It’s potluck day at work. I’ve already eaten enough perogies and veggies that I’m surprised my co-workers don’t have to roll me around. I’m trying to lose weight for the wedding, and going back for more would be very counter-productive to that cause.
But there is a cheesecake in the lunch room.
It beckons me. I can hear it calling; its sweet, gooey voice echoing in my mind.
I don’t know how much longer I can resist…
Itchy. Tasty.
Do you like Earthbound? If you answered no, it’s because you haven’t played it.
It seems that the big thing about Earthbound is that everybody loves it for different reasons, and more often than not, they’re all little personal things. I’ve read a host of Earthbound-related stuff this week, and I recommend checking out at least Talking Tyrant Loki‘s take on it. It’s the shortest of the three links I’m posting here, and probably the easiest to swallow. Another one from a website I’ve never read before called Critical Distance gives you a sort of play-by-play of a handful of other people’s EB-related musings. The last, an absolutely mammoth review by Tim Rogers really digs into the game. It’s a long read, and it’s incredibly deep. If you don’t want to experience Earthbound after reading this, nothing will sway you.
Me, I think the thing that draws me most to Earthbound is the music. Ever since the first time I played it, the Onett theme has stuck with me. I whistle it pretty consistently, and usually when I go for a walk on a quiet day (sans iPod) I find the Twoson theme playing in my head.
More than anything, the little scene you get when waking up in a hotel and the accompanying melody are permanently ingrained on my soul. Most people miss it because you wake up and leave the room to get back to the quest, but there’s a piece of music that plays after the “good morning” melody that I’m sure is exclusive to the room after waking. Once you leave the room, it switches back to regular ol’ hotel music. I think. It’s been almost a year since I played the game, so the details are a little fuzzy.
The point is, that that one tiny moment -those ten second between when the screen fades after talking to the hotel clerk and leaving your room- makes me feel an overwhelming sense of serenity. In other RPGs, waking up after a hotel stay produces a chime and then it’s back to business. Earthbound perfectly captures that one feeling that we all get occasionally in the morning, when you wake up and everything feels absolutely perfect for a few fleeting seconds.
The little melody. The music that comes afterwards. The chirping of the birds in the background. This minor instance that is a throwaway moment in any other game has had a deeper and more lasting impact on me than any other element of any game that I can think of. You may read this, having never played the game, and think I’m nuts. Maybe you have played it, but didn’t get the same sensation. But this affected me. I can’t even describe how it works in my head. Anytime I stay at a hotel in real life, this scene invariably invades my mind.
There’s a scene in the game where you stay in a haunted hotel, and the whole process is similar, but twisted. That was when I truly realized that things were really amiss, despite the fact that the town was overrun with zombies and smelly trash can ghosts. It was emotionally distressing, to say the least.
All that, and I haven’t even gotten around to the Sound Stone Melody (called “Smiles and Tears,” apparently). This is the first song that I can remember which evoked a strong emotional response in me, and remains one of two songs and the only instrumental piece that has ever brought tears to my eyes on the merits of the music alone, the other being Queen’s “Save Me.” But while the latter brought about its response through a genuine expression of despair and loneliness, the Sound Stone Melody has a more ineffable quality to it. I don’t know how it manages to grip my consciousness so tightly, but it does. It’s one of my favourite pieces of music, and it really is beautiful.
The main quest of Earthbound is to assemble the pieces of this melody. Yes, it’s to help defeat an evil alien, but that’s besides the point. You travel the world, to these sacred places that really aren’t so extraordinary on their own. At each one, you acquire the next few bars of the tune. Once you’ve assembled them all and listen to the entire piece, you cannot help but be overcome by a wave of nostalgia, remembering all of these places, and everything you experienced on the way there. Maybe it was just a silly quest in a silly video game, but now it’s a part of you too, and that melody will bring all those feelings and memories back every time you listen to it. I used to sit on the Sound Stone screen and listen to the melody -even when incomplete- over and over, because it brought with it the absolute strangest feeling I’d ever experienced. It was like the greatest happiness and the deepest sorrow wrapped into one short, simple melody.
So yeah, Earthbound is pretty deep. I recommend playing immersing yourself in it as soon as possible. And don’t just get to the end. Walk around. Explore the world. Let it and all of its little details wash into you. Though given that everyone who writes about Earthbound in this way played it in their developmental years and is now waxing nostalgic about it, I’m not sure if an adult could properly appreciate the game. All I can say for sure is that I played plenty of video games in my youth, and none of them evoke that same warm feeling in my chest that Earthbound does.
I spent a little time last night exploring the Playstation Store, and I really had no idea how robust its catalog is. Turns out that a rather large helping of PSP games are available in digital versions as well as UMD. I had no idea! Guess that just goes to show how far out of the loop I am these days.
Anyway, the object of my desire, Persona 3 Portable, is still costs a little more than I can justify spending at the moment, and I think with some dedicated hunting I could track down a physical copy for less, so I let it go for now. I did notice that there was a sequel to Steambot Chronicles though! And you know how I love my Steambot Chronicles.
The odd thing about it is that the download was only around 128MB. It’s supposed to be a full game, so that seems small to me. Isn’t that small? Maybe I just read it wrong. Then again, it only took ten minutes to download, so…
Size notwithstanding, it does seem like there’s quite a bit here. Any important conversations are fully voice-acted, and the game is all in 3D graphics, so no loss there. I’ve only spent half an hour with it and most of that was story blah blah blahing, so I can’t vouch for how big the game world is, but hub town is pretty big! And the gameplay seems to be identical to that of its older brother, but with what is seeming to be a much fluffier story (re: robot fighting tournament). Oh, and the loading times are super short compared to those in the PS2 game, so booya there.
I know it’s weird, but I think about Steambot Chronicles now and then, considering replaying it. Hopefully this new game will fill that hole, and maybe it’ll have some of the things I would have liked in the original. There’s one particular thing I’d like to see here, which is dungeons. The original game was a fairly open-ended game, but as far as the story goes it was almost all outdoor setpieces. There were three optional dungeons, however, that you could explore and find treasure in. This is also where you’d go for a challenge, as some of the toughest enemies were hiding in these caves. But as I said, there were only three, and I don’t remember any of them being very long. They may have had random elements though?
More to the point, I think the game would only be better with even a little more focus on these dungeons. They can still be optional, because half the fun is not being forced to do something. But they need to be a little meatier! Make at least one a real challenge, with tens of floors and save/refuel points and a boss/bosses. I think all the treasure was salable junk in the original game, so make these dungeon dives really worth the trouble by putting exclusive equipment down there.
Even if the dungeons aren’t revamped, and even if they don’t exist in this sequel, I’m hoping that it’s an otherwise fun game. Re-reading my article on it reminds me of a few of the rough spots in the original, but I only remember being nothing but delighted while playing it.
Yesterday I discovered the Playstation Store for the first time. This is both fantastic and not good at all.
I suppose I knew that it existed. As I understood it though, it could only be accessed via PS3 and then the games could be transferred to your PSP. If that was ever the case, it’s not anymore. And now I have access to PSOne Classics, and my credit card bill is going to inflate dramatically.
I’ve already bought Breath of Fire IV, Tomb Raider and Gex 3: Enter the Gecko. BoFIV and Tomb Raider because the kids at Gamespite keep telling my how good they are and how I missed out, and Gex 3 because I remember playing and enjoying the N64 version as a whippersnapper. In retrospect, it’s a game that only a child should enjoy; a second-rate Banjo-Kazooie.
The most interesting thing about Gex 3 is that it’s just loaded with pop-culture references. And this was in an age before Family Guy. At least, Gex: Enter the Gecko (Gex 2) predated Family Guy by about a year, and it used the same schtick. After a little research, it seems like Enter the Gecko was actually released before Banjo-Kazooie, making my comment in the last paragraph a little backwards, but you’d think that Crystal Dynamics would have learned from the best for Gex 3. That is to say, the best for 3D platforming collectathons anyway.
I actually cannot wait to dig into Tomb Raider. I remember hating the demo with a passion, but I’ve heard enough people say that once you get around the lame controls and gunplay mechanics there’s a great adventure buried in there. I hope to excavate this supposed relic. Hyuk hyuk.
And Breath of Fire IV? I’ve played the first dungeons in the first two BoF games, and have delved a bit farther into Dragon Quarter (which I need to get back to…), but otherwise I have very little experience with the series. RPGs also seem better suited than complex action games to be played on a system that’s missing two buttons and an analog stick from the original controller. Also, I probably don’t need to buy a third copy of Final Fantasy VIII. Though I inevitably will. The idea of being able to play FFVIII anywhere is way too tempting. And when I can, I fear my 3DS and all other PSP games I own will become completely irrelevant. The only thing that’s really stopping me from doing so right now is the fact that my tiny memory stick is full and I don’t want to buy a new one.
In conclusion, I’m glad the most these games go for is $10 (sans tax!). That’s considerably less than people are trying to make me pay for used physical copies! Hooray!
I picked up Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together a while back, because I love me some tactical strategy games. Two years ago I committed to finishing Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions, and burned my way through it over the summer months. I figured I’d do the same for Tactics Ogre this year. So far, not looking so good.
It’s mostly just that I’m not setting aside any time to play it. I started playing maybe three weeks ago and generally just pick it up during my lunch hours at work. Yeah, that’s an optimal time for handheld games, but when each battle can take anywhere up to half an hour, it makes progress slow. Especially considering that I can spend just as much time between battles tweaking my army’s equipment and skills. Playing the random encounter battles only serves to slow story progression even more. It’s definitely a game that requires a big time commitment.
So far, I’m enjoying TO almost equally to FFT. The big difference is that FFT makes life a little easier for players in several ways. The most obvious one regards skills. In FFT, each class has a skill set, and once you earn enough JP (Job Points) to buy any of the skills within that set, they’re free to use. Permanently ingrained in your character. You walk into battle, and as long as your dude has the Black Magic skill set equipped, he can use any Black Magic he knows. Passive skills and reaction skills are a little more limited, but your abilities are all good to go.
Tactics Ogre is similar, but more complex. You still buy skills, but each unit has a certain allotment of skill slots in which they can be equipped. You can use your points to buy more slots, but they’re expensive. And all skills must be equipped. Passive abilities, stat boosts, counterattacks, usable skills, etc. all take up a valuable slot. It’s not a bad system by any means, but it means you have to grind twice as much so you can buy the skills and the skill slots to put them in.
The other little difference is in attack magic. So far in TO, all the healing and stat-/status-affecting spells I’ve seen just happen where they’re casted. All spells work this way in FFT. The target tiles are highlighted, and the fireball appears there. But attack spells in TO are projectiles, and therefore need a clear path to their target. I’ve fried the heads of many of my own allies because it took me a while to get accustomed to this rule and how to determine the trajectory of the spell (though there is an ability that makes said trajectory visible).
Fortunately, the game also includes a rewind feature called the Chariot Tarot, which can turn battles back by up to 50 turns. While FFT is easier overall (and can be broken much easier), the Chariot system makes life more bearable because you can rewind and basically try to get things right if a battle goes south. Mostly I just use it when I wang one of my own guys in the head with a spell.
None of this is to say that I’m against the game though! I like that it’s challenging but not brutally so. If you do FFT right, the challenge level goes out the window pretty quickly. There are one or two sticky fights, but really as soon as you get ninjas you’re golden. And then when Cid joins? It should just say “you win” at that point. TO doesn’t seem to have such luxuries. But of course, I’m still only a few fights into Chapter 2, so there’s plenty of room left for game-breaking. And that’s what I want, deep down inside. As much as I enjoy the feeling of winning a hard-fought battle by the skin of my teeth (more on that in a second), I truly love marching into battle with unstoppable, dual-wielding demigods. With the skill system here though… I don’t see it happening. At least not if there’s a slot cap. That would be tragic.
As far as winning a battle by a hair, I got into this one random fight yesterday against a bunch of zombified people and skeletons. Such units are all classified as undead, and undead units will come back to life (with full HP!) three turns after they’ve been killed. The only way (currently available) to stop this is with the Exorcism spell. I did not have this spell at the time. Now, felling seven or eight units within three “rounds” of combat isn’t exactly easy, but somehow I managed to make it through and you bet your ass the first thing I did afterward was pick up a few copies of the scroll that teaches Exorcism.
The one thing I really like about the game though, is that you level up classes instead of individual units. Which sucks if you change one of your dudes to a new class and he has to start at Lv1 again, but as long as you bring a good mix of classes to each battle, it should be more beneficial than anything. At least it seems that way for now. Changing classes is a bitch anyway, because unlike FTT where you get new classes by leveling other ones, here you need a special ticket (One for every job class! Collect them all!) every time you want to do a class change. So you can’t just go and change your main dude between black mage and knight every fight. I mean, you can, but it’ll cost you. Not that there’s any reason to do that anyway.
I still love the meat of the game, but there are a few freedoms taken away here that I miss. Not that they’re important of useful freedoms, but if I want to make a paladin that can chuck fireballs, I think I should be able to. Actually, I haven’t seen a paladin class yet, so maybe they can chuck fireballs. A knight that chucks fireballs then. No, spell fencers are not good enough for me!
I work in a new building. It was built across the parking lot from a Superstore, which is always busy. We have comparatively little traffic, though things have picked up a little recently. The branch is close to the southernmost point of the city, and it’s a bit out of the way, which doesn’t help make us more accessible. However, it seems like the driveway to our parking lot is the real thing keeping people away. Take a look at the diagram below.
The blue arrow shows the way I come on on my drive to work. The gold arrows show the flow of traffic, and the purple arrow is the only way to access our parking lot. It should also be noted that this map is technically upside down (North is at the bottom).
So if you can navigate my clumsy map, you can see that when you journey to my building, you must make a u-turn when approaching from the main street. You could always make life easier and come in from the Superstore parking lot, but that’s just silly. Generally, you’re doing a u-turn.
And people bitch about this.
We’ve all heard people complain about stupid stuff before, but they get so riled up about this, you’d think that they’re taking the poor driveway planning as a personal attack on them. One guy came in yesterday and actually yelled at us about it. He’s not the first to do so, but the location has been open for seven months now, so at this point we’re a little taken aback when someone reacts so violently about it. I thought that people were realizing that it’s a tiny inconvenience and moved on with their lives. Stupid me.
Not that I care that people are too useless at driving to make a u-turn (“I had to make a three-point turn to get in here!”), but they take it out on us humble employees, who have nothing at all to do with it.
There are architects who designed the building and parking lot. There is Superstore, whose head office in Ontario is too apathetic to give us the okay to have the median cut out a little at the end (that part of the lot is on their property, not ours). There are the people at head office who are in charge of enacting some kind of solution. But no, the complaints and verbal assaults are all directed at the branch employees. Of course I’m not surprised, because when something goes wrong it’s clearly the next closest person’s fault.
I’m just sick of people thinking we have any say in this business at all. Yes, it’s a minor inconvenience. Suck it up, and then go dust the sand out of your vaginas. We have to do that u-turn every day. No, old man, I’m not going to rent a jackhammer and tear it up myself. You go do that. And enjoy it as much as you can before you get arrested for destruction of property, and probably a handful of other laws I’m sure that would break.
I’m sorry that the driveway is that way, but there’s nothing anyone who works in this building can do about it, so leave me alone. It’s a u-turn. I really don’t care. I’m a fairly competent driver, so it’s literally no problem at all for me.
If there’s a silver lining here, recently construction started to the South and East of our building. People think it’s the construction of a new entry/exit for the parking lot. I just love to watch the hope in their eyes vanish when I tell them that it’s actually just apartment buildings going up. Oh, the sweet taste of shattered dreams…
One of the things I really like about LEGO Rock Band is the story mode. It begins by your LEGO character seeing LEGO Queen perform on TV, and starting up a band because… well, the lack of dialogue makes the exact reason a little ambiguous, but I’m assuming that they decide the easiest way to meet Queen would be to be in a successful band.
The story rolls out in traditional LEGO video game fashion, with hilarious cutscenes punctuating your band’s tour. Most of these cutscenes happen around rock power challenges. These are special gigs where somebody needs something and you use the power of rock to make it happen. In the first one you demolish a building. Later on you’ll summon a thunderstorm to save a farmer’s crops from drought. It’s the closest a Rock Band game will ever come to having boss battles.
These are cool. I love them and would not remove them for the world. I’m not finished the tour yet, so maybe they get even better later, but I can’t help but feel like maybe there could be cooler subject matter? Look at Brutal Legend, for example, where the power of rock is used to wage wars. LEGO Rock Band is technically channeling the power of power-pop, so it’s understandable that the most awesome thing they would do is fight off a giant octopus, but imagine if the game were something more along the lines of, let’s say Dethklok Rock Band.
It’s no secret that I’ve been wishing and hoping for a Dethklok-centric guitar game since Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, but it’ll never happen. EA will find a way to make a game that gives the player candy and blowjobs before they greenlight Dethklok Rock Band. Mainly because Dethklok is not mainstream enough, and why would EA release a game that’s pretty much guaranteed to move even fewer units than Green Day Rock Band? (Ooh, burn!)
One might also argue that between both The Dethalbum and The Dethalbum II there are only 33 Dethklok songs, and that’s not enough to justify a full disc release. There is tons of music on the show that were never released on either album though, and while some are just bits of songs, I’m sure Brendon Small has complete versions of all the tracks somewhere. And really, would it not be awesome if songs like “Hamburger Time,” “Takin’ It Easy,” and “Underwater Friends” were included? While we’re at it, why not include a couple Snakes N’ Barrels tracks? Or a venue dedicated to Dr. Rockso/Zazz Blammymatazz? The point is, the official material couldn’t fill a game, but there’s more than enough supplemental stuff there to pad it out. Not to mention that fans would eat it up. With a friggin’ spoon.
Circling back to my original point here, rock power challenges would be awesome in Dethklok Rock Band. You wouldn’t even need to read lyrics to come up with cool challenge scenarios; the titles are more than enough in most cases! “Volcano” and “Comet Song” would obviously have you summoning (or maybe repelling) the named disaster with the power of metal. “The Cyborg Slayers” speaks for itself, and “Awaken” will have the band bringing a giant troll to life. You don’t even have to be creative with this stuff, it’s awesome. The challenges in LEGO Rock Band really draw you into the whole scenario, and I think it would only get better with something as intense as causing a volcano to erupt through the power of death metal.
That intensity takes us back around to why the game would never be made: it would be way too damn difficult. In Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, “Bloodlines” is fairly easy, but “Laser Cannon Deth Sentence” is so difficult that I can’t even star power my way to the end. “Thunderhorse” was one of my favourite tracks to play on Guitar Hero 2, even though to this day I cannot 5-star it. The Van Halen and Metallica editions of Guitar Hero have pretty steep difficulty curves (in comparison to the numbered games), but Dethklok Rock Band would be many, many times harder. You’d be a fool to expect any less from a game that’s 90% death metal, of course, but I think it would still turn away potential buyers. Yes, people could step down their difficulty level if it were spoiling their fun, but I’m pretty adamant about not toning it down. If I can’t play a song on expert, I don’t go down to hard: I just don’t play that song. Best case scenario, I play it on expert bass instead of guitar.
The really sad thing about all this is that Konami was developing a Metalocalypse game. …Only it was an action game where you play as a Klokateer for some reason, and was quickly cancelled because they realized how stupid that was. I posit that a Metalocalypse action game could work, but nobody wants to play a Metalocalypse game where you don’t get to play as Dethklok. That’s like having a Super Mario Bros where you’re forced to play as Toad. Good as the game might be, you will inevitably say “fuck this, I’m not playing Goddanm Toad.” Likewise, I do not want to play a Metalocalypse game where I can’t play as Toki or Pickles. Can I say that enough times?
Time has not been kind to single-band plastic guitar games, or even just plastic guitar games in general, so any tiny window there was for a Dethklok Rock Band has long since closed, but I still think it would kick some serious ass. No, it wouldn’t be for everybody, but Metalocalypse has been pretty well-received for what it is, and even though there’s no way it would get close to million-seller, there is certainly a niche that would play it. Maybe we should get Atlus on the case? Somebody do that. I’d be pretty pumped if there were even a Dethklok DLC pack for Rock Band someday in the near future. It doesn’t even have to be a full album, I’ll take a 3-pack (“Awaken” “Black Fire Upon Us” and “Comet Song,” please). The fact that there isn’t even one Dethklok song available yet is sad, and I hope that one day it will be remedied, but I’ll likely have to buy Rock Band 3 when that happens. Hopefully it’s $5 on that day.
This is broken now that I’ve moved to WordPress! Now come back in a few hours and see if that greeting has changed. I made up (re: stole) a dealie that makes it change based on the time of day. Hopefully it works right.
The point of this exercise -aside from seeing how little function you can get from as many lines of code as possible- is to play with JavaScript a bit today. The code I used is really not complicated at all, but it took me almost half an hour to get that greeting to the point where it would show up on the page. I don’t much care for JavaScript; I cannot foresee any reason why I would use it. Alas, to learn XSLT properly, one must also know XML. And to learn XML, a firm grasp on JavaScript is highly recommended. So today I’m learning about JavaScript. It’s going slowly.
I don’t really think that it’s useless or anything. It’s just like, I’m reading and there’s these cool things you can do but then I turn around and realize that there’s no reason to. Sure I could put a self-updating time stamp on the site, but why bother? You’re probably reading this on a computer, and the time and date are right there on the bottom-right corner of your screen. I can do algebra on my page with JavaScript, but I cannot imagine any situation where it would be useful. Even if/else is just if/then’s dropout cousin for webpage content. I’d make stuff up just for the sake of learning it, but really, that would amount to making homework for myself. Mind you, I’m in the JavaScript tutorial equivalent of kindergarten, so maybe there’s better stuff beyond the horizon.
So I’m trying to get some small part of that project I’ve been talking about up. Not happening. Being insistent on using XML is keeping the project in the “working on” phase, and it’s not getting anywhere. I really don’t understand what it is I need to be doing. Guess I’ll just have to spend tomorrow reading about it… Dammit. I really wanted to have something up today.
