I don’t actually think that’s a real word.

Anyway, I booted up the 360 this morning to see what the “New Xbox Experience” was all about, and managed to be the first person on my friends list* to whip up an avatar, which I will share with you because

a) I’m narcissistic.**

b) It reminds me of the good old days, when I had more hair.

* Only 13 people long, so this really isn’t much of an achievement.

** While “Avatarized” isn’t a real word, this one is.  I had to look up how to spell it, mind you.

There’s a particular Japanese ghost story that I see repeated quite often, with some variation - that, not knowing the official name, I think of as the “extra person” story.  If you’ve ever seen They Were Eleven, you have the gist of it - a group of people, in some extraordinary circumstance, discover that they have an extra member, but don’t know which of the group is the “extra” who isn’t supposed to be there.  In some variants, we actually find out WHY there is one extra person - in other variants, the “wait, we have one extra!” is the Big Reveal and the story ends there.

Killer 7 draws on this ghost story - there are EIGHT Smiths in a group called the Killer SEVEN, and I was quite happy when it turned out to follow the first of those options and we found out who the extra was and why they were there.  I was expecting it would remain unexplained - because, well, the story DOES have that reputation for being opaque.

Reputation aside, the game actually does an awful lot of explaining after a certain point, and the story becomes a lot easier to follow - though, I have the feeling that, if I were to put disc 1 back in the Gamecube and start over from scratch, it would make even more sense.

That’s a little more effort than I’m willing to put in, though.  I happily did it for Fatal Frame II, which featured cute girls in frilly outfits, but Killer 7 doesn’t have quite the same replay appeal.

That sounds like a bit of a put-down, so I’ll clarify a bit:

Killer 7 is one ugly game, even accounting for “stylistic decisions”, the control scheme seems almost deliberately engineered to make things difficult for the player, the blood is overdone, the characters say “fuck” entirely too much, and there’s a “Boy, you really liked “Se7en”, huh?” cutscene that could have been dropped.

It’s also ridiculously satisfying and at times a sheer joy to play.  I wouldn’t have felt ripped off if I’d actually paid full price for it, so getting it after it’d hit the clearance racks is even sweeter.

Note: I typed the bit above without realizing that a “Se7en” ripoff homage in a game called “Killer 7″ might have been an intentional reference, and now I feel silly but I’m going to leave it in the post so you can all point and laugh.

Just for the record, when I was making fun of adventure games in my earlier post on Killer 7, I did not know that I would, at a point approximately halfway through the game, actually have to look around for doohickies so I could turn on a valve to drain a pool.

I got some of the particulars wrong, mind you.  While you do get an awful lot of rings throughout the course of the game, none of them have been swallowed by fish, not yet anyway.  Instead, they are, perfectly logically, given to you by a disembodied head that likes to go to amusement parks and hang around in garages.

At the moment, having broken up an organlegging ring by fighting a machine-gun-toting Sailor-Moon-wannabe in a plaid skirt followed by a quick-draw contest with her albino adoptive father, I’m hunting down an artist whose Power-Rangers-esque comic book seems to be predicting the future.

This is all, again, perfectly logical.

OK, I’m pretty much lying.  What I should say is that, while I’m really enjoying the game, I’m looking forward to playing through to the end so I can go looking for discussions on what the hell the story was all about. 

So I’ve been really cranking through the games backlog this year, up to over 40 games finished and I might just be able to push that to 50 by the time 2009 rolls around.

On the other hand, my wife wanted to go out and look for DS games this weekend - she doesn’t really build up a backlog, mind you, she has a couple of Xbox games knocking around that she wants to get back to sometime, but apart from that she plays her DS an awful lot and doesn’t let stuff build up - and unfortunately for me, she took me along.

And there are an awful lot of cheap PS2 titles for sale right now.

I came home with Klonoa 2, which was defensible as I enjoyed the GBA games quite a lot.  Seemed perfectly reasonable to add it to the backlog.

Unfortunately, I also came home with Ratchet & Clank : Going Commando and Up Your Arsenal, because I played the PS3 Ratchet & Clank demo and thought it was damn fun, which reminded me that I bought the first game when it went greatest hits and had never actually tried it and then I saw the sequels cheap…

…and Oni, because it was $2.99 with a spotless disc and manual and it surely must be worth it, and Jak & Daxter : The Precursor Legacy because, what the hell, I’m buying all these Ratchet & Clank games and I should at least try the Other Big PS2 Buddy Game, and Jedi Knight II because I thought I’d heard people say that it was awfully good.

So, added six games to the backlog.

At least, after buying the second and third Ratchet & Clank games, I DID put the first one into the PS3 and played it for 3 straight hours.  Mighty fun game, that.  Wish I’d played it at some point in the four years since I bought it, mind you.

I tell myself that it could have been much worse, I could have bought six NEW games and then been out $240.  Buying these six only set me back $43 which isn’t a lot in the grand scheme of things.

So, I took our Denon 2910 DVD player in for service last Sunday because it had stopped playing some - but not all - CDs, and I honestly expected to get it back with a note of “could not reproduce problem.”

This worry was intensified somewhat when the retailer called back five days later saying that I could come and pick up my player.  I mean, it was cool that they’d shipped it off to Denon and gotten it back already, don’t get me wrong, but it seemed like that wasn’t really enough time to test it and fix it.

I took along a power cord and a couple of CDs that had exhibited problems.  I’m not an idiot.

Happily, when I plugged the player in at the store and put CDs into it, it recognized them without difficulty, so I took it home to confront my next worry.

See, the whole reason we went with this model of Denon was that it could be made region-free by pushing a few buttons, no modification needed.

When I took it in, I was really hoping that, in addition to actually being able to see the problem, that they wouldn’t exercise their right to say “well, it’s broken, here’s this year’s model DVD player instead.”

They didn’t do that, which was nice.  They found that the problem was that the optical drive was, well, worn out, replaced the drive, which sorted out the problem neatly, and I should have been worry-free from that point on, only:

The work order also said “UPGRADED FIRMWARE”, and this made me somewhat nervous, because that’s the sort of things companies do to get rid of little things like back-door-region-code-mods.

We got it home, I plugged it in, and all the settings were back to the default states, as if it were new from box.  This was a pretty good indication that they had done the firmware upgrade they mentioned.

I put in a region 1 disc, which played just fine.

Then I put in our region 2 Nausicaa DVD, and THAT played just fine.

So life is good.  I’m not sure how they upgraded the firmware without knocking it back to a region 1 player, but I’m not going to bitch.

I’m coming up on the end of my AA degree, a nominally-two year process that will have stretched out for three years by the end of it.

I have good reason for this.

If I’d started off with a full load of courses and realized that it just wasn’t going to happen, it would have been embarrassing and expensive.  Instead, I took five classes over the first three terms, concentrating on ones that were heavy pre-requisites, the sorts of things I really didn’t WANT to take.  Writing, speech, college algebra… Not things that were relevant to the plan of getting a degree in Japanese, but at the same time things that, if I couldn’t hack it in, I wouldn’t get any degree at all.  After those first three terms, I switched to full time and took classes like statistics, psychology, drama, economics, chemistry…

I did occasionally have to explain to people that, yes, I was trying for a Japanese degree, and that, no, I didn’t see any real contradictions in going to college for five terms before enrolling in my first actual Japanese class.

But I digress.

My plan has been to finish up my Oregon Transfer AA degree in Spring of 2009, and it’s looking like I’ll hit the mark there.

That leaves me two years short of the whole Bachelor’s degree thing.

A solution comes to mind here, which is to find somewhere else that will let me take classes and hopefully eventually issue me a degree.

The obvious candidate for that was the semi-local State university, which would have let me stay right where I am and commute about 20 miles each way for school.

That made perfect sense until, oh, the whole gas crunch thing and also our rent jumping by 20% over the last two years as a new management company bought our complex.

Sucking up the rent boost in order to stay put and drive forty miles round-trip at least three days a week sounded kind of dumb, so we were looking at moving closer to school.

On the other hand.

The hard part about moving is the “putting stuff in boxes and in a truck”, right?

Once it’s in a truck, moving, say, 100 miles in the opposite direction to go to the slightly-less-local school with the much better-known Japanese program isn’t all that much more difficult, right?

With this in mind, I put in an application to them, mindful of the fact that their reputation for having good programs came with a bit of a reputation for being difficult to get in to.

That came back yesterday, approved, with all of my community college course hours neatly assigned to the equivalent courses at the four-year college, and it looks like I had better get ready to box stuff up over the next eight months.

A little while ago, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Phantasy Star series - you know, the really damn cool Master System and Genesis RPGs that Sega has been trying to pretend never existed now that they’ve decided that pumping out endless pseudo-MMORPGs is a better use of the name? - Sega put up an anniversary web site and put out a few bits and bobs designed to get the nostalgia flowing and the wallets opening.

In Japan only, of course.

Anyway, one of the bits and bobs was a very neat poster.  I couldn’t buy it, of course, and the provided image sample was far too small to use as a desktop wallpaper.

I finally found a decent-size version of the image.  Still a bit small, but on a white desktop background it works pretty well regardless of your monitor size.

I share this with you now:

I’m letting my PSP annoy me lately.

See, here’s the thing:  I have a Ceramic White Japanese PSP-1000, hand-imported from Akihabara back in August of ‘06.  I rather like having the Japanese firmware; it means that when I go looking for demos or wallpaper or what have you, I’m taken to the Japanese PSP site which has better stuff than the US site.

It’s running firmware version 3.50, which is the last version that can be replaced with custom firmware without too much effort; all I need to do is use the Lumines buffer overrun thing.  Of course, then I lose the things that I like about having an imported PSP.

It running firmware 3.50 is also what’s stopping me from playing the last three or four PSP games I’ve gotten; they all require at least 3.51.  If I upgrade to 3.51, I’m locked into official firmware from then on out.

I had a solution to this.

I was going to buy a “Deep Red” PSP-2000 in Japan in June so I’d have one PSP with up-to-date Japanese firmware and I could replace the firmware on my original PSP with custom firmware.

I also thought that the red PSP looked super cool, so, you know, two good reasons to drop another Y16900.  It occurs to me that I have pretty poor priorities for how to spend money.

But:

The red PSP-2000 was not to be found, anywhere, for any price.

I could have picked up pretty much any other limited edition - even the Final Fantasy limited edition package - just not the red one.  I did see a gentleman using one in a maid cafe, so I know that they do exist and aren’t just a product of my fevered imagination.

And, no, I don’t want the red PSP that came out in the US, because I’d have to try to scrape off the Kratos and I don’t think that would work out well.

I’m honestly not even sure what homebrew apps I WANT to run.

The usual reason people put custom firmware on their PSPs is to run bootlegged copies of games, and I could really care less about that, so I’m not exactly sure why I’m holding back upgrading the PSP to the latest version except that, well, it feels like I’m closing a door.

And, no, It’s not that I’m refraining based on any particular ethical grounds.  It’s just that I don’t have enough time to play through all the games I’ve actually spent money on, so there’s no point in making my PSP able to play ISOs; it would just mean that I could accumulate even more games that I don’t have time for. 

This has been especially annoying since it’s mid-November and two of the PSP games I haven’t been able to play were 2007 Christmas gifts, so they’ve been sitting unplayed for 11 months while I try to make up my mind.  I’ve also been putting off buying games I want - like Crisis Core - so my PSP has pretty much been nothing but a media player all this time.

So, yeah, it’s a petty thing to be frustrated about and I really need to make up my mind, but first I needed to rant about it.

As often as I see the topic come up on forums and blogs, I think it’s safe to say that most - if not all - gamers have a list of games that they loved and that they think got the short end of the stick in the marketplace.

Sometimes, these are pretty individual opinions - I haven’t met too many other folks who absolutely loved Alisia Dragoon, for instance - but there are games whose market reception was legendarily apathetic in comparison to the efforts spent on promoting them.  These usually get even more credit if their production costs were so high, and their sales so low, that they heavily contributed to the failure-or-near-failure of a publisher or development house.  See: Majesco, Clover, etc.

The top two games that I see trotted out as “overlooked” are Psychonauts and Beyond Good and Evil.  Both expensive games, both heavily marketed, both marked down to twenty bucks in their first month of sales.

I can’t say that this is ALL bad.  Yeah, it’s sucked having to wait so long for a BG&E2, but I’m not sure that it would be better if it had sold by the truckload and spawned an endless stream of sequels and spin-offs.

Put another way:  Do you really want to see a BG&E-inspired Kart Racing game?

Anyway, after you get past the “big two” underappreciated games, you tend to see at least a mention of Killer 7.

Killer 7 is a game that’s at the end of the “accessibility” scale that’s furthest away from, oh, Pac-man.  The control scheme is obtuse - you don’t even use the joystick to move, for instance, your character moves forward when you press the A button and turns around if you press B - and it has the worst case of Ugly First Level Syndrome I’ve yet encountered, a bizarre mostly-white building that reminds me of the worst examples of mid-90s 3D and which is so devoid of distinguishing features that I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be a hotel, an office building, or maybe an apartment block.

Your in-game advice is delivered by a gibbering nutjob in a bondage outfit, and when you die, you leave a take-out-baggie - seriously - full of your vital bits that you then have to use another character to retrieve and bring back to a save room before you can continue.

Is it any wonder that I was able to pick this up, a few months after release, for $9.98?  Or that the shelf I took it from was full of similarly-clearance-priced copies?

At its core, it’s awfully close to an adventure game.  You have a limited set of locations you can explore, there are puzzles to be solved to open up new locations, and the puzzle solving tends pretty heavily towards the “to open this door, you’re going to need to do two or three fetch quests, seemingly unrelated to the actual door opening, which will result in the key to the door falling out of its hiding place for no apparent reason.”

On the other hand, while you’re roaming around whatever building you’re in looking for the crank handle that will turn on the water pump in the basement and drain the flooded room, leaving the fish in the flooded room gasping on the floor so you can find the fish that swallowed the signet ring that you need to show to the butler so he will loan you a serving tray which you will use to reflect the moonlight on to the portrait of the princess which will open the secret compartment which…

I am, of course, kidding here.

I hope I’m kidding here, anyway.  Let’s start over.

…while you’re roaming around whatever building you’re in doing adventure game stuff, occasionally you will hear an evil laugh and something invisible will run at you and try to get close enough to explode.  That is your cue to switch to shooter mode, hit the “scan the area for invisible running exploding guys” button, target the newly-visible running exploding guy and try to shoot him before he blows up on you.

This bit is sort of cheap.  Often the invisible running exploding guys spawn so close to you that you don’t have a chance to protect yourself, and then you tend to wind up in the aforementioned take-out-baggie.  It’s not like you can pull out your gun and then back up, or anything.  While aiming, you’re rooted in place.

It’s a bit of a hybrid of the genres, and doesn’t necessarily take the best bits from either, is what I’m getting at.

Now, it does come with some payoffs, if you can make it past the first level.  It’s got an art style that looks dreadful in still images but really works in motion, what I’ve seen so far of the story looks pretty interesting, even if I’m having a little trouble following the different players and their motivations, and you switch between characters as diverse as a wheelchair-bound sniper, a curiously soft-spoken wrestler in a Lucha Libre mask and tuxedo, and a waifish psychic who can break barriers by, well, bleeding all over them.

Did I mention I’m a terrible hemophobe?  Between this game and Bullet Witch, It’s been a bad month for my particular neurosis.

Let’s put my squeamishness aside, though, and carry on.

Twenty minutes into playing Killer 7, I was wondering what the heck people saw in it.

An hour into playing Killer 7, I was wondering why I was still playing it instead of, say, minesweeper.

Two hours into playing Killer 7, I started wondering what the heck was going to happen next, and if the next - I don’t like to use terms like “mindfuck”, but it applies here - could possibly top the last.

That’s a pretty good progression, I think.

About fifteen years ago, I worked for the Peter Norton Computing Group down in Santa Monica, CA - specifically, on Norton Antivirus.

At the time, Norton was The Name when it came to PC utilities, and the team I worked with was an amazing bunch of people - extremely capable, dedicated and quite proud of the job they were doing and the product they were putting out.

So reading the comments to this story on Kotaku was kind of sad.  I knew that my former employer’s rep had suffered somewhat since my time there, but I didn’t realize it had gotten quite to this point.

Full disclosure: I use AVG these days, myself, because I’m too cheap to pay for yearly subscriptions.