Stuff, and things

31 May 10 | 16:07 | Posted by:

So, I've spent the past few hours sketching silly doodles in the GameSpite bonus books before stuffing them into envelopes. I'm hoping to have them in the mail within the next couple of days, so that's something we can all be excited about.



Perhaps less exciting for everyone who isn't me: I posted another installment of Kit-Kat Densetsu on BakeSpite and intend to post a new entry every day this week. I actually have enough different flavors to carry me pretty much to the end of June, to be honest, but I wouldn't want to burn through my material quite that quickly.

In summary: Blah, blah, blah.

category: blog | forums | three comments | §

Another great thing about Metroidvania games

30 May 10 | 17:00 | Posted by:

They make for some really awesome desktop backgrounds.



I'm proud to say that I have, to date, resisted the urge to do a Google Image Search for Samus, shrink down the result, and pretend to run it through the levels.

category: games | forums | two comments | §

The venting of the spleen

29 May 10 | 10:51 | Posted by:

This week, I did something I haven't had the occasion to do in quite a while: I published an article which was little more than me being a cranky, sardonic jerk about videogames that annoy me. I've been so darned positive about games lately, for the most part, which mostly has to do with the fact that my free time is limited and I only spend it on games I enjoy.



It was particularly satisfying to vent about how absolutely terrible the final stupid fisticuffs encounter of Metal Gear Solid 4 was, but I'm absolutely shocked to see how many people are willing to stand up and defend it. To my mind, it is the absolute lowest point of a series that alternates wildly between brilliant and brain-dead, and frankly I was kind of tempted to give MGS4 something in the neighborhood of a C just because it was such a terrible, inappropriate finale to the saga. This does not seem to be the general consensus on that sequence, though, and that baffles me.

Oh well. Internet be wack, yo.

Back to being positive, though: I've just opened up a Talking Time thread for voting on games to include in GameSpite Quarterly 6. Where the publication's second issue was about the greatest games ever (according to you folks), issue six will be about the most underappreciated games ever. (Titles that appeared in GSQ2 are disqualified for what I should hope are obvious reasons.) So, please do log in and vote for your top three personal picks. Subjectivity is totally great! I want this to be an interesting list that forces those of us writing to really think about what makes games worth playing, and these games in particular.

category: games | forums | 30 comments | §

A new wrinkle

27 May 10 | 23:13 | Posted by:

So, as of today, Apple now allows people to self-publish books on the iPad bookstore. (I can't bring myself to call them iBooks, though; in my old-school mind, an iBook is the low-budget version of a PowerBook... which no longer exists, I guess, so it's just needless pedantry.) Anyway, as someone who self-publishes, this development intrigues me! The iPad market is small enough that I'd be lucky to sell a dozen copies at the moment, but it's hard to imagine this particular media niche -- as filled by both iPad and the raft of looming competitors -- not becoming fairly important in the fairly near future. Thus it seems to be something I should jump on soon, doesn't it?

I don't suppose anyone knows how to go about procuring an ISBN number, or how to convert a PDF to ePub format?

category: blog | forums | 17 comments | §

Talkin' aboot language

26 May 10 | 19:29 | Posted by:

I browse a lot of forums in the course of my working day, so when I commented on Dragon Quest IX's localization and reactions to it last week, I was intrigued by the way number of people in various corners of the Internet assumed my criticism about what I see as short-sighted complaints about the way DQIX is being handled was specifically directed at them, when in fact it was just kind of a general response to a widespread dislike of the way Dragon Quest games are adapted into English.

(Convoluted as that last sentence was, I have probably disqualified myself from any commentary on the English language, but whatever.)

The fact of the matter is that Dragon Quest localization is a fairly divisive topic. It's not exactly one of the hot issues of modern life, but any forum featuring a fair amount of discussion on the series is bound to see a few dissenters who really and truly detest how Plus Alpha handles the series, with all their over-the-top dialects and extremely British-flavored (er, flavoured) text. And fair enough. Dragon Quest's English dialogue is pretty wildly different from, well, every other videogame series that I'm aware of. For me, that's a big part of the charm -- god knows there are more than enough games out there whose scripts were penned by people who either don't know how to convey anything akin to personality or simply don't care to bother -- but I can see where some might find it off-putting. And yeah, a couple of those dialects in Dragon Quest IV bordered on the grating.

Still, I think that the wanton abuse of idiom and idiosyncrasy are a perfect complement to the games, especially taken within the context of its character and history. There are some complaints that the English localizations aren't faithful to the original Japanese scripts, which I tend to regard as a depressing po-faced sort of gripe. Not that I ever do any localization work myself, but if I did, I would definitely favor the tenets laid down by Saint Ted lo those many years ago: It's important to be true to the source material, but never forget to give your target audience something interesting to read. A literal translation and an effective localization are rarely the same thing.

In the case of Dragon Quest games, while it's true that the original Japanese tends not to be quite so flamboyant as the modern English adaptations, it's also true that their dialogue is shaded with subtleties that aren't entirely possible in other languages. More importantly, though, Dragon Quest games don't take themselves completely seriously. Not to say they're devoid of drama, because that would be a patently ridiculous claim. But bear in mind that this is a franchise whose most iconic image is of a grinning blue slime; a franchise in which you can pay a pittance of coins so that you can close your eyes and have girls in bunny costumes squoosh their breasts against your face; a franchise that includes a combat class whose most tactics include telling a "naff gag" that debilitates the bad guys with laughter for a round or two (although sometimes it doesn't work, when the enemies don't get the joke). In other words, despite the epic drama and heartbreaking vignettes, it's hasn't exactly crawled up its own arse with self-importance.

The closest analog to Dragon Quest that comes to my mind is the manga of Osamu Tezuka, which is perfectly appropriate. Both stand as medium-defining works in Japan, yet neither has done especially well in the U.S. And both demonstrate the ability to make wild tonal swings between deathly serious and farcical slapstick... sometimes in a single panel, in Tezuka's case. The Dragon Quest games are the farthest thing from your typical stuffy RPG fodder, and the dialogue we see these days reflects that a lot better than the clunky semi-Shakespearean material that was foisted upon us in the NES days.

So anyway, the point is I'm really looking forward to Dragon Quest IX, and stuff. But I guess you knew that already. The end.

category: games | forums | 23 comments | §

So... it looks like today is Mega Man day.

25 May 10 | 16:43 | Posted by:

First, my morning RSS trawl inspires a look at the tragic disparity in quality between American Mega Man products and Japanese Rockman goods. Then, Capcom stops by and leaves a build of Mega Man Zero Collection with me for preview purposes. And then shortly after I posted that last piece, this piece of headwear showed up in the mail:


I'm not sure what powers decided I should be graced with so much Mega Man-themed material today, but I guess I won't complain. After spending a few days assembling dozens and dozens of pages worth of old Mega Man reviews for Year One, Vol. 2, it just seems kind of inevitable.

Special thanks to Another Castle on Etsy for hooking me up with this small bit of radness! And sorry about the awful webcam picture of myself, but I didn't have a fashion dummy to model it for me.

category: games | forums | fifteen comments | §

The tally

24 May 10 | 15:13 | Posted by:

Well, I was completely wrong about the Pierre Chang thing. But I did finish the book and submit it for proofing, so I'm going to consider this weekend a net victory.

The cover photo this time around was shot by my fiancée (and slightly tweaked by me) rather than just being based on a random iPhone snapshot. As you can see, there is a certain theme being established between this book and the first volume. However, the quality of the actual work is much higher this time around! I'm certain this holds true for the interior aesthetics as well.

Trivia time: I did try to do some "real" photography for the first book's cover, but strangely enough none of the pictures I took with a costly DSLR looked as good as what I snapped with my phone. I have since come to realize that this was because I had no idea how on earth one goes about using a DSLR. We regret the error.

category: blog | forums | eight comments | §

Where it's at

23 May 10 | 14:08 | Posted by:

Just as a quick update, GameSpite Year One, Vol. 2 was supposed to have been completed for proofing last weekend, and I was meant to have it in my hands at this point. Sadly, that hasn't been the case; the project spiraled a bit out of control. I'd estimated we'd end up at 280-300 pages; currently I am performing a holding action at 360 pages to keep from bumping up to the next folio price. What can I say? I got a little carried away with the page layouts. It was kind of like Xeno's Paradox for a while, there: I'd see I had 70 pages to go, but once I'd completed 10 pages of design I'd still have 66 pages left. Fortunately all that's left now is the fine tuning, so I should be submitting this to Blurb for reals tonight. Given the girth of this bad boy, pricing will probably end up being a little more than $20 for the paperback and twice that for a hard cover version with dust jacket.

Since it's about 90% recycled content, I'm guessing it's probably going to be of less interest to most people than our usual fare. However, GameSpite Quarterly 5 will be a 25th anniversary celebration of the NES, so I figure that should probably appeal to a few more people. (And yeah, I promise our next retrospective issue after that will be for a non-Nintendo, non-8-bit system.)

Needless to say, the delays with the book layout have affected mailings for the subscriber bonuses, but I am determined to have those in the mail before month's end! In other words, next Monday.

Anyway, I need to wrap the book now so I can watch the Lost finale and go about ignoring TV again. I would like to take this opportunity to further propagate my personal theory for how the show will end: We'll discover tonight that Pierre Chang is Pierre Francis Chang, and that the DHARMA Initiative is actually just a training camp for employees of the P.F. Chang restaurant franchise.

The whole series will then be revealed to have been a fever dream experienced by Hurley after eating a plate of crispy orange chicken that had gone slightly bad.

(boom)

LOST

category: blog | forums | sixteen comments | §

Sounds like it plays

22 May 10 | 11:38 | Posted by:

For the first time in... well, since I was in college, which I suppose the kind of time one generally measures in terms of glaciation and continental drift, isn't it? Huh. That's depressing.

Anyway, for the first time since that faraway era, I've been seeking out new music in an active way of late. Sometime around my junior year of college I bought some albums by The Orb and Eat Static, and I guess I decided that, well, my music collection is up at a few hundred CDs now, and that's more music than I can listen to in half a year, so I'm done now. Since then, I've picked up plenty of CDs and downloaded more than my share of music files -- legitimately, whenever possible! -- but it's all been drawn from the same pool of specific progressive rock bands, game audio, and pleasantly sterile '80s post-punk.



For some reason, though, I find myself compelled to hunt down new work lately. And by "new" I actually mean "old," since my brain's tuning knob seems to have settled on the so-called UK Canterbury scene of the '70s as my unexpected new fixation. It's strange, because I gave a few of the relevant bands a try back in college and found them distinctly lacking. But a few months back I downloaded Camel's Rain Dances on a whim (despite previously having found Camel to be suffocatingly dull) and couldn't stop listening to it. And now I'm slowly fleshing out my collection of Canterbury-affiliated albums, the vast majority of which are unified by the way their sounds shares a common airy warmth.

This morning I listened to National Health's eponymous debut album for the first time ever, and it made me kind of sad that I've lived so many years without ever having even heard of this band (outside of some passing mention on a Genesis retrospective, once). In between bouts of shaking my fist regretfully at the sky, though, I realized that my taste in music actually shares a lot in common with my taste in games. I tend to gravitate toward things with a sense of scope, a feeling of freedom, and a tendency to explore. Of course, games are an active medium where music isn't, so exploration in those cases is all on the musicians. But the rambling 15-minute "Tenemos Roads" flips the same switch deep in my brain that is struck by Symphony of the Night; it's meandering yet structured, sweeping but not bombastic.

Come to that, I think my interest in '70s-vintage music stems from the same place as my appreciation of classic games: Not just that this is what I grew up with or whatever, but because there's a certain authenticity about both. The sound of an unprocessed drum and a Hammond organ dates from an era before the music industry was thoroughly corporatized and composition took a back seat to production and digital tinkering, just as a 16-bit game predates massive teams and middleware solutions and render farms.

In other words, I'm pretty much just a Luddite when it comes to all my entertainment. Ah well. Not that you care about any of this, of course. It was just a random revelation.

category: media | forums | fourteen comments | §

Everyone walk the dinosaur

21 May 10 | 10:36 | Posted by:

I had no idea what a Tropius was until about 12 hours ago, when one randomly appeared on my Pokéwalker. Now I've caught a few of them, and I'm pretty sure it may be the entire reason God invented videogames. (Personally, I consider the story of how He appeared to Ralph Baer in a burning vacuum tube to be canon rather than apocrypha.)

Why is Tropius great? Well, let's see. It's a brontosaurus, so that's nice. But it's also a palm tree. Its fronds form wings, which means it is a flying brontosaurus. As brontos were herbivorous dinosaurs, this makes Tropius a cannibal. And reading its profile, I realize its beard is actually made of bananas that began to sprout there because it like bananas so much that it ate them all them time and its body eventually started just growing them itself. This of course makes no damn sense, but that just lends to its brilliance. It's a self-cannibalizing flying dinosaur, and that is fantastic. This is exactly the sort of bizarre foolishness that makes Pokémon worth bothering with in the first place.

Anyway, Tropius goes to the breeding farm so I can create a level one baby Tropius to import into my copy of Pokémon White, whenever that arrives here. The thing that really bugs me about these games -- well, one of the things that bugs me -- is that the really fun and interesting creatures don't show up until pretty late in the adventure, at which point it's far too much trouble to make them viable party members. So I'm rounding up a team of creatures more interesting than the ones the games want me to use in proper sequence -- such as Tropius, Spoink, and other assorted oddballs that apparently no one every actually uses -- so I can import them as early as possible and play the next chapter of the series my own dang way.

From everything I've read, Tropius is kind of worthless in the games, yeah. But by crackie, it's a flying palm tree dinosaur that eats its own banana beard, and I will find a way to make it a viable team member. The heck with you min-maxers and you balance-obsessed trainers alike; this is how these games are meant to be played.

category: games | forums | 37 comments | §

I just can't shut up

20 May 10 | 11:23 | Posted by:

So hey! That Dragon Quest IX thing. How about that, huh?

I think it's interesting that Nintendo is more or less relegating its role in the game's U.S. release to simply publishing and marketing it. All the main localization decisions are still being handled by Square Enix, including the text translation. But that's OK, because as the limited screens Nintendo has released so far reveal, DQIX is being translated with the same goofy irreverence as the past few games. On the whole, I have to say that I really prefer corny alliteration to hokey faux-Shakespearean English.

It's not shown in any of the screens so far, but with DQIX the localizers are also taking the opportunity to rename some old series standards. The Dharma Temple, for example, is now known as the Alltrades Abbey. I don't know if the translators were motivated by the need to make the oblique religious references feel more western, or if their obsessive need for alliteration won over consistency with Dragon Quest VII's localization, or if they were just worried about getting things muddled with Lost. Powder-blue Volkswagen buses would be tragically anachronistic here.

Whatever the case, the dude who runs Alltrades Abbey is now named... Jack of Alltrades.

I'm gonna be disappointed if they don't reprogram the Start button to play a rimshot clip.

category: games | forums | 41 comments | §

You are not allowed to call it DraQue

19 May 10 | 11:23 | Posted by:

You may have heard that Dragon Quest IX is launching in the U.S. July 11. I have already put in an order for two copies; one for myself, and one for the fiancée as a sort of last resort to get her interested in RPGs. She's been on a gaming kick lately, but keeps reaching a point at which she's frustrated by her inability to advance past the sticking points in whatever she tries. DQIX is highly approachable, and the coop means I can actually join in her game and help when she gets stuck, so I'm hoping this does the trick. Of course, there's the not-insignificant issue that she doesn't like games that involve a lot of reading and menus, preferring instead to shoot at things and blow them up, but if anything can break the mold it'll be DQIX. And if not... well, keep your eyes on the Trading Time thread on the forums, I guess.



I have another preview of the game up at 1UP. It's, like, my third. And that's not including all the podcast talk and blog posts I've penned about the game. What can I say, I like it.

More importantly, I think it's a very forward-thinking game despite the reputation for stagnation Dragon Quest commands among the American gaming public. Yes, it's running on 1995's technology, and it's a turn-based RPG, and yadda yadda blah. But its social components are extremely innovative, butting a classic RPG up against the realm of MMOs, and that's far more important than its polygon count. Videogames have reached a point where technology is more or less moot; only large studios with millions to spend can make games that truly push the boundaries of visual design, and the need to make a return on that investment brings with it a certain creativity-stifling caution. Not that pretty games are inherently boring. That would be a ridiculous claim! But the need for market performance often suffocates invention.

The future of games is pretty clearly in socialization. Nintendo's turned Wii into a stunning success, and why? Because its design emphasizes socialization rather than sitting alone, hunched over a controller. Facebook games are huge (or were right up until Facebook turned stupid a few weeks ago), and Mafia talk has taken hold of Talking Time like a particularly annoying kudzu. Why? Because these games are about sharing, networking, communicating. How we play games has grown to define the medium, not how pretty the games we play are. Dragon Quest IX changes the way one of the medium's oldest genres -- the turn-based RPG -- is played. That's a damn revolution, right there. And the fact that it's built on the series' basics, its lovable enemies and distinctive skills and emphasis on small, self-contained vignettes about the lives of everyday people, just means that all those social elements are bringing people together to enjoy something genuinely worthwhile.

So anyway, I hope to see you and your copy of DQIX this year at PAX. I would like to siphon off all your awesomest treasure maps, please.

category: games | forums | 24 comments | §

The inevitable minor course correction

18 May 10 | 16:18 | Posted by:

I'm always hesitant to post entries like that last one, because I don't want to give the wrong impression. And there are so many wrong impressions to choose from! In particular, I don't want to give the impression that I'm laboring under the delusion that I am a lone bastion of quality work here on this Internet, because (1) my work could use improvement and (2) there are plenty of other writers I look up and (3) I'm not the only person chafing under the Internet's new regime of cherry ad words and Google-baiting. For that matter, neither am I venting about my day job; we have some subtle but intriguing ideas at play at 1UP that, I hope and pray, will help us to work around the system.

What I am, however, is unhappy about the way "new media" has simply adopted the worst practices of old media, amplified them, and thrown out all the good. I am worried that before long my unwillingness to think in terms of (or, to be more honest, my inability to wrap my head around) traffic and metrics will make me as useless and unemployable as the cranky old journalist who refused to learn to use computers ten years ago.

So, anyway, thank you for the very nice things you've all said, but that wasn't really what I was after. Unfortunately, what I'm after is a large-scale ecumenical change in the things people value online, and in the way they read, which is a change I don't think this site's modest readership will be able to effect.

(However, if you do happen stumble across some kind of mass mind-control technique, please feel free to put it to use for me.)

category: blog | forums | fifteen comments | §

Regretful words

18 May 10 | 09:18 | Posted by:

Man, I owe you guys an apology. I've been violating our tacit agreement, the quiet pact we've had for years. You come to this site, maybe browse around, use the forums, possibly send me a little cash to help keep the servers running, and in return I write a steady stream of interesting words for you. I'm sorry to say that stream has been more like a trickle, and the trickle hasn't been very interesting. I am a terrible person and should be publicly admonished.

So let's get on that. As I write this, I am standing in front of a mirror, wagging a finger at myself in an accusatory fashion. You'll understand if I don't make this admonition public, of course; at the moment I am wearing only a T-shirt and underwear, and I'm pretty sure no one wants to see that. But take my word for it, I'm duly chastised.

I have to admit it has grown more difficult to find time for the upkeep of this site, between work, and the quarterly print publication, and my fiancée, and spending a couple hours every day exercising so that I don't get fat and ugly again, and my irritating need for several hours of sleep per night. But more to the point, I've been suffering a crisis of confidence lately as I wonder if I made a terrible mistake in choosing to become a writer.

Writing is looking more and more likely to become the next obsolete career selection, a once-proud vocation made redundant by the fact that no one gives a crap about quality work anymore... at least not on the Internet, anyway. I made this lamentation on last Friday's podcast, but a few years ago the quality of writing in magazines was being pruned and demolished in favor of compact, bite-sized fluff, whereas the Internet was a boundless horizon full of potential in which every possibility was open. Somehow, the poles have been reversed; now those few magazines that have survived into 2010 are producing more and better content, while the Internet has been reduced to a noisome den of noise and din. Writing online has been replaced by traffic-baiting, by search engine optimization and trolling for links from Digg/Twitter/Facebook/some other damn thing. The problem, of course, is that a few years ago no one knew what worked online, so it was anything-goes until someone found the magic formula. Now we do know what works, and everything else is moot; unfortunately, "everything else" includes the sorts of work I'm actually good at.

I'm certainly not the only writer feeling this way. It's a universal shift; think about the sites you frequented five years ago, your online reading habits. Now, think about your choice of venues today and how you approach the web. Think about site layouts then versus now, how article structures have changed, how the art of long-form prose has all but vanished from any site with an even vaguely commercial charter. I'm not just talking about game sites; I'm speaking of all sites, everywhere. If people make a living from a website, it is SEO-obsessed. You'll see several dozen headlines at various game blogs and news sites that, say, decry how some dude at BioWare who hasn't played Final Fantasy XIII doesn't think Final Fantasy XIII is a real RPG, but good luck finding a thoughtful editorial at those same sites that explores the comparative approaches of BioWare and Square Enix -- and if you do, you can be sure it'll have far fewer hits/diggs/thumbs than the five-sentence piece quoting some guy you've never heard of out of context and painting his opinion as his employer's public company-wide stance on some non-issue that was artificially inflated and invented for the sake of provoking hits.

Anyway, all of this makes me fear for my future, because I'm pretty OK at writing, but I just can't get my head around the art of traffic-baiting. I'm not really future-proof! I am old, and I am rapidly growing obsolete. It's pretty depressing to think about.

That just makes me feel worse about neglecting GameSpite, of course. I'll never be able to make a living off the work I do here, but at least it's something I can approach any way I want. Even if that does mean it will grow less and less viable as the Internet causes us how to forget to read fully developed thoughts and, eventually, complete sentences. At least we can all fade into irrelevance on our own terms: That is, with subjects, verbs, and punctuation.

Daily updates resume tomorrow. Let's make this slow ride into the sunset a memorable one.

category: blog | forums | 45 comments | §

Why I haven't been blogging much

16 May 10 | 10:32 | Posted by:

category: blog | forums | seven comments | §

Jamaican me thirsty

13 May 10 | 21:49 | Posted by:

Looks like Nintendo is really branching out with the Wii, taking its peripherals into all kinds of interesting new markets:


I'm not really sure how this is supposed to work as a Wii skin, but I've added it to my Amazon wish list so that maybe I can find out next time gifting season rolls around. And, I suspect, so that I may have a very, very Merry Christmas.

(Found here)

category: games | forums | nine comments | §

How you feel can make you real

12 May 10 | 21:51 | Posted by:

After being spurned by Valve for the past 12 years, Mac users were finally given a tiny taste of Steam today. Of course, that doesn't include the Half-Life games, because I'm pretty sure that the day Half-Life shows up on Mac is the day that everyone dies in a horrible inversion of reality which will rend the human mind unto insanity. But we did get Torchlight, which will be totally great once I finish my current book layout project and can spend time with things that don't involve InDesign.

The cross-platform aspect of Steam -- with its "cloud" design that allows a player to jump onto any Steam-enabled computer and not only load up their account but also their current progress in any of their games -- really demonstrates how utterly behind the curve Nintendo is when it comes to digital rights management. Wired Game|Life posted a story today that I've been wanting to write for a couple of years spanking Nintendo for its atrociously backward approach to digital accounts. There's no excuse for the fact that you can't easily (or, according to some, simply can't) transfer games from one Nintendo device to another; all your personal data is linked into their servers, connected through Club Nintendo, and well-documented in a variety of means. The fact that they force you to re-purchase all your software if you should have the audacity to upgrade/switch/lose your system almost certainly has nothing to do with technical limitations and everything to do with the company's collectively awful grasp of the social and end-user aspect of technology.

Heck, even Apple blows Nintendo away in this regard, despite its own shortcomings. Lose a music or video download to a hard drive crash or whatever and you're sadly outta luck; but even so, Apple allows you to share your purchases among several computers and a number of portable devices. Complain as I might about Valve's habits and Apple's drift from its former standards, but at least they have the decency not to assume that their customers are inherently criminal. Maybe some day Nintendo will extend us the same benefit of a doubt.

category: games | forums | eleven comments | §

Hey youuu guuuys

11 May 10 | 22:50 | Posted by:

Dear site subscribers, the latest bonus book has arrived en masse and is really quite nice, so please do me the courtesy of emailing me with your up-to-date shipping address so that I may mail these out over the weekend. Thanks!

category: blog | forums | seven comments | §

2D: Mother's day, pt. 2

10 May 10 | 21:41 | Posted by:

Yes, yes, Mother's Day was yesterday. Whatever.



I sure haven't had much time to play Mother 3 lately! But that's OK, because it means I can take it slowly and savor the experience. The game reminds me of a good book in that it's the sort of thing you could easily skim, but taking the time to soak it up is far more rewarding.

At the moment I'm well into the second chapter of the game, wherein I've taken control of a gimpy slacker with a knack for theft in the wake of a tragic turn of events. (Chapter one's parallels with EarthBound -- dealing with strange happenings in the dead of night -- are not lost on me, but there's much less "quirk" and a lot more "this is heartbreaking" in Mother 3.) The end of the first chapter is what's sticking with me, though. Not just because of the events, but also because of the care that went into depicting the aftermath as Flint beats the crap out of the ground, the citizens of Tamzily, and most of the scenery in a fit of raw rage.

Illustrating sprites is something of a lost art these days, which is a real shame. It demands a certain level of artistry... which isn't to say that 3D animation doesn't require artistry as well, but it's a different kind of artistry. There's something really satisfying about unique sprite animations that appear once in a game never to be seen again; they're opulent, indulgent, almost wasteful. The one-off animations were something that really made me fall in love with Final Fantasy Tactics, and already I've seen more of them (or so I assume) in Mother 3 than in just about any other game that comes to mind. Seeing a grieving Flint smash up a fire and take wild swings at his friends would have been powerful in any medium, but knowing that each frame was meticulously animated, that so much thought was put into the way the debris flew from the impact and the townswoman scurried to shield Lucas and Claus from the sight of their father flipping out, really added an extra layer of meaning to the whole scene. Even little things, like the careful palette choices on the ground around the fire to simulate what would normally be handled by self-illuminating light sources, catch the eye.

But then again, maybe I'm just a polygon-hating luddite! You just can't trust my technology-hating ways.

category: 2D, games | forums | eleven comments | §

GSQ4: Bowser's inside comix

09 May 10 | 15:12 | Posted by:

Mario & Luigi: The Inside Scoop on Bowser
The secret of being a good editor is to surround yourself with people more talented than you are, because their goodness reflects positively on you. This is why I keep Mr. Armstrong chained up in my basement, where he produces a steady stream of videogame-themed comics for my publications. In return, I supply him with life-sustaining water and scraps of bread crust.

category: games, gamespite | forums | five comments | §

Because you love statistics

08 May 10 | 21:51 | Posted by:

I thought you might like to know that I've completed preliminary layouts for Year One, Vol. 2, and it's going to clock in somewhere between 280 and 300 pages, depending on how crazy I go with images. That's slightly slimmer than the first volume, but there's actually more content since the text is smaller and denser and I'm no longer railroaded into using Blurb's wasteful layout templates.

I was hoping to get a lot of work done on the book today, but then this little baby came over to visit, and he kept smiling at me and laughing, so I was obligated to hold him and make silly noises and blow air against his belly until he got tired and fell asleep. It was terribly unlike me, and I apologize. Apparently I have a biological clock now? I'm not sure how that happened, but I'm having this unseemly situation investigated.

Also, I've been updating BakeSpite again, mainly because it's fun to shoot photos of food.

category: blog | forums | two comments | §

Big Boss here. I forget to mention something!

07 May 10 | 11:06 | Posted by:

I sent off the subscriber bonus books to be printed a few days ago. It looks like they will ship in about 10 days, so I should have them mail by the end of the month. Hoorah, and all that. Now I am hard at work on Year One, Vol. 2. This morning on the train I finished some of the new content for the book: A Metal Gear Solid 2 retrospective to help fill the gaps in the site's Metal Gear section. The article will show up online eventually, of course, but for the next few months it will be a tiny carrot dangling from the incentive stick. I don't think it will take too long to put together the book, so I figure that'll be up for sale at the beginning of June.

category: gamespite | forums | seven comments | §

2D: Mother's day, part one (of ??)

05 May 10 | 21:05 | Posted by:

The first time I wrote here about Mother 3, I was piping up as a despicable, shallow graphics whore who could only babble on about how great the game's visuals look. Somehow, though, I'd forgotten just how nice the game actually does look in motion. Guys, it's been four years, and I am old and senile. Be kind.

Yes, I know, sprites are ancient and dated and all that nonsense, but Mother 3 possesses a sort of vibrant opulence missing from most games these days. Marketing and focus group realities have conspired to crush this sort of visual design in modern games, with only the occasional exception to the rule. You have the rare oddity like Mario & Luigi popping into sight like some bizarre coelacanth darting out of gaming's fossil record for a quick dash into the sunlight, but by and large developers are only allowed to publish 2D visuals if they're self-consciously retro. The only way to keep classic styles and formats alive is for designers to kneecap themselves. And hey, that affected retro style definitely works, when it's used appropriately; but there's more to 2D visuals than big-chunky pixels (or static hand-drawn portraits, as in most corner-cutting JRPGs). Mother 3 is a beautiful reminder of how much artistry games can possess.



I almost -- almost! -- regret my decision to use an Afterburnered GBA to play through the game. I say "almost" because, despite the fact that a hacked-in side light for a reflective LCD offers a rather poor visual experience, the original model GBA is awfully comfortable to hold. It's all chunky and sturdy in a way that current portables lack, what with their devotion to slim lines and clean angles. Pah. Leave that tasteful nonsense to Apple; I like my gaming platforms to be ergonomic.

Even with the dim, uneven lighting of the hacked-up GBA, Mother 3 looks amazing. The combination of beautiful color choices, crisp sprite work, and graceful animation makes for a game that's absolutely eye-popping. Every scene so far is crammed with detail, but never cluttered. And yet it still looks like a Mother game. EarthBound was a Super NES game designed to look like an NES game, yet still be decidedly 16-bit; Mother 3 is a GBA game designed to mimic the overall aesthetic of EarthBound, yet it's still decidedly portable. Which is to say, despite the stylistic similarity to its predecessor, it's smartly crafted to work on smaller, less visible screens: The sprites are smaller to prevent the visuals from feeling cramped, yet the characters and environments are clean and well-defined so that everything is easily visible.

Playing Mother 3 makes me miss beautiful games like this. But that sense of loss is a lie: "Games" never looked like this, only a handful of standout titles. Mother 3 is a false relic from an era that never really existed. It's more like... the ideal of what we remember games as being. It's the embodiment of nostalgia, in a sense: Not what we did, but what we remember of that experience. No wonder people always talk about how moving Mother 3's story is. It assaults your mind through your eyes right from the start with the illusion of fond memories.

category: 2D | forums | sixteen comments | §

Pokey-vacation

04 May 10 | 20:12 | Posted by:

I've decided to take a break from Pokémon, because somehow I've been chipping away at it for six weeks and still have a long way to go. The second half of the game thus far has proven to be reeeeeally boring, given that it's designed almost entirely to coast along on nostalgia for Red/Blue that I simply don't possess. I figure I have at least a year before Black/White makes it way to the U.S., so that's plenty of time to work through it one boring little piece at a time. At this point, I'm mostly just determined to complete it so that I can say I did it. The most noble motivation of them all.

To cleanse my palate, I decided to ask for suggestions from the Talking Time kids. Then a few minutes later I remembered, oh dang! I still haven't played the English translation of Mother 3 yet! And that seems like a grand and glorious thing to do.

I guess if you hate the Mother series you probably shouldn't read the site for a couple of weeks, since I imagine I'll be talking about it a fair amount.

In the meantime, I'm going to pretend that this decision is entirely by design, and that I'm tackling the game in honor of Mother's Day and that this isn't just another of my life's random stupid coincidences. Likewise, the fact that I'm abandoning my mission to battle pokeyman creatures in order to battle Pokey-man's creatures.

For the record, I'm playing this fan-crafted translation on an Afterburner-modified original model Game Boy Advance. I thought about using a DS Lite, but there's a certain poetic symmetry in using a system hacked to shore up Nintendo's design deficiencies in order to play a game left stranded overseas by Nintendo's U.S. release scheduling deficiencies.

category: games | forums | 19 comments | §

Bonus glory

03 May 10 | 13:53 | Posted by:

My print proof of the second bonus subscriber book has just arrived from Blurb, and I've gotta say it looks phenomenal. Except the cover, which I didn't have ready until yesterday; on the proof, it's basically a big, blank nothing. So there's no point in showing it off. But the interiors are fantastic. Downright classy. Not sure how people are going to feel about the content itself, but at least it will look great. Basically, I finally got the hang of InDesign.

Said content, incidentally, is divided into two parts: "Guild Woes: An Etrian Odyssey Tale" (30 pp.) and "ToastyFrog in: Metroidvania!" (possibly part one of many, 8 pp.). The latter is a short story, and the former is a videogame critique, sort of.

I should have the book's text proofread by tomorrow, at which point I can pretty much place the order for the final prints right away. Assuming all goes according to keikaku, I'll have the books in the mail to their loyal recipients the weekend after next. And I am now fielding requests for content for the third bonus book! These things are created very specifically for you guys, with a print run of well less than 100 copies, so I might as well create work that you want to read.

category: gamespite | forums | seven comments | §

A skyscraper built on a tarpaper shack's foundations

02 May 10 | 20:29 | Posted by:

I finally beat Pokémon HeartGold this weekend. And by "beat" I mean "the credits rolled and then the game said, oh by the way here is the other half of the adventure that you need to complete." It's kind of like the Inverted Castle from Symphony of the Night except that the world assets are copied-and-pasted from some other game. That's all well and good, but I have to say my enthusiasm for completing the back half of the quest has been severely depleted by the "endgame." The Elite 4 sequence -- the series' equivalent of a final boss, I guess -- isn't a terrible idea, but it has the unfortunate side effect of throwing into sharp relief just how absolutely awful a lot of the mechanics and underlying concepts of the Pokémon series really are.

The issue is that the Elite 4 tend to use critters that are about 10 levels above every other trainer you've faced throughout the game, and their ringleader's team is almost ten levels higher than that. In theory, that's totally fine; after all, the point of a final battle is to put your skills to the test and provide a real challenge. The flaw with this, in practice, is that the game doesn't really offer a reasonable way to level up a team once you get to the end, so if you make it to the final gauntlet with a team that isn't properly balanced to provide the very specific tactics you need to employ, you'll be grinding for hours and hours and hours to reach that point. And nothing makes a game more fun than hitting a brick wall that kills your momentum!

Of course, long-time series players are more than happy to dish out advice on which moves and attributes your crew should learn, as if it should be immediately obvious how you should go about acquiring those skills. Except that it's not; while Pokémon games offer a multitude of combatants that can be trained up, each with a rich and varied skill tree, there's no way to know in advance which skills a given creature will learn except by referring to outside resources. So, you're given a choice: You can go it alone and hope to stumble upon something amazing by pure chance through a tremendous investment of time and effort, or you can just give up on mastering the game under your own steam and seek external help by reading a guide or asking for advice. Neither is a satisfying solution.

The prevailing attitude about these shortcomings is that the developers at Game Freak are too lazy to bother updating the underlying 8-bit RPG around which every Pokémon game is built... or worse, too incompetent. I kind of doubt it, though. There's nothing preventing the creators from adding a small amount of data to the game -- something like Etrian Odyssey's skill tree preview that allow you to see the nature of and prerequisites for every possible ability you'll eventually learn -- to make the series more self-contained and user-friendly. But to do that would be to undermine the vast revenue stream that is the Pokémon guide business, to say nothing of the horrifyingly unending cartoon series (which I assume serves as a sort of loosely-plotted strategy guide in its own right). Even something like offering higher-level random encounters would be detrimental to the underlying philosophy of the Pokémon series, which is "keep gamers from playing anything besides Pokémon for as long as possible."

For my part, I eventually just steamrolled the Elite 4 with a bunch of high-level monsters I traded for over the Global Trade Station. It's really kind of startling what people will part with in return for a version-exclusive creature! But that was an act of annoyed frustration that came only after trying to build up two separate teams to competitive status over 10 days of play. I dunno, I tend to be of the mindset that I shouldn't have to memorize extensive stats and data from a guide in order to have a fighting chance, but maybe that's just the cynical part of me that thinks gaming should have outgrown that sort of crap a decade and a half ago speaking.

So, what's keeping me going? Well, I know I'll inevitably play Pokémon Black & White, even though it won't fix a single one of these severe issues. I plan to import a team of ridiculously useless creatures over from HeartGold right at the very outset of my adventure so that I can focus on beating the next-gen (ha) game with a party consisting of a bunch of scrubs. Maybe by then I'll have sorted out all this deliberately opaque nonsense... though of course I'm sure Game Freak will introduce a few new ill-explained wrinkles to the next games to keep things hostile to the player.

Man, what a stupid hobby videogaming is.

category: games | forums | 41 comments | §