is that it’s the beefed-up versions of the easy(ier) boss monsters. The problem here is that you need quite a few HR levels to unlock the next star level, and you need a lot of experience points to go up a rank. Also, hunts take about half an hour in general, and don’t dole out a whole lot of experience. So if you want to play MH3 to its full extent, you’ve got a lot of grinding in your future.

That’s not so bad though, because Monster Hunter is pretty darn fun.

Continue reading The only game I play online

Badwich

This is a photograph of the worst sandwich I’ve ever had the displeasure of eating. Fortunately, it was crafted by none other than myself, so I don’t have to get on anyone’s case about ruining a sandwich.

The sandwich in question is comprised of four ingredients beyond the requisite bread: turkey, cheese, tomato and mustard. Doesn’t sound too bad, does it? Not as bad as the last notable sandwich I made anyway. In reality the Pepwich was far more palatable than this beast.

Now, it’s just theory, because I haven’t tried to recreate this thing yet (And why would I? It was awful!) but I think the poor taste of the sandwich was more due to shoddy construction and handling than inappropriate ingredients. The first mistake I made was to put the tomatoes on the top, squished up against the mustarded bread. It’s just theory, but it seemed like the biggest issue in flavour was that the tomato and mustard had a poor combined taste. I claim it as a theory because it’s never been an issue before; I always get tomatoes and mustard on my Subway sandwiches, but here they seemed to work against each other. I mustard any meat-based sandwiches I make, and never has it been a problem when tomato is introduced. But I don’t think I’ve ever made a sandwich where the tomato and mustard touch. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s the only theory I’ve got.

Either that or the tomato had gone bad. It looked fairly fresh though.

The other big issue with the sandwich, and this was a rookie mistake, is that I sat the sandwich tomato-side down in its plastic container. Not an issue when you’re going to consume it right away, but when it’s going to sit until lunchtime? Tomato against bread is going to make for a mushy, disgusting sandwich. It wasn’t the worst soggification I’ve ever suffered, but that one layer of bread was still pretty soggy and gross. Combined with the off taste, it made for an almost inedible sandwich.

The lesson I want you to take away from this story, children, is this: don’t put your tomatoes adjacent to the bread when you make a sandwich. Put them between the meat and cheese. This also applies to pickles, but you have a little leeway there because pickels aren’t as watery as tomoatoes. Also pickles add a lot more to a sandwich than a tomoato will. Tomatoes are best reserved for omelettes and salad.

The worst number ever

I have this app that teaches me a new Finnish word every day. It’s mostly useless, because you really can’t learn a language one word at a time. Not efficiently, anyway. Plus I actually have to launch the app every day and manually choose to save the daily word, or else it’s lost to the ether. Sometimes updates will stealthily remove large swathes of words. It’s rather inconvenient and I sometimes wonder why I let it continue to eat up space on my phone.

At the very least though, it’s proven that twenty-one is the worst number ever.

Prolonged Fantasy VI

I’ve been very, very slowly chipping away at Final Fantasy VI. Or, I suppose it’s Final Fantasy III because I’m playing the Virtual Console edition. But all that aside, I started playing this in February. From what I’ve read about it over the years,  FFVI should not take 5+ months to complete.

The problem is that I cannot seem to remember that it’s there. Every time I pick it up and start playing again, it sems that a new game comes around to distract my attention from it. And this isn’t the first time I’ve had this issue either! I’ve tried playing it (admittedly the highly illegal ROM of it) a couple times before, and the farthest I’ve ever made it was to the ghost train. I know this for a fact because I haven’t got even the slightest recollection of Terra or Locke’s paths from the point where the party splits following the battle with Ultros.

I’ve finally progressed beyound that point though, and I’ve just arrived at whatever the town is where you can learn a little bit about Locke’s past. I probably should have remembered that one town’s name too, because Locke has always been my favourite FFVI character, even though I’ve never really played the game. That opinion is based almost completely from Nintendo Power’s coverage of the game. It’s funny, Epic Center was always my favourite NP feature, but I never played any SNES RPGs during their time. I was always afraid of games I wouldn’t be able to beat in one rental.

Before I move on, Locke is still my favourite character. “It’s a little tight, but the price was right!”

Anyway, I was a little distraught at the event battle just before this part of the game, where you have to defend a hill against a force of encroaching troops. FFVI up until that point wasn’t a tough game. I kept a big stack of potions on hand, and just chugged those as I brute-forced my way through anything that posed a threat. But this battle was different.

There’s a part that plays out the same near the beginning of the game, where you’re on a map that’s made up of a small maze. Your party is at the top, the enemy below. You get three groups of characters to move around while trying to stop the baddies reaching your side. The first instance of this is pretty easy. There aren’t a lot of bad guys, and it’s the beginning fo the game; of course they wouldn’t make it very hard. Only the second time around, you’re squaring off against a regiment of soldiers led by Kefka, who (SPOILERS) ends up being the main antagonist of the game.

It became clear very quickly that my parties were painfully underleveled. I had never stopped to grind in this playthrough yet, and while I still had a good supply of potions and tonics, the soldiers were doing a pretty good job of carving up my two-person squads. (There was one squad with three characters, but they only saw a single fight). In the end I got screwed because one party was constantly barraged by enemies, and since you can only move one squad at a time, your control is frozen as the camera pans over to any inactive parties that are besieged by enemies. Because of this, I was only able to move my backup squad at the top about one step between each battle, while the enemy party that was near the top was able to slide on in at two steps between fights. It was stupid, and a waste of like twenty minutes.

On my second time around, I tried something competely different. I stuck Terra and Sabin together, and sat my other two squads at the two choke points at the top of the map to intercept any incoming enemies. With Terra and Sabin, I beelined directly for Kefka. On the way they were accosted by at least seven enemy squads, which I cut down handily by spamming Sabin’s Aurabolt. Terra doled out poitions when necessary, and I FireDanced my way past the Rider at the bottom. I proceeded to continually blast Kefka with Aurabolt and he retreated before I knew it. I think only one enemy squad made it to the top before it was over.

I’m now starting to wonder if it’s a trait exclusive to FFVI, or if more FF games become a cakewalk if you just plow through them with a sack full of potions. I’m wondering if the rest of the game is like this too, or if I’m eventually going to have to put some thought into it. I’m sure that I haven’t seen the last of the gimmick bosses, but aside from that, is brute force the best way to get through all the mooks? I guess we’ll have to wait and see. I think at this pace I should be done by about this time two years from now.