Thoughts on community

Posted on November 7, 2009 by baudattitude

It’s 5:30 in the morning, and I’ve been up for an hour already, something I’m going to blame on the cold I’m dealing with.  I took some Albertsons-store-branded Sudafed-a-like when I got up, and hopefully it will let me get back to sleep soon.   I’ll warn you in advance that you’re about to get hit with a wall of text, and after writing it I think it’s got some good points but is really disorganized and needs a solid editing job before being put up on the blog.  I’m going to put it up anyway.

That’s not really important, though.  What is important is Super Mario Brothers 3.

I’ll be upfront: This is one of the most beloved video games of all time, and I hate it, and I think I may have finally gotten why this is so.

It boils down, I think, to community.

SMB3 is one of those games that has an incredible number of little hidden secrets, warps, power-ups, branching paths… the game is theoretically about saving the princess, but it’s really more about exploration.  I’d argue further that was – when it was released – about shared exploration, sort of like crowd-sourcing if the crowd is your immediate circle of friends and whatever data you all could glean from playing the game, reading Nintendo Power and books by Jeff Rovin and watching The Wizard.

It’s a game that you and your friends might play to finish, but the real bragging rights didn’t come from finishing it but rather from puzzling out secrets, and the important thing was that you were all obsessed with the same game at the same time.

I didn’t own an NES back when it was the popular console; my first console was a Sega Genesis and so I naturally identify myself as being on the Sonic side of the eternal Sonic Vs. Mario war, yet I’ve never really gotten in to any of the Sonic games besides Sonic 1 & 2.  I think I’ve finally figured that out, and the reason why ties nicely into the reason I can’t stand SMB3.

See, when I first saw Sonic, it was in the company of a friend who’d played the game a bit and who knew some of the hidden bits.  He showed me the wall in Green Hill where you can crash through bricks if you’re going fast enough; he showed me the hidden room with the 1-up in it in the next zone, he taught me about getting 50 rings and jumping through the big golden ring at the end of the level, and we shared both frustration and elation about that god-damned spinning bonus stage.

He also taught me about the level select, which let you jump straight to the final boss, if you wanted, and beat it, and see the ending credits, all in less than 5 minutes.

I think everyone, on finding out how to jump to the final boss, did so, beat him, watched the ending, and then got back on the process of beating the game “right” – starting from level 1-1 and getting all the way to the end, beating the final boss again, and watching the credits again.

In looking back, I realize that it made me approach the game differently from how I play these days.  I’d plug in the Sonic cartridge and think to myself; what do I want to do?  Should I try for a complete play-through or should I use the level select to skip straight to those god-damned water levels and get more practice on them?

Once I got to the point where I could get through the game properly, it became a question of how I could do it more beautifully or more efficiently.  The first Sonic game has multiple paths through most levels.  Each of them gets you to the end of the level, of course, but some are just plain tricky to get to – and once you’re on them, they’re tricky to stay on.  Miss a difficult jump on one of them and you’re, well, not dead, but you’re not able to get back to where you were.

Anyway, during the whole thing, I’m talking to my friend about Sonic, reading magazines full of how-to tips about Sonic, reading BBSes where people are talking about ways to beat levels more beautifully and how to get to hidden bits…

Sonic 2 came out and of course everyone bought it day one, and there was the same sense of community; I was playing through the same game as everyone else at the same time, trading secrets and – along with everyone else – trying to find the Level Select code, which the designers had hidden quite well.

After Sonic 2 came Street Fighter II, which was Yet Another Community game; it was the game that inspired my small circle of friends to all buy Super Nintendos and swap tips on how to pull off different moves and hunt for the Hidden Cheat Code – which, surely, MUST exist, right? – that would let you play as the boss characters.

The game was still about standing at the left side of a screen and beating up the guy on the right side of the screen, and there was never any question about whether or not you’d be able to do it – it allowed you to set the difficulty level quite low, and you had unlimited continues, after all.  It became more about beating the game at harder and harder difficulty levels, about continuing fewer and fewer times, and of course about beating up your friends in two player mode.

The next sort of shared community games were probably Virtua Fighter, because I and an awful lot of folks I knew all bought Saturns when Sega released them ahead of schedule and it came bundled with the console, and then Toshinden because it was the Playstation’s Answer To Virtua Fighter, Only Flashier And A Cute Girl.

It’s kind of funny, now, how many slavering rabid Toshinden fans there were.  I know it got a few sequels, but they were released later in the system’s life, when they could no longer benefit from being the One Game Everyone Owned, sold poorly, and the series died a rather quick death.

Anyway, I’ve gotten rather off track.  The root point I was trying to reach, I think, was that games like Sonic and SMB3 and SF2 were games that existed on a couple of different levels – there was the game you played, by yourself, with a controller, console, and TV, and there was the metagame, where the players existed as part of a greater community.  I missed the chance to be part of that community for both SMB3 and Sonic 3, and this is why I can’t really get in to either; I see them only on one level, whereas someone who played SMB3 as a kid can pick up the controller and play them as an adult and get a completely different experience. It’s not that they’re just playing SMB3 again, it’s connecting them to their childhood – and, more to the point, it’s a connection to all the people they played it with.

Come to think of it, this is probably why Everquest hooked me so hard and so long; there were message boards and guild dramas and spoiler sites and all kinds of things that existed outside of the game proper.  The decline of my interest in EQ started around the time that the community started splintering and dying out.

It’s also finally provided me an answer to why people buy new release videogames at full price rather than wait for them to get marked down, inevitably, to a more reasonable $20 or so: games are more fun if you’re playing them WITH people, which is one of those statements that’s bloody obvious on the face of it but what the hell, and if you’re playing a game at the same time as other people, it doesn’t matter as much that it’s a single player game, you’re still getting a shared experience out of it.

Posted in random, videogames | 2 Comments

It took 2 to tango.

Posted on November 5, 2009 by baudattitude

So, looking back in my posts, I played through the first Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas game back in January of 2008.  It’s taken me a while to get to the sequel, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas: 2.

I spell out the entire name because it’s just so gosh darned ridiculous.  I will henceforth refer to the first game as R6V and its sequel as R6V2.

That kind of sounds like a flu strain, though, like “Hey, where’s Bob today?” “Aw, man, he caught R6V2, he’s going to be puking his guts up for a week.”

Not that R6V2 made me sick, or anything.

Much like the first game, it was pretty fun.  I don’t play many games in this particular genre – note that it took me 23 months to play the second game after finishing the first – so I really can’t critique it next to other tactical FPS games, but I liked it.  It was a little frustrating in a couple of spots, but I did  play through on “Normal” instead of “Casual”, so I really can’t fuss too much about getting hung up.

I was a bit confused by the story for a while, though.  See, R6V ends with a Big Reveal and a cliffhanger ending, and I kind of expected R6V2 to pick up from where R6V left off.  This turned out not to be the case; R6V2 takes place concurrently with the first game. This actually makes sense, though, because the last level of R6V has you LEAVING Vegas, so if they made a game that picked up directly from that point you wouldn’t actually be in Vegas and they couldn’t name it Tom Clancy’s Rainbox Six Vegas 2, they’d have to name it Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Leaving Los Vegas or something.

It does, however, have a level that goes beyond the events of R6V and DOES resolve the story once and for all, so that gets good marks from me.

Even if it isn’t in Vegas.

Let’s see, what else can I say about it?  Well, it’s not quite as pretty as the first game, because you don’t spend most of the game shooting up casinos. You do GO to a casino at least once, but most of the levels are, like, a library and a recreation center and some other fairly dull environments.  On the other hand, if it were just another five casino levels bookended by non-casino bits, it would have been kind of samey.

It does have AI partners who are perhaps a little too smart; they’re really good at killing stuff so you don’t have to.  This is made extremely evident on the level where they get assigned to a different mission and you have to play solo.

I died a lot on that level.

What else can I say…

It has kind of a weird little XP / leveling system, where you get XP from kills you make or that your AI partners make and you unlock new guns and uniform pieces as you level up.  This sort of thing is all the rage these days.

It does give you incentive to put yourself in harms way, because you get more XP from killing stuff by yourself instead of leaving it up to your AI partners, but it doesn’t seem to have a whole lot of in-game effect.  It’s one of those features that probably makes quite a difference in multiplayer. I’ll never know.  🙂

Overall, it’s, well, it’s a sequel to a game that’s really cheap to buy these days and which I thought was quite worth trying out even though it wasn’t really in my normal genres and didn’t have any cute girls in glasses; if you enjoy the first game, it won’t cost much to try the sequel as well. What more can I add?

 

 

 

Posted in videogames, Xbox 360 | Leave a comment

Senko no Ronde Rumbled

Posted on November 2, 2009 by baudattitude

Senko No Ronde is a bit of an oddity in the Xbox360 library; it’s unabashedly Japanese and yet somehow managed to make the jump across the pacific.  If only that could be said for some of the bullet hell shooters languishing on the far side of the ocean.

I’m going to file this, now that I’ve completed it, under “Super Pretty, but Really Hard” – I had to set it down to Easy to beat the story modes, and even with that crutch it still took me upwards of a dozen times to clear Culian’s final boss.

I’ve heard it compared to Virtual On, and I think that’s not an entirely unfair comparison; both games are fighting games that feature giant robots and mix up their range combat and melee neatly, and both inspire a very niche crowd of fanatics.   I haven’t played any Virtual On games since the Saturn, though (and I was dreadful at the game, to boot) so I really can’t get any deeper than that.

For whatever reason, playing this game made my hands HURT.  I don’t think I’ll be putting it back in the machine any time soon, but I think I got my $10 worth from it.

 

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Weekend goals, an update

Posted on November 2, 2009 by baudattitude

Did: Finish my 3-page paper on Confucianism for REL101; go me!

Didn’t: actually get any studying for my JPN301 midterm done.  At least I still have four hours until class.

Did: attend the football game.  My school’s team was winning at the halfway mark and it was starting to rain, so I decided to leave and beat the rush.  Turns out we won, which is good inasmuch as it puts everyone in high spirits. As a side note, it took two hours to play half a game.  If they could somehow get the whole game done in that time, I think that would be better; I rather enjoyed the time I spent there but I can’t fathom the concept of spending four hours watching the same event.

Did: Attend the Halloween events on-campus both nights, including going to both dances and participating in the costume contest; didn’t win mind you but when you’re 15 years older than most of your classmates, you get a certain sense of accomplishment from simply being able to keep up with them.  🙂

Didn’t: manage to do a long write up of anime recommendations.  Once I started the task, it grew huge pretty fast.  It’s still a good idea for a post, I’ll get back to it.

Overall, more done than not done.  A good weekend.

 

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A weekend to-do list:

Posted on October 29, 2009 by baudattitude

To do this weekend:

1) Write a 3-page REL101 paper.

2) Study for JPN301 midterm

3) Attend a football game.  Yes, you read that right, an actual sporting event.  No, I don’t know the actual rules to the sport, but if I’m paying $3000 a term I’m going to take advantage of a free ticket.  Also, inasmuch as I’m attending a, if I get the term right, a “Pac-10” school, there’s a good chance that the simulated violence on field will be echoed by actual violence between the players off the field, which should be entertaining.

3.1) For the record, I understand most of the rules to baseball, so I have at least some slight claim to being a man.

3.2) Except the infield fly rule.  I used to know that one, but I’ve forgotten it.

3.3) Look, I was on the chess team in high school, all right?

3.4) Mind you, I was kicked off the chess team because it was – officially – a sports (stop laughing, you) team, and my GPA was less than the minimum GPA required of (again, quit with the laughing) student athletes.

3.5) No, really.

3.6) At least I wasn’t on the debate team.

4) Attend at least one Halloween party at school, again for much the same reason as the football game.

5) Write up a big gosh-darned list of anime recommendations for the blog, because it will let me reminisce about the good old days when Artmic ruled the OVA roost and Gainax actually knew how to write a half decent ending.  So that’s been a while.

6) Sit here feeling rather smug about spelling “Reminisce” correctly on the first go.  Wait, I’m already doing that.  One milestone down!

 

 

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E8 H8

Posted on October 26, 2009 by baudattitude

So, I quite enjoyed the 2006 “Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya” anime, and it turned me into a bit of a KyoAni fanboy; I went from there to watching Air, and Kanon, and Lucky Star and so forth.

I didn’t go back and hunt down Full Metal Panic, though.

Haruhi was one of those perfect storm sort of shows, playing with anime stereotypes in a way that came close to breaking the fourth wall, but never quite crossing the line into being an outright parody of itself, with really good music and a heck of  a lot of fanservice for us boy type people.

Anyway, after about three years of endless rumor speculation and rumors, KyoAni actually made new episodes, slipping them – all stealthy-like – into the middle of a re-run of the entire series.

And I watched the first episode, and It Was Good, and then I kind of forgot to go looking for more episodes for a while, long enough for the entire new series to be broadcast, translated, and surreptitiously distributed to legions of slavering Haruhi fans.

So anyway, I got myself a full set of episodes and settled in to watch them.

The second episode was a little plotless, but fun enough.  It was a lot like the baseball episode from the first series; Haruhi makes up her mind to do some sort of random activities and forces the entire group into participating, hilarity ensues, blah blah blah, end credits.

The third episode was the same as the second episode, except that the characters realized halfway through that they were in a time loop, but have no idea how to break it by the end of the episode.

The fourth through eighth episodes of the series were the same as the third episode.  They were animated differently, but the characters were doing the same things, in the same order, realizing halfway through that they were in a time loop, and unable to break out of it.

The ninth episode repeated the same sequence of events, but at the very last minute Kyon figures out how to break the loop.

That’s 8 episodes – three-and-a-half-hours of anime – that were basically the same episode over and over again.  After the fourth one, I actually went to wikipedia to make sure that there really WAS an ending.

I’ve seen things described, in the past, as being “love letters to the fans”

This would be more along the line of “hate mail for the fans”; the only enjoyable part of the whole thing was, after I’d finished watching the series, going online and reading the rants of everyone who’d watched it week-by-week.

After these 8 episodes – appropriately all titled “Endless Eight” – finished, the remaining new episodes were actually pretty decent, so it has that going for it.  I just can’t fathom the thought process behind making two month’s worth of episodes all the same; it’s a low point that makes the infamous “island arc” from Nadia look like a triumph of storytelling.

Anyway, it’s over now, and I kind of feel like I accomplished something by making it through.  I usually feel very detached from other fans, but reading the rants from around the web makes me feel a brutal sort of camaraderie; we’ve shared a certain pain and we’ve all made it through.

But I wouldn’t recommend experiencing it yourself.

 

Posted in anime, haruhi | 4 Comments

Kratos, pusher of crates

Posted on October 26, 2009 by baudattitude

Started God of War this weekend. It’s a game which got generally impressive reviews, and I quite enjoyed it for a few minutes. The combat was nice and stabby, the visuals were very impressive for a PS2 title, and the setting opens up seriously epic potential.

Then I got to a bit, maybe 10-15 minutes in, where I had to push a small, fragile box around while archers shot at me and the box, and I said to hell with it after the fifth or sixth time I got the box ALMOST to where it needed to be before it got shot to pieces.

Oh, well, at least it was cheap.

Pity about buying it and the sequel at the same time, though.

Decided to start Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando instead, and it’s going a long way to alleviate my box-related frustrations.

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You say Pettanko, I say Potato

Posted on October 23, 2009 by baudattitude

While I’ve been watching K-On! just of late, it actually wasn’t what got me back to watching anime series.  That honor (blame?) falls on Toradora!, which is part of my favorite genre, the high-school/college romantic comedy with love triangles more accurately represented by dodecahedrons.

K-On! would be an example of my OTHER favorite genre, the amped-up-cuteness Slice-of-life comedy.  It’s basically Ichigo Mashimaro, just with musical instruments and older girls.

Anyway, Toradora! has a bunch of fun characters; you’ve got your male lead, who’s sensitive about his tough-guy looks and prone to outbursts of sudden housework, you’ve got your female lead, who’s 145cm, sensitive about… well, I’d say sensitive about her height, but really, sensitive about just about everything and prone to outbursts of sudden violence, and then you have the two characters who our main leads are actually in love with.  The leads fall in hate more-or-less on first sight, but form an alliance for mutual assistance in landing the girl or guy of their dreams… and wackiness ensues.

It manages, I think, to pull off the “you think you know who’s winding up with whom, but are you really SURE?” thing for the majority of the series, which was fun.  It has its big-reveal-all-the-characters-know-the-score episode a little early, which lets them do an extended ending that’s just about perfect, even if it does taunt the viewer for about an episode with the prospect of the characters doing something REALLY dumb that would probably have ruined the series for me if they’d decided to do it.

Anyway, if you likes your romantic comedies with a little deredere and a whole lot of tsuntsun, this is probably the one for you.

I’ve finally come up with, I think, the answer to why I watch tons of animated romantic comedies and shy away from most western live action ones; the Japanese have learned how to write RomComs for GUYS.

I mean, think about your average western romantic comedy plot.  You’ve got your female lead, who is usually a hot actress they’ve tried to make into the mousey girl-next-door librarian type, like putting Sandra Bullock in glasses and a thick cardigan.

Give me a moment while I think on the topic of Sandra Bullock in glasses and a thick cardigan.

Anyway, she’s usually lacking in confidence.

She comes with at least one female friend who’s much better looking than she is and generally jaded on romance.

Moving right along, the male lead in your average western RomCom is, let’s say, rugged.  Attractive, confident, either financially secure (if the woman is broke) or down-to-earth (if the woman has money).  He’s almost perfect, he just needs Sandra Bullock to fix a couple of little things and fill up the gaping hole in his life.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just not targeted to my demographic.

The thing with shows like Toradora, or Kanon, or most of the other romantic comedies I’ve seen recently, is that pretty much everyone is lacking in confidence and/or lightly-to-moderately broken in some way, and there’s a kind of mutual confidence building thing that goes on among the main characters.  Also, they’re usually built up with a small army of characters, so the relationship develops in the middle of a community of friends, rivals, and onlookers, and you get subplots revolving around everyone elses’ own personal quests for The Right Guy, or Girl as the case may be.

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Horrible, inexcusable and generally wrong

Posted on October 21, 2009 by baudattitude

I’ve been making more time in my life to actually sit down and watch anime.  I haven’t followed any shows regularly since, oh, Clannad, and that’s been a couple of years, so there’ve been lots to choose from.

I notice that fansubbers have once again made a technological leap forward, and that the new trend in fansub distribution involves stripping the OP and ED out of episodes and packaging them alongside the files with the actual episode contents, to save space.  This works fine if you’re on Windows, using whatever media playback software they’ve decided to bless as the Correct Way And To Hell With All The Rest, but there aren’t any Mac media players that handle it yet which is something of a pain.

I’d get fussed about it, but I realize that most fansubbers are young guys, and I remember pretty well that I used to be pretty firm on the Correct Way To Do Things And To Hell With All The Rest back when I was a young guy, so I figure there’s nothing to be gained by getting fussed about it.

Anyway, that’s not horrible, nor is it inexcusable.  It’s something they’ll grow out of, and in the meanwhile they’re translating lots of anime for me to leech.

What is wrong is that I’ve been watching K-On!, and my brain persists in forcing the term “Deus Ex Mugina” on me every time Mugi has to save the day using her wealth / family connections / ability to pull cakes out of the Hammerverse.

It’s not really that clever and it’s not really even a GOOD bad pun, and I really wish it would get out of my head.

Posted in anime | 7 Comments

Princes, questionable

Posted on October 21, 2009 by baudattitude

So, I’ve been coming to terms with the news that a family member passed away recently.  It wasn’t entirely unexpected – she was 93 years old and had been having a pretty bad summer of things – but it’s still one of those things that’s a little hard to fully process.

For the meantime, though, I’m going to continue with my habit of talking about games that everyone else played through a year ago, in this case the latest Prince of Persia game and its subsequently-released epilogue level.

The last time the Prince of Persia series got a complete revamp, the result was one of the best games I’ve ever played.  It was atmospheric, funny, suspenseful, and – oh, yeah – right at the top end of my personal difficulty curve.

It was also followed by a sequel that completely destroyed my interest in the series.  Kind of like Tomb Raider II, there.

On the other hand, much like Lara, the prince has gotten another chance at things with a reboot.

Not that it’s the same prince, mind you, or even a prince at all.  He’s actually a thief who specializes in, well, tombs.  So uh, they could have called it “Tomb Raider of Persia”, but that leads to confusion and I guess they figured they’d go with the old name and avoid getting sued for the sake of accuracy.

I played through it last week, and it was, well, probably the prettiest game I’ve ever played.  It’s also pretty damn funny most of the time, though it does occasionally slow down the quips for the sake of occasional dramatic bits, and the prince’s companion Eliza is on the far end of the scale that sidekicks like Yorda are on the other end of.  Nothing against Yorda, mind you, but I can report that I never once felt like knocking off work early and abandoning Elika to shadow monsters.

Oh, and it’s easy.  Super easy.  Seriously.  I mean, it was generally hard to die in Sands of Time, but I wasn’t able to find ANY way to die in the new game.

Not being able to die doesn’t mean that it wasn’t challenging, at times.  The platforming bits do test your reflexes and timing, and you get a deep feeling of accomplishment and reward when you pull off a particularly tricky bit.

So it’s got that going for it, and I highly recommend it.

I’ve seen lots of complaints that it didn’t have a proper ending, and I will admit that the ending it does have is a shameless – TRULY shameless – setup for a sequel.

So when I got to the end, I decided I’d buy the Epilogue levels and give them a run.

I’ve made worse mistakes, but this was still kind of a dumb move.

The Epilogue is 10 bucks, lacks most of the charm of the main game, throws the whole “pretty” motif out the window, and is bloody hard, particularly the combat.  It’s not so much that you do a lot more fighting or that the developers didn’t bother making any new enemy models, it’s that the mindless soldiers you fought so often in the first game gained new abilities, all of which seem to revolve around hitting you through blocks, stun-locking you, and being generally frustrating.

The boss fights, oddly enough, aren’t at all frustrating.  It’s the small fry that are the pains.

Oh, and it ends with a cliffhanger, even more annoying than the original cliffhanger, and there’s no way to make a single sequel that works as a follow-up to the epilogue that will also work as a follow-up to the main game, so I am forced to wonder if they’ll even acknowledge it in future or just try to come up with a compromise.

So to sum up: Buy Prince of Persia, if for some reason you didn’t do so in the last year, play it. enjoy it, and don’t bother with the DLC.

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