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sibyl-of-space · 4 years ago

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Final Fantasy IX ~ Melodies and Memories

"Jesters of the Moon"

There are a lot of very good video games in the world, but it takes some luck and circumstance outside of a game's control for one to reach me at just the right time(s) and place(s) in my life that it has a tangible impact on who I am -- who I want to be. One that carves out a space for itself in my soul that will never be removed or replaced.

I've just finished playing Final Fantasy IX for the first time, and there's no doubt in my mind that such is the case here.

(Continued below readmore.)

I drew this art last year, when I was mourning my attachment to an old favorite game that I just don't feel the same way about anymore: Majora's Mask. I wanted to draw something that captured my feelings about it, because sometimes art is the best way to talk about something when the words don't want to come.

Why is "Jesters of the Moon," the name of a random song in the Final Fantasy IX soundtrack, plastered in the middle of this Majora's Mask fanart? Especially considering I hadn't even played Final Fantasy IX yet when I drew this?

The reason is exactly that "luck and circumstance" that allowed me to fall so uniquely in love with the game.

"Mt. Gulug"

In 2008, someone on YouTube uploaded a Majora's Mask parody-slash-let's-play series called "Majora's Mask: The Things Which Were Taken Out." The series has since become unlisted and won't be linked here out of respect for the creator who probably doesn't want things they said and made in 2008 being spread all over the internet, but because of Unregistered Hypercam 2 reasons, the series inserted other background music over the video and didn't record the actual game audio.

I didn't recognize any of the music, but I watched these parody videos on repeat because in addition to being funny (...at the time, in my mind, at least), I really really loved the music. It got to the point where I would sometimes be playing Majora's Mask and get disappointed when I approached Goht and the Mt. Gulug theme wasn't playing in the background.

I had forgotten about these videos for a really long time in the interim, but I remembered them at some point when I was thinking about Majora's Mask and I found them again. The creator had cited the Final Fantasy IX soundtrack for virtually all of the background music used in the videos, and I realized that despite knowing literally nothing about the game, I had become really fond of - and weirdly nostalgic for - the songs from it that I now recognized.

So I looked up "Jesters of the Moon" and played it on repeat while I drew out my feelings in colored marker. A few months later, I realized that my backwards compatible PS3 can also play PS1 games, and eBay had FFIX for PS1 at a good price. I had nothing to lose by ordering it and seeing what the source of all that fantastic music was like.

"Vamo Alla Flamenco"

I started my playthrough knowing nothing about what to expect from the game. I'd never played a Final Fantasy game before and my overall JRPG experience has been mostly limited to Tales of, Persona, and more recently, mainline Shin Megami Tensei. The only things I knew about Final Fantasy were a) the Tidus laughing scene, and b) Sephiroth. IX seemed like it had vibes I would enjoy, but beyond that I knew nothing about what the experience would be. So I approached it with a "let's have fun and see how it goes" attitude, naming my party members the first silly thing that came to mind, ending up with "Swaggy," "OwO," "Bitchin," "Gunz," and "SWOOORD" to start with.

(For the record I do not regret those names whatsoever.)

I was immediately struck by how differently the game uses music in comparison to all of my previous JRPG experiences. This was not a game where the composer was given a list of theme songs that were slapped on top of a mostly completed game-- this was a game constructed with the soundtrack in mind as a part of the writing process.

The opening act plays almost like an opera (side note, yes I know one of the other FF's has a literal opera, I haven't played that one): you traverse the same locations from different perspectives as different characters, introducing the cast with lighthearted humor and dramatic irony out the wazoo. While you traverse the city as OwO, OwO's theme is playing in the background, coloring your perspective of the city and the narrative. When you switch to Gunz patrolling around the castle, Gunz's theme accompanies your movement and informs his character and mission. I am so accustomed to "location themes" being the norm in virtually all video games that experiencing character and/or narrative themes as BGM instead while I bumble around town changed my entire perspective on what music in games can do and be.

The operatic feeling is definitely intentional, because the game uses a play-within-a-game narrative device to hit you over the head with its themes in a way that is somehow poignant and artful while also being extremely blatant. That is a hard balance to strike, but it manages. The whole game is like that: it is completely straightforward and tells you exactly what it's about at heart, but it does it beautifully.

At any rate, I was enamored with this intro and had a very fun time, but I wasn't obsessed or anything and ended up putting it down. I spent several months on the first half of disk 1 with weeks passing between play sessions. I liked the game plenty, but life stuff happened and I decided to get obsessed with Dai Gyakuten Saiban and Ghost Trick for a while. No regrettis.

It was already clear, though, that FFIX was going to be special to me. My compositions for my team's game in the Global Game Jam in 2021 were directly inspired by FFIX's opera-like intro. I wrote two character themes for our game that would serve as background music when you play as the two protagonists, coloring your journey differently even when moving in the same spaces. I was intentionally trying to mimic the way music is used in FFIX as an exercise. The themes I wrote are definitely some of my strongest work so far.

(You can check out the game here if you want, I promise it is significantly shorter than Final Fantasy IX.)

"Melodies of Life"

Music caused me to pick up FFIX the first time, and music caused me to return to it. After months of not touching or really thinking about it, just earlier this week I was inspired to play it again, because - again - I listened to the right song at the right time.

I was again mourning the loss of something, in this case a friendship, for reasons I'm not going to share here. I had already heard the song "Melodies of Life" because it came up when I was looking up FFIX songs to reblog on Tumblr a few months ago, and I decided to listen to it again. Even without knowing the game context, the song itself really spoke to me in that moment: "a voice from the past, joining yours and mine, adding up the layers of harmony" - it kind of made me feel at peace with the fact that I had a lot of positive memories of that friendship and I could keep those at heart while also moving on in the present. ...I'm also a sucker for music metaphors, so there is that.

I was really moved by this song, cheesy as it is, and I was also definitely in the mood for a distraction. Picking up FFIX again felt like the best move.

It was, and my life is forever changed.

The game never stopped being beautiful and funny and touching, and the soundtrack never ceased to amaze. I recognized concepts I've seen in other games but never had I seen them used so artfully. I adored the fantasy world and non-human cast, I found myself enticed by random encounter for the first time because it made me feel like I had to struggle to survive a difficult journey. Music, gameplay, visuals, and story felt like one cohesive work of art for the entire duration.

Life circumstances got me to play the game again, but the game itself was so captivating and wonderful that I binged the entire rest of it - disks 2-4 - in less than a week. Everything else that the game had to say, it told me itself, in its own context, and I was ready to listen.

"You're Not Alone!"

This is going to make me sound like an emotionally-stunted twenty-something, but it has been years since a work of media has got me to have a really good cry. I used to cry playing games all the time as a kid but recently I'll find myself getting emotional, sure, often tearing up, but getting completely red-faced and snot-nosed because I physically cannot contain the emotions being evoked by a work? Years. I can't honestly tell you the last time it happened with certainty.

I feel like an emotional band-aid has been ripped off. I was f*cking sobbing during the entire duration of the "You're Not Alone!" sequence. It didn't matter that what was happening was obviously coming from a mile away, because the delivery was so raw and emotional and human!!! A whole game's worth of Swaggy punching first and asking questions later to save his friends, being Protag McProtag endangering himself for others in any and all circumstances, for the payoff of all of his friends forcing him to stop being such a primadonna and let them help him for once. It's true, too! He relies on them just as much as they rely on him! And the game doesn't just tell you this, no, it lets you try to solo all these fights and waits until you realize how boned you are until they come bail you out.

When Bitchin showed up with her "looks like you need a hand" I wanted to straight up yell at my tv. YES I DO!!! YES I DO NEED YOU BITCHIN!!!!! THANK YOU!!!!!!! I half knew that SWOOORD was going to heal me before I got truly KO-ed but I had been unmercifully wiped in "unwinnable" battles before in this game, so I legit thought I might have to re-do that whole part of the game again, and I was so relieved and thankful when she showed up and healed me.

This moment exemplifies everything that I adore about this game. It doesn't just tell you its story. It shows it to you, it sings it to you, and it and lets you play it out and feel it for yourself.

"Game Over"

This song is all too familiar to me. Gizamaluke's Grotto was very unforgiving for a first-time Final Fantasy player, especially one who didn't happen to pick up Big on the way for a fourth party member early on.

I hadn't heard the piano part in a few months, though, because when I picked the game back up I started just mashing to reload before it got to that point any time we wiped. I didn't hear it again until the game was truly over, this time for good.

I let it play for a while. Not too long, because I have a CRT TV and didn't want "The End" to get burned in. But a while. Enough to meditate on what I'd just experienced, and how I was feeling about it.

There's so much more to say about the game, far more than I could put in a blog post. But I don't think I need to describe these thoughts in words. I can do what the game did, and use music, use art, use stories, use metaphors, and use symbols to communicate what I mean; and hope that someone else is able and willing to listen.

And although a written record of my thoughts likely won't be preserved for all that long, maybe the feelings and the memories will be, so long as they have been shared.

#personal #analyses #ffix

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craftmanatee · 5 years ago

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Dread X Collection 3 Games Review

Once again, my friend and I have played through a new Dread X collection and I would like to make a short concise review for each game including the Hub area. We each played 1 game resulting in 6 each. The order of games reviewed is not the recommended order to play as we went on a very simple roundabout on the graveyard, and the games have a strong sense of quality unlike Dread X Collection 2 which had many great quality games and many low quality games.

Lets go!

Game X: The Castle (A bit unremarkable)

Scare Type: Cute

Player: My friend

The castle in some way is a step back from the awesomeness of the house. As it proceeds with forced dialogue cutscenes with your character and a ghost character that possesses in you. The puzzles and areas are also larger and more spread out and easier than the house. The Dialogue cutscene itself even give the idea to not compare the two, which is understandable. But let me tell YOU that I enjoyed the house more than I did the Castle (Even if it was not I who was doing the Castle Bit), so even if they are different, one was in my opinion better than the other.

The forced Dialogue cutscenes weren't to bad. The Voice Acting was not bad. Its rather the script and subjecting the player to sit through it. Its not the most fun to sit through and could have been handled better. In the house, a dialogue still happened but you were still free to move around while listening to the pre-recorded message. The ghost possessing you could have done the same with you, but instead this YOU is a character that must go into a dialogue and stop your gameplay.

The STYLE of the castle is where I think it wins the best. The very cute spooky aesthetic is great, and hold a lot of details we noticed near the end of the game. Like the paintings being famous paintings, replacing the characters of the paintings to goofy ghosts. Time passing between each game is also a great detail, making the castle ever so slightly different all the way to night time. I love the castle for this.

We quickly figured out that the theme for this Dread X collection was not just Cute and spooky, but also the inevitability of death.

Nate Berens – SATO WONDERLAND (Ok)

Scare Type: Surprising!

Player: My Buddy

This game was alright, nothing too amazing as pulling different topics to make a new dialogue box appear was tedious and a bit annoying. But the story itself was pretty cool, resulting in a surprise ending. Each game have different endings which we did not try to explore, but for this I think we managed to get the best ending. Not much to say about this one.

Blood Machine – Soul Waste (Eh...)

Scare Type: ...None?

Player: Me

Soul Waste is a 3D action platformer about this... post apocalyptical world, and you happen to be the “Saviour”. We got Ending C for this as we felt the tedium of the collectables and we weren't going to sit around collecting them all in this weird to navigate map. The enemies did not make much of a challenge making the game bit boring. The end boss was the only thing that gave me some ounce of real fun. There was a lot to explore, but my patience wore thin due to not being that interesting of a platformer. Although it did look good for what it did. There is some to explore which we did not, but I simply noticed that there was some things here and there that we did miss. We just did not feel the need to go back.

Bryce Bucher – Disparity of the Dead (Great!)

Scare Type: Horror that sticks around even after the game.

Player: My pal

This game I think pulls off the themes of Dread X Collection 3 very, very well! Perhaps the best thematic one? Nevertheless, this is a 3D platformer that lets you talk to fun characters collecting collectables and piece together a mystery. The topics that which the game introduces to you are all very good and sad in many ways. It also had a lingering effect on me personally. This lingering horror reminded me of SOMA by Frictional Games. Anyways, the game in general is not horrifying until you get to a certain point. Then when the actual ending plays, it all gets sad. We do not know if there are different endings, but the ending we did get was a sad one in my opinion and was great.

Amon Twentysix – Bete Grise (Cool!)

Scare Type: Uneasy, then relief!

Player: Me

I really liked the aesthetics of this game, reminded me a lot of some obscure old-school games. The gameplay is mostly of you going floor to floor doing cleaning and... repairing? Anyways, there are a few hints here and there that foreshadow the great revelation at the end. I saw some of them and felt very uneasy when going through the process as it all felt like a facade. But once the revelation hit, the game turned into something more funny, stylish and well, just felt good. Its rare for a horror game to kinda blue ball you into satisfaction.

DIRIGO GAMES – REACTOR (Disappointing)

Scare Type: Betrayal

Player: My Homie

This is a game I spoiled myself with, which is why I had my friend play it instead. The game is mostly a walking simulator in which it feels like you shouldnt be there in the bad/useless way as there is a robot buddy who keeps you company and doing everything for you. When the time comes, you are then obviously, chased to the ending of the game. Its not scary, sad. Its just a simple experience. The aesthetics of the game is great, by being a gradient of blacks and whites as well as minimal uses of colour. Other than that, this is disappointing.

Moya Horror/Amos – Nice Screams at Funfair (humorously frustrating)

Scare Type: Dont fail

Player: Me

This is a very short game that was short enough for us to also explore a different ending. There is no real inherent horror here. Its mostly thematic to being like Halloween. The game has you serving icecream to people, the challenge is to serve them the ice cream that they want, and take the money into your tip jar or cash register. The real challenge is the controls, as throwing ice cream into the ice cream cones often fails for no reason, and clicking on to activate anything just sometimes did not work. Resulting in funny scenarious. We got 2 different endings for this, one that made sense, and another that we didnt understand. The game looked great, the intro did not have to be as long as it did but it was a fun little ride.

Basalt Tower – Matter OVER Mind (Woah!)

Scare Type: Loosing progress...

Player: My Amigo

Matter over mind absolutely felt like an old-school platformer, it was also unique, colourful and funny/cute! Crawling around as a little parasitical monster and possessing scientists in order to escape the labs just looked great. Like many of these games, it had a collectible that meant... NOTHING. And if you died collecting them, you will loose them all. Prompting you to reset the entire game. Nevertheless, it was an impressive game that felt great.

Corpsepile – Submission (Fuck yeah!)

Scare Type: Scary, but also funny

Player: Me

This game had so many unique and cool twists and ideas. Maybe one of the best games in this collection. It was absolutely creative, funny... everything! It was also scary at times, referencing P.T. Its puzzles were great and fun, so much good about this one! The gameplay switches often, the horror amps up... Man... Submission was super good! Cant really say much other than that.

Torple Dook – Chip’s Tips (Funny!)

Scare Type: Friendly?

Player: My guy

Super creative point and click adventure game, hamming it up to 101%. It is also so patronizingly friendly that it becomes funny. Probably the most unique game on this list. And you can pet the dog in this game. I absolutely love the aesthetics of the unhinged masked textures, as well characters being flat cutouts. What is sad is this game feels like the end to Torple Dook’s streak of being in Dread X Collection games as it references his previous 2 games as well as more.

Breogan Hackett – Bubbo: Adventure on Geralds Island (Woah! x2)

Scare Type: JUMP

Player: Me

A very well done 3D platformer, with some challenge. The game is not scary, although it does come to a point. The platforming was very good albeit a tiny bit weird when turning in a specific way. It also features hidden collectibles that we unfortunately did not find all and left it at that. It sounded and felt good, looked good and was fun to get to the end with. There are different endings, we (me) only got to see 1. I jumped at the right time and made my way out!

Modus Interactive – EDEN: Garden of the Faultless (Chaos?)

Scare type: None, just weird.

Player: My hombre

This is literally a game akin to raising your Chaos in Sonic Adventure games. Just that you raise your little Evangelion. This game I think, has the best Ps1 look than the other games. It has a very weird control scheme, as well as being weird in its own right. And it nails the aesthetics very well. Too bad the game is finicky or boring, sporting long paths and lots of waiting. I guess you could have some fun minmaxing your wittle angel. I guess you always need at least one super unorthodox entry in a collection.

Adam Pype & Viktor Kraus – SPOOKWARE @ The Video Store (Quintessential)

Scare Type: brief moments of panic

Player: Both of us

This game... is actually really fun. Spookware is literally Wario ware but with horror movie themed events. The style, game and everything is perfect. Although very short, I would honestly buy a game like this if it was fully complete. I also think this is the most fitting game for the theme of the collection. Although, not much is done about the “inevitability of death” theme here, but everything else about it carries the collection thematicly. Such a fun and quirky little game.

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Conclusions

And so, the best games in the collection In my opinion were...

#1 Submission AND Spookware

#2 Chips Tips

#3 Disparity of the Dead

The collection was not at all as scary as the first or the second collection. Although, that is understandable as it had a more Fun and goofy vibe to it. I love seeing these collections and it introduces me to people ive never heard of before. Like Viktor Kraus who made the music, like in the trailer for the collection. Thats a great one. I wish to keep seing them make these and I hope that it is profitable for them in the end as well.

#dread x collection #Dread X Collection 3 #horror #Halloween #Spooky #Scary #video games #realtalk #review #torple dook

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biscuitreviews · 6 years ago

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Biscuit Reviews Final Fantasy VIII Remastered

Final Fantasy VIII has finally received the remaster treatment. This was the last entry from the PS1 and PS2 era that had yet to receive a remaster. The reason it was constantly left out was because during the PS1 and PS2 era, Square didn’t have much of an archiving policy. This meant that the source code for Final Fantasy VIII no longer existed. If this story sounds familiar then it does as the original Kingdom Hearts also suffered the same fate.

Final Fantasy VIII was my entry point into the series and seeing that remastered announcement trailer gave me alot of feelings and a lot of joy that the gaming community would give this game another look.

Now, I’ve already reviewed Final Fantasy VIII for this blog already. This review is mostly going to focus on the remastered edition as well as cover some points I didn’t address in the previous review. I’ll be talking about what changed as well as what improved and what didn’t improve.

Let’s get the obvious change out of the way first and talk about the character models. These new models are absolutely gorgeous. They look like they belong on PS2 game. The details on the new models show more than the original PS1 models. For example, you can now see the Garden Insignia on the Garden student uniforms and you can see Squall’s necklace, both which weren’t as prominent previously. These models go to not only the main characters, but some side characters, NPCs, monsters, and bosses. Almost everything got a nice new coat of paint and pop out more than ever before. Even the weapons that each character wields have more fidelity to them making them stand out in their own way.

One drawback is that the environments look blurry at times. It gives a weird feeling that the models are just running in a background set piece rather than their actual environment. It sort of reminded me of the first Uncharted how the characters looked way out of place from the environment. The world map also looks really rough. Textures look patchy at places and the road is just a big gray line with details popping in and out.

As for battle maps, it’s sort of hit or miss with the remaster. Some battle maps, such as the Galbadian Garden battle map, Edea’s float battle map, and D-Prison battle map, look like they got a nice touch up. Other battle maps such as the battle maps from the world map look incredibly ugly like they got no sort of treatment at all.

One thing I do want to address is the “censorship” issue some people seem to have regarding Rinoa and Siren’s new models. Honestly, I don’t have an issue with their new models. In fact, Rinoa’s new model is actually more closer to the FMV model which gives her more consistency throughout the game. As for Siren, her changes really didn’t bother me. I wish I could add more for Siren’s case, but I don’t have anything, I don’t feel one way or another. The only feeling I do have is if you are a person that has an issue with it then just stick with the PS1 version or the original PC version.

Speaking of FMV’s, they’re a bit on the blurry side. Most of them are not that bad and perform well but is a bit disappointing that they weren’t fully smoothed out. The intro FMV is probably the worst performing one as it’s incredibly slow and does suffer from frame rate issues in a few areas in that particular FMV. At least that seemed to be the case for the Steam version, I’m not sure how the scene plays on consoles. It’s something I hope Square does patch at a later time because this was the main shining point for Final Fantasy VIII which were these very cutscenes, especially with the very first scene having performance issues.

I think some new dialogue might have got added in as well as I ran into a line that I know wasn’t in the original version, particularly the Dollet SeeD field exam where Galbadia soldiers will make a comment that they’re fighting kids. Now the original Final Fantasy VIII did make references to this further in the story, particularly the Timber section. But, to have a new line that has these soldiers questioning and even state outloud that they’re fighting kids does make it more prominent that Squall and the gang are trained child soldiers which further amplifies an interesting subject matter that there is an organization actively training child soldiers with some areas of the world seeming ok with that!

Like the Final Fantasy VII and IX remasters, cheats have been included. These cheats include turning off random encounters, maxing out your health (which for some reason is only available in the Steam version), having limit breaks always available, acquire all cards, and speeding up the game. Now, those cheats might sound like they’ll make the game easier and they can, but turning off random encounters could also be challenging with how Final Fantasy VIII’s Junction/Draw progression system works.

I have to say, speeding up the game cheat was a great addition to this one as Draw farming can be a very mundane task. Now instead of spending 20+ minutes on a single encounter to Draw magic, you can just turn on the faster speed cut your farming by a significant amount. This goes for GF summons as well, no more having to sit there watching the long animation over and over again when you can just click the speed up button and get right back into the battle.

As for random encounters, I never turned them off. I can see how this cheat might actually be more challenging than helpful under the right conditions with how Final Fantasy VIII’s progression work. I can see this being an added layer of difficulty to no EXP challenge runs. This could make it to where you have to play Triple Triad and go to Draw Points to get the spells you need. This could also have your GFs learn abilities at a much slower pace causing you to be a bit more creative with some of the game’s Junction exploits to still fight effectively.

That’s another thing I wanted to discuss, now this isn’t bad, but it was something that I did hope that Square would address for this remaster which was retooling the Junction/Draw progression system. They didn’t change anything which isn’t bad as it maintains the system, but also bad because you can still heavily exploit it. This can be done by having your GFs learn item refinement abilities early and playing a lot of Triple Triad to where you can have what is traditionally late mid-game stats within the first five hours of the game.

Enemies are also still dependent on Squall’s level. This means you can stay at a low level to just kill enemies and even some bosses in one hit with how you can increase stats with the Junction system. That was another thing I hoped Square would address also to make leveling up Squall more meaningful.

I also wished that Square fixed it to where the game didn’t un-Junction your characters at specific points in the story. I get it, make sure you’re equipped and prepared to go, but damn it, why do I still have to double check to make sure the game didn’t decide to be a dick right before a boss fight to un-Junction everything.

You might be wondering with the pros and cons that I listed if the game is worth it. Honestly, yeah I think it is. For $20 USD, it’s a pretty good price for some updates and having the speed up cheat a very welcome addition for the GF summons and Draw farming.

Yes the game still has a somewhat rushed romance, the second half of the story falls apart, and the Ultimecia still feels disconnected to the story as a villain. But to me, that’s part of Final Fantasy VIII’s charm and this is a game that I still love to bits to this day.

In my review for the game a couple years ago. I didn’t give it a review score as I didn’t think I could be objective enough to give it one due to how much this game means to me and what it did for my educational development. However, looking back now I think I can be objective enough to show the differences between the original Final Fantasy VIII on its own and the remastered version. So for this I’ll score Final Fantasy VIII the game as is as well as a separate score for the remastered version.

Final Fantasy VIII receives a 4 out of 5

Final Fantasy VIII Remastered receives a 3 out of 5

This one I’ll admit was tough but I feel the Remastered version could have done a bit more to give it a remastered feel. There were issues in the original that were ripe for Square to fix this go around and they didn’t take that opportunity to fix them. However, despite me giving the remastered version a 3, it’s still a fantastic game and worth the $20 price tag. I’m glad that this game finally got some attention and even opened the door for new Final Fantasy fans to finally take a look at this game.

However, if you’ve been curious about the Final Fantasy series and is someone that is possibly looking for an entry point, Final Fantasy VIII is not a good entry point. Take it from someone whose entry point was this game. Yes, the Junction system is easy to exploit, but it does take time to understand the system to make it easily exploitable. You have to know how to properly train your GFs to get what you need at certain points in the game, know how to make skills you learn from GFs help you with progression, mastering a card game to help you get cards that can lead to items to make you stronger, learn what spells are good to Junction to which stat, and tinkering with Elemental and Status Junctions to better fight enemies with elemental weaknesses. This is better to play when you’ve had a few other Final Fantasy titles under your belt.

If you want recommendations on a good entry point, Final Fantasy XV serves a good entry point as it has all the modern conveniences of games today. Final Fantasy VI and VII also serve as good entry points as both have compelling stories and fun combat. Final Fantasy X is also a great entry point as it has a good mix of both modern and classic and one that I personally recommended as being a good “first Final Fantasy.” Then again that could also be my bias showing as it is my favorite Final Fantasy.

#Final Fantasy VIII #Final Fantasy VIII Remastered #FF8 #FFVIII #video games #video game review #game review #gaming review #gaming #Biscuit reviews #Square Enix

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maximelebled · 7 years ago

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Growing Pains - Zelda, Tony Hawk, The Sims, games and related memories from my formative years

This blog post is about my personal history with video games, how they influenced me growing up, how they sometimes helped me, and more or less an excuse to write about associated memories with them.

This is a very straightforward intro, because I’ve had this post sitting as a draft for ages, trying to glue all of it cohesively, but I’m not a very good writer, so I never really succeeded. Some of these paragraphs date back at least one year.

And I figured I should write about a lot of this as long as I still remember clearly, or not too inaccurately. Because I know that I don’t remember my earliest ever memory. I only remember how I remember it. So I might as well help my future self here, and give myself a good memento.

Anyway, the post is a kilometer long, so it’ll be under this cut.

My family got a Windows 95 computer when I was 3 years old. While I don’t remember this personally, I’m told that one of the first things I ever did with it was mess up with the BIOS settings so badly that dad’s computer-expert friend had to be invited to repair it. (He stayed for dinner as a thank you.)

It was that off-white plastic tower, it had a turbo button, and even a 4X CD reader! Wow! And the CRT monitor must have been... I don’t remember what it was, actually. But I do once remember launching a game at a stupidly high resolution: 1280x1024! And despite being a top-down 2D strategy, it ran VERY slowly. Its video card was an ATI Rage. I had no idea what that really meant that at the time, but I do recall that detail nonetheless.

Along with legitimately purchased games, the list of which I can remember:

Tubular Worlds

Descent II

Alone in the Dark I & III

Lost Eden

Formula One (not sure which game exactly)

Heart of Darkness

(and of course the famous Adibou/Adi series of educational games)

... we also had what I realize today were cracked/pirated games, from the work-friend that had set up the family computer. I remember the following:

Age of Empires I (not sure about that one, I think it might have been from a legitimate “Microsoft Plus!” disc)

Nightmare Creatures (yep, there was a PC port of that game)

Earthworm Jim (but without any music)

The Fifth Element

Moto Racer II

There are a few other memorable games, which were memorable in most aspects, except their name. I just cannot remember their name. And believe me, I have looked. Too bad! Anyway, in this list, I can point out a couple games that made a big mark on me.

First, the Alone in the Dark trilogy. It took me a long time to beat them. I still remember the morning I beat the third game. I think it was in 2001 or 2002.

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There was a specific death in it which gave me nightmares for a week. You shrink yourself to fit through a crack in a wall, but it’s possible to let a timer run out—or fall down a hole—and this terrifying thing happens (16:03). I remember sometimes struggling to run the game for no reason; something about DOS Extended Memory being too small.

I really like the low-poly flat-shaded 3D + hand-drawn 2D style of the game, and it’d be really cool to see something like that pop up again. After the 8-bit/16-bit trend, there’s now more and more games paying tribute to rough PS1-style 3D, so maybe this will happen? Maybe I’ll have to do it myself? Who knows!

Second, Lost Eden gave me a taste for adventure and good music, and outlandish fantasy universes. Here’s the intro to the game:

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A lot of the game is very evocative, especially its gorgeous soundtrack, and you spend a lot of time trekking through somewhat empty renders of landscapes. Despite being very rough early pre-rendered 3D, those places were an incredible journey in my young eyes. If you have some time, I suggest either playing the game (it’s available on Steam) or watching / skimmering through this “longplay” video. Here are some of my personal highlights: 25:35, 38:05, 52:15 (love that landscape), 1:17:20, 1:20:20 (another landscape burned in my neurons), 2:12:10, 2:55:30, 3:01:18. (spoiler warning)

But let’s go a couple years back. Ever since my youngest years, I was very intrigued by creation. I filled entire pocket-sized notebooks with writing—sometimes attempts at fiction, sometimes daily logs like the weather reports from the newspaper, sometimes really bad attempts at drawing. I also filled entire audio tapes over and over and OVER with “fake shows” that my sister and I would act out. The only thing that survived is this picture of 3-year-old me with the tape player/recorder.

It also turns out that the tape recorder AND the shelf have both survived.

(I don’t know if it still works.)

On Wednesday afternoons (school was off) and on the week-ends, I often got to play on the family computer, most of the time with my older brother, who’s the one who introduced me to... well... all of it, really. (Looking back on the games he bought, I can say he had very good tastes.)

Moto Racer II came with a track editor. It was simple but pretty cool to play around with. You just had to make the track path and elevation; all the scenery was generated by the game. You could draw impossible tracks that overlapped themselves, but the editor wouldn’t let you save them. However, I found out there was a way to play/save them no matter what you did, and I got to experiment with crazy glitches. 85 degree inclines that launched the bike so high you couldn’t see the ground anymore? No problem. Tracks that overlapped themselves several times, causing very strange behaviour at the meeting points? You bet. That stuff made me really curious about how video games worked. I think a lot of my initial interest in games can be traced back to that one moment I figured out how to exploit the track editor...

There was also another game—I think it was Tubular Worlds—that came on floppy disks. I don’t remember what exactly lead me to do it, but I managed to edit the text that was displayed by the installer... I think it was the license agreement bit of it. That got me even more curious as to how computers worked.

Up until some time around my 13th or 14th birthday, during summer break (the last days of June to the first days of September for French pupils), my sister and I would always go on vacation at my grandparents’ home.

The very first console game I ever played was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on my cousin’s Super Nintendo, who also usually stayed with us. Unlike us, he had quite a few consoles available to him, and brought a couple along. My first time watching and playing this game was absolutely mind-blowing to me. An adventure with a huge game world to explore, so many mysterious things at every corner. “Why are you a pink rabbit now?” “I’m looking for the pearl that will help me not be that.”

Growing up and working in the games industry has taken the magic out of many things in video games... and my curiosity for the medium (and its inner workings) definitely hasn’t helped. I know more obscure technical trivia about older games than I care to admit. But I think this is what is shaping my tastes in video games nowadays... part of it is that I crave story-rich experiences that can bring me back to a, for lack of a better term, “child-like” wonderment. And I know how weird this is going to sound, but I don’t really enjoy “pure gameplay” games as much for that reason. Some of the high-concept ones are great, of course (e.g. Tetris), but I usually can’t enjoy others without a good interwoven narrative. I can’t imagine I would have completed The Talos Principle had it consisted purely of the puzzles without any narrative beats, story bits, and all that. What I’m getting at is, thinking about it, I guess I tend to value the “narrative” side of games pretty highly, because, to me, it’s one of the aspects of the medium that, even if distillable to some formulas, is inherently way more “vague” and “ungraspable”. You can do disassembly on game mechanics and figure out even the most obsure bits of weird technical trivia. You can’t do that to a plot, a universe, characters, etc. or at least nowhere near to the same extent.

You can take a good story and weave it into a number of games, but the opposite is not true. It’s easy to figure out the inner working of gameplay mechanics, and take the magic out of them, but it’s a lot harder to do that for a story, unless it’s fundamentally flawed in some way.

Video games back then seemed a lot bigger than they actually were.

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I got Heart of Darkness as a gift in 1998 or 1999. We used to celebrate Christmas at my grandparents’, so I had to wait a few days to be back home, and to able to put the CD in the computer. But boy was it worth it! Those animated cutscenes! The amazing pixel art animations! The amazing and somewhat disturbing variety of ways in which you can die, most of which gruesome and mildly graphic! And of course, yet again... a strange and outlandish universe that just scratches my itch for it. Well, one of which that forged my taste for them.

I can’t remember exactly when it happened or what it was, but I do remember that at some point we visited some sort of... exposition? Exhibit? Something along those lines. And it had a board games & computer games section. The two that stick out in my mind were Abalone (of which I still have the box somewhere) and what I think was some sort of 2D isometric (MMO?) RPG. I wanna say it was Ultima Online but I recall it looking more primitive than that (it had small maps whose “void” outside them was a single blueish color).

In my last two years of elementary school, there was one big field trip per year. They lasted two weeks, away from family. The first one was to the Alps. The second one was... not too far from where I live now, somewhere on the coast of Brittany! I have tried really hard to find out exactly where it was, as I remember the building and facilities really well, but I was never able to find it again. On a couple occasions, we went on a boat with some kind of... algae harvesters? The smell was extremely strong (burning itself into my memory) and made me sick. The reason I bring them up is because quite a few of my classmates had Game Boy consoles, most of them with, you know, all those accessories, especially the little lights. I remember being amazed at the transparent ones. Play was usually during the off-times, and I watched what my friends were up to, with, of course, a bit of jealousy mixed in. The class traveled by bus, and it took off in the middle of the night; something like 3 or 4 in the morning? It seemed like such a huge deal at the time! Now here I am, writing THESE WORDS at 03:00. Anyway, most of my classmates didn’t fall back asleep and those that had a Game Boy just started playing on them. One of my classmates, however, handed me his whole kit and I got to do pretty much what I wanted with it, with the express condition that I would not overwrite any of his save files. I remember getting reasonably far in Pokémon before I had to give it back to him and my progress was wiped.

During the trip to the Alps, I remember seeing older kids paying for computer time; there was a row of five computers in a small room... and they played Counter-Strike. I had absolutely no idea what it was, and I would forget about it until the moment I’m writing these words, but I was watching with much curiosity.

The first time I had my own access to console games was in 2001. The first Harry Potter film had just come out, and at Christmas, I was gifted a Game Boy Advance with the first official game. I just looked it up again and good god, it’s rougher than I remember. The three most memorable GBA games which I then got to play were both Golden Sun(s) and Sword of Mana... especially the latter, with its gorgeous art direction. My dad had a cellphone back then, and I remember sneakily going on there to look up a walkthrough for a tricky part of Golden Sun’s desert bit. Cellphones had access to something called “WAP” internet... very basic stuff, but of course still incredible to me back then.

I eventually got to play another Zelda game on my GBA: Link’s Awakening DX. I have very fond memories of that one because I was bed-ridden with a terrible flu. My fever ran so high that I started having some really funky dreams, delirious half-awake hallucinations/feelings, and one night, I got so hot that I stumbled out of bed and just laid down against the cold tile of the hallway. At 3 in the morning! A crazy time! (Crazy for 11-year-old me.)

(The fever hallucinations were crazy. My bedroom felt like it was three times at big, and I was convinced that a pack of elephants were charging at me from the opposite corner. The “night grain” of my vision felt sharper, amplified. Every touch, my sore body rubbing against the bed covers felt like it was happening twice as much. You know that “Heavy Rain with 300% facial animation” video? Imagine that, but as a feverish feeling. The dreams were on another level entirely. I could spend pages on them, but suffice to say that’s when I had my first dream where I dreamed of dying. There were at least two, actually. The first one was by walking down a strange, blueish metal corridor, then getting in an elevator, and then feeling that intimate convinction that it was leading me to passing over. The second one was in some Myst-like world, straight out of a Roger Dean cover, with some sort of mini-habitat pods floating on a completely undisturbed lake. We were just trapped in them. It just felt like some kind of weird afterlife.)

I also eventually got to play the GBA port of A Link To The Past. My uncle was pretty amused by seeing me play it, as he’d also played the original on SNES before I’d even been born. I asked him for help with a boss (the first Dark World one), but unfortunately, he admitted he didn’t remember much of the game.

We had a skiing holiday around this time. I don’t remember the resort’s or the town’s name, but its sights are burned in my memory. Maybe it’s because, shortly after we arrived, and we went to the ski rental place, I almost fainted and puked on myself, supposedly from the low oxygen. It also turned out that the bedroom my parents had rented unexpectedly came with a SNES in the drawer under the tiny TV. The game: Super Mario World. I got sick at one point and got to stay in and play it. This was also the holiday where I developed a fondness for iced tea, although back then the most common brand left an awful aftertaste in your mouth that just made you even more thirsty.

We got a new PC in December of 2004. Ditching the old Windows 98 SE (yep, the OS had been upgraded in... 2002, I think?). Look at how old-school this looks. The computer office room was in the basement. Even with the blur job that I applied to the monitor for privacy reasons, you can still tell that this is the XP file explorer:

A look at what the old DSLR managed to capture on the shelf reveals some more of the games that were available to me back then: a bunch of educational software, The Sims 2, and SpellForce Gold.

I might be misremembering but I think they were our Christmas gifts for that year; we both got to pick one game. I had no idea what I wanted, really, but out of all the boxes at (what I think was) the local Fnac store, it was SpellForce that stood out to me the most. Having watched Lord of the Rings the year prior might have been a factor. I somewhat understood Age of Empires years before that, but SpellForce? Man, I loved the hell out of SpellForce. Imagine a top-down RPG that can also be played from a third-person perspective. And with the concept of... hero units... wait a second... now that reminds me of Dota.

Imagine playing a Dota hero with lots of micro-management and being able to build a whole base on new maps. And sometimes visiting very RPG-ish sections (my favorites!) with very little top-down strategy bits, towns, etc. like Siltbreaker. I guess this game was somewhat like an alternate, single-player Dota if you look at it from the right angle. (Not the third-person one.)

I do remember being very excited when I found out that it, too, came with a level editor. I never figured it out, though. I only ever got as far as making a nice landscape for my island, and that was it!

A couple weeks after, it was Christmas; my sister and I got our first modern PC game: The Sims 2. It didn’t run super well—most games didn’t, because the nVidia GeForce FX 5200 wasn’t very good. But that didn’t stop me or my sister from going absolutely nuts with the game. This video has the timestamp of 09 January 2005, and it is the first video I’ve ever made with a computer. Less than two weeks after we got the game, I was already neck-deep in creating stuff.

Not that it was particularly good, of course. This is a video that meets all of the “early YouTube Windows Movie Maker clichés”.

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Speaking of YouTube, I did register an account there pretty early on, in August of 2006. I’ve been through all of it. I remember every single layout change. I also started using Sony Vegas around that time. It felt so complex and advanced back then! And I’m still using it today. Besides Windows, Vegas Pro is very likely to be the piece of software that I’ve been using for the longest time.

I don’t have a video on YouTube from before 2009, because I decided to delete all of them out of embarassment. They were mostly Super Mario 64 machinima. It’s as bad as it sounds. The reason I bring that up right now, though, is that it makes the “first” video of my account the last one I made with the Sims 2.

But before I get too far ahead with my early YouTube days, let me go backwards a bit. We got hooked up to the Internet some time in late 2005. It was RTC (dialup), 56 kbps. my first steps into the Internet led me to the Cube engine. Mostly because back then my dad would purchase computer magazines (which were genuinely helpful back then), and came with CDs of common downloadable software for those without Internet connections. One of them linked to Cube. I think it was using either this very same screenshot, or a very similar one, on the same map.

The amazing thing about Cube is not only that it was open-source and moddable, but had map editing built-in the game. The mode was toggled on with a single key press. You could even edit maps cooperatively with other people. Multiplayer mapping! How cool is that?! And the idea of a game that enabled so much creation was amazing to me, so I downloaded it right away. (Over the course of several hours, 30 MiB being large for dialup.)

I made lots of bad maps that never fulfilled the definition of “good level” or “good gameplay”, not having any idea how “game design” meant, or what it even was. But I made places. Places that I could call my own. “Virtual homes”. I still distinctively remember the first map I ever made, even though no trace of it survives to this day. In the second smallest map size possible, I’d made a tower surrounded by a moat and a few smaller cozy towers, with lots of nice colored lighting. This, along with the distinctive skyboxes and intriguing music, made me feel like I’d made my home in a strange new world.

At some point later down the line, I made a kinda-decent singleplayer level. It was very linear, but one of the two lead developers of the game played it and told me he liked it a lot! Of course, half of that statement was probably “to be nice”, but it was really validating and encouraging. And I’m glad they were like that. Because I remember being annoying to some other mappers in the Sauerbraten community (the follow-up to Cube, more advanced technically), who couldn’t wrap their heads around my absolutely god awful texturing work and complete lack of level “design”. Honestly, sometimes, I actually kinda feel like trying to track a couple of them down and being like, “yeah, remember that annoying kid? That was me. Sorry you had to deal with 14-year-old me.”

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At some point, I stumbled upon a mod called Cube Legends. It was a heavily Zelda-inspired “total conversion”; a term reserved for mods that are the moddiest mods and try to take away as much of the original foundation as possible. It featured lots of evocative MIDI music by the Norwegian composer Bjørn Lynne. Fun fact: the .mid files are still available officially from his website!

This was at the crossroad of many of my interests. It was yet another piece of the puzzle. As a quick side note, this is why Zelda is the first series that I name in the title of this post, even though I... never really thought of myself as a Zelda fan. It’s not that it’s one of the game series that I like the most, it’s just that, before I started writing this, I’d never realized how far-reaching its influence had been in my life, both in overt and subtle ways, especially during my formative years.

And despite how clearly unfinished, how much of a “draft” Cube Legends was, I could see what it was trying to do. I could see the author’s intent. And I’m still listening to Bjørn Lynne’s music today.

The Cube Engine and its forums were a big part of why I started speaking English so well. Compared to most French people, I mean. We’re notoriously bad with the English language, and so was I up until then. But having this much hands-on practice proved to be immensely valuable. And so, I can say that the game and its community have therefore had long-lasting impacts in my life.

I also tried out a bunch of N64 games via emulation, bringing me right back in that bedroom at my grandparents’ house, with my cousin. Though he did not have either N64 Zelda game back then.

The first online forum I ever joined was a Zelda fan site’s. There are two noteworthy things to say here:

It was managed by a woman who, during my stay in the community, graduated from her animation degree. At this stage I had absolutely no idea that this was going to be the line of work I would eventually pursue!

I recently ran into the former head moderator of the forums. (I don’t know when the community died.) One of the Dota players on my friends list invited him because I was like “hmm, I wanna go as 3, not as 2 players today”. His nickname very vaguely reminded me of something, a weird hunch I couldn’t place. Half an hour into the game, he said “hey Max... this might be a long shot, but did you ever visit [forum]?” and then I immediately yelled “OH MY GOD—IT IS YOU.” The world is a small place.

Access to the computer was sometimes tricky. I didn’t always have good grades, and of course, “punishment” (not sure the word is appropriate, hence the quotes, but you get the idea) often involved locking me out of the computer room. Of course, most times, I ended up trying to find the key instead. I needed my escape from the real world. (You better believe it’s Tangent Time.)

I was always told I was the “smart kid”, because I “understood things faster” than my classmates. So they made me skip two grades ahead. This made me enter high school at nine years old. The consequences were awful (I was even more of the typical nerdy kid that wouldn’t fit in), and I wish it had never happened. Over the years, I finally understood: I wasn’t more intelligent. I merely had the chance to have been able to grow up with an older brother who’d instilled a sense of curiosity, critical thinking, and taste in books that were ahead of my age and reading level. This situation—and its opposite—is what I believe accounts for the difference in how well kids get to learn. It’s not innate talent, it’s not genetics (as some racists would like you to believe). It’s parenting and privilege.

And that’s why I’ll always be an outspoken proponent for any piece of media that tries to instill critical thinking and curiosity in its viewer, reader, or player.

But I digress.

Well, I’ve been digressing a lot, really, but games aren’t everything and after all, this post is about the context in which I played those games. Otherwise I reckon I would’ve just made a simple list.

I eventually got a Nintendo DS for Christmas, along with Mario Kart DS. My sister had gotten her own just around the time when it released... she had the Nintendogs bundle. We had also upgraded to proper ADSL, what I think was about a ~5 megabits download speed. The Nintendo DS supported wi-fi, which was still relatively rare compared to today. In fact, Nintendo sold a USB wireless adapter to help with that issue—our ISP-supplied modem-router did not have any wireless capabilities. I couldn’t get it the adapter work and I remember I got help from a really kind stranger who knew a lot about networking—to a point that it seemed like wizardry to me.

I remember I got a “discman” as a gift some time around that point. In fact, I still have it. Check out the stickers I put on it! I think those came from the Sims 2 DVD box and/or one of its add-ons.

I burned a lot of discs. In fact, in the stack of burned CDs/DVDs that I found (with the really bad Sims movies somewhere in there), I found at least three discs that had the Zelda album Hyrule Symphony burned in, each with different additional tracks. Some were straight-up MIDI files from vgmusic.com...! And speaking (again) of Zelda, when the Wii came out, Twilight Princess utterly blew my mind. I never got the game or the console, but damn did I yearn badly for it. I listened to the main theme of the game a lot, which didn’t help. I eventually got to play the first few hours at a friend’s place.

At some point, we’d upgraded the family computer to something with a bit more horsepower. It had a GeForce 8500 GT inside, which was eventually upgraded to a 9600 GT after the card failed for some reason. It could also dual-boot between XP and Vista. I stuck with that computer until 2011.

We moved to where I currently live in 2007. I’ve been here over a decade! And before we’d even fully finished unpacking, I was on the floor of the room that is now my office, with the computer on the ground and the monitor on a cardboard box, playing a pirated copy of... Half-Life! It was given to me by my cousin. It took me that long to find out about the series. It’s the first Valve game I played. I also later heard about the Orange Box, but mostly about Portal. Which I also pirated and played. I distinctly remember being very puzzled by the options menu: I thought it was glitched or broken, as changing settings froze the game. Turns out the Source engine had to chug for a little while, like a city car in countryside mud, as it reloaded a bunch of stuff. Patience is a virtue...

But then, something serious happened.

In the afternoon of 25 December 2007, I started having a bit of a dull stomach pain. I didn’t think much of it. Figured maybe I’d eaten too many Christmas chocolates and it’d go away. It didn’t. It progressively deteriorated into a high fever where I had trouble walking and my tummy really hurt; especially if you pressed on it. My parents tried to gently get me to eat something nice on New Year’s Eve, but it didn’t stay in very long. I could only feed myself with lemonade and painkiller. Eventually, the doctor decided I should get blood tests done as soon as possible. And I remember that day very clearly.

I was already up at 6:30 in the morning. Back then, The Daily Show aired on the French TV channel Canal+, so I was watching that, lying in the couch while waiting for my mom to get up and drive me to my appointment, at 7:00. It was just two streets away, but there was no way I could walk there. At around noon, the doctor called and told my mom: “get your son to the emergency room now.”

Long story short, part of my intestines nuked themselves into oblivion, causing acute peritonitis. To give you an idea, that’s something with a double-digit fatality rate. Had we waited maybe a day or two more, I would not be here writing this. They kind of blew up. I had an enormous abcess attached to a bunch of my organs. I had to be operated on with only weak local anaesthetics as they tried to start draining the abscess. It is, to date, by far the most painful thing that has ever happened to me. It was bad enough that the hospital doctor that was on my case told me that I was pretty much a case worthy to be in textbooks. I even had medical students come into my hospital room about it! They were very nice.

This whole affair lasted over a month. I became intimately familiar with TV schedules. And thankfully, I had my DS to keep me company. At the time, I was pretty big into the Tony Hawk DS games. They were genuinely good. They had extensive customization, really great replayability, etc. you get the idea. I think I even got pretty high on the online leaderboards at some point. I didn’t have much to do on some days besides lying down in pain while perfecting my scoring and combo strategies. I think Downhill Jam might’ve been my favorite.

My case was bad enough that they were unable to do something due to the sad state of my insides during the last surgery of my stay. I was told that I could come back in a few months for a checkup, and potentially a “cleanup” operation that would fix me up for good. I came back in late June of 2008, got the operation, and... woke up in my hospital room surrounded by, like, nine doctors, and hooked up to a morphine machine that I could trigger on command. Apparently something had gone wrong during the operation, but they never told me what. I wasn’t legally an adult, so they didn’t have to tell me. I suspect it’s somewhere in some medical files, but I never bothered to dig up through my parents’ archives, or ask the hospital. And I think I would rather not know. But anyway, that was almost three more weeks in the hospital. And it sucked even more that time because, you see, hospital beds do not “breathe” like regular beds do. The air can’t go through. Let’s say I’m intimately familiar with the smell of back sweat forever.

When I got out, my mom stopped by a supermarket on the way home. And that is when I bought The Orange Box, completely on a whim, and made my Steam account. Why? Because it was orange and stood out on the shelf.

(As a side note, that was the whole bit I started writing first, and that made me initially title this post “growing pains”. First, because I’m bad at titles. Second, because not that I didn’t have them otherwise (ow oof ouch my knees), but that was literally the most painful episode of my entire life thus far and it ended in a comically-unrelated, high-impact, life-changing decision. Just me picking up The Orange Box after two awful hospital stays... led me to where I am today.)

While I was recovering, I also started playing EarthBound! Another bit of a life-changer, that one. To a lesser extent, but still. I was immediately enamored by its unique tone. Giygas really really really creeped me out for a while afterwards though. I still get unsettled if I hear its noises sometimes.

I later bought Garry’s Mod (after convincing my mom that it was a “great creative toolbox that only cost ten bucks!”), and, well, the rest is history. By which I mean, a lot of my work and gaming activity since 2009 is still up and browsable. But there are still a few things to talk about.

In 2009, I bought my first computer with YouTube ad money: the Asus eee PC 1005HA-H. By modern standards, it’s... not very powerful. The processor in my current desktop machine is nearly 50 times as fast as its Atom N280. It had only one gigabyte of RAM, Windows 7 Basic Edition, and an integrated GPU barely worthy of the name; Intel didn’t care much for 3D in their chips back then. The GMA 945 didn’t even have hardware support for Transform & Lighting.

But I made it work, damn it. I made that machine run so much stuff. I played countless Half-Life and Half-Life 2 mods on it—though, due to the CPU overhead on geometry, some of those were trickier. I think one of the most memorable ones I played was Mistake of Pythagoras; very surreal, very rough, but I still remember it so clearly. I later played The Longest Journey on it, in the middle of winter. It was a very cozy and memorable experience. (And another one that’s an adventure wonderful outlandish alien universe. LOVE THOSE.)

I did more than playing games on it, though...

This is me sitting, sunburned on the nose, in an apartment room, on 06 August 2010. This was in the Pyrénées, at the border between France and Spain. We had a vacation with daily hiking. Some of the landscapes we visited reminded me very strongly of those from Lost Eden, way up the page...

So, you see, I had 3ds Max running on that machine. The Source SDK as well. Sony Vegas. All of it was slow; you bet I had to use some workarounds to squeeze performance out of software, and that I had to keep a close, watchful eye on RAM usage. But I worked on this thing. I really did! I animated this video’s facial animation bits (warning: this is old & bad) on the eee PC, during the evenings of the trip, when we were back at our accomodation. The Faceposer tool in the Source SDK really worked well on that machine.

I also animated an entire video solely on the machine (warning: also old and bad). It had to be rendered on the desktop computer... but every single bit of the animation was crafted on the eee PC.

I made it work.

Speaking of software that did not run well: around that time, I also played the original Crysis. The “but can it run Crysis?” joke was very much justified back then. I had to edit configuration files by hand so that I could run the game in 640x480... because I wanted to keep most of the high-end settings enabled. The motion blur was delicious, and it blew my mind that the effect made the game feel this smooth, despite wobbling around in the 20 to 30 fps range.

Alright. It’s time to finish writing this damn post and publish it at last, so I’m going to close it out by listing some more memories and games that I couldn’t work in up there.

Advance Wars. Strategy game on GBA with a top-down level editor. You better believe I was all over the editor right away.

BioShock. When we got the 2007 desktop computer, it was one of the first games I tried. Well, its demo, to be precise. Its tech and graphics blew my mind, enough that I saved up to buy the full game. This was before I had a Steam account; I got a boxed copy! I think it might have been the last boxed game I ever bought? It had a really nice metal case. The themes and political messages of the game flew way over my head, though.

Mirror’s Edge. The art direction was completely fascinating to me, and it introduced me to Solar Fields’ music; my most listened artist this decade, by a long shot.

L.A. Noire. I lost myself in its stories and investigations, and then, I did it all again, with my sister at the helm. I very rarely play games twice (directly or indirectly), which I figure is worth mentioning.

Zeno Clash. It was weird and full of soul, had cool music, and cool cutscenes. It inspired me a lot in my early animation days.

Skyward Sword. Yep, going back to Zelda on that one. The whole game was pretty good, and I’m still thinking about how amazing its art direction was. Look up screenshots of it running in HD on an emulator... it’s outstanding. But there’s a portion of the game that stands tall above the rest: the Lanayru Sand Sea. It managed to create a really striking atmosphere in many aspects, through and through. I still think about it from time to time, especially when its music comes on in shuffle mode.

Wandersong. A very recent pick, but it was absolutely a life-changing one. That game is an anti-depressant, a vaccine against cynicism, a lone bright and optimist voice.

I realize now this is basically a “flawed but interesting and impactful games” list. With “can establish its atmosphere very well” as a big criteria. (A segment of video games that is absolutely worth exploring.)

I don’t know if I’ll ever make my own video game. I have a few ideas floating around and I tried prototyping some stuff, though my limited programming abilities stood in my way. But either way, if it happens one day, I hope I’ll manage to channel all those years of games into the CULMINATION OF WHAT I LIKE. Something along those lines, I reckon.

#video games

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deadcactuswalking · 5 years ago

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REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 09/10/2020

Okay, so as you know this show has been on a “hiatus” for reasons I explained in the last episode and I had been thinking of different ways to continue this. Eventually I came to the conclusion that it does not really matter if I skipped tens of songs, maybe even more than 100, because a lot of them don’t have lasting success and if I kept doing these massive blocks of songs from months ago I would pretty much get nowhere by the end of the year. So, I’m writing this on Saturday, meaning the UK Singles Chart updated yesterday, and I think it’s about time I get back in schedule. This week’s #1 is “Mood” by 24kGoldn and iann dior, and let’s discuss the new arrivals in the UK Top 75. Welcome back to REVIEWING THE CHARTS.

Dropouts and Returning Entries

So, how will this work? Well, it’s going to be pretty simple. No rundown of the top 10, no climbers and fallers, just reviews of the usually about 10 or so new songs that hit the UK Top 75. I’ll cover returning entries and drop-outs as well ever so briefly at the start of each episode, just for some additional clarity and information, I guess. This was actually a pretty damn busy week to start off with so we have a lot of drop-outs, some of which are pretty notable, like “Secrets” by DJ Regard and RAYE, “Fake Friends” by Ps1 and Alex Hosking, “Dinner Guest” by AJ Tracey and MoStack, Tion Wayne’s “I Dunno” featuring Dutchavelli and Stormzy, “Dancing in the Moonlight” by Jubel and Neimy and some other relatively unimportant one-week hits I won’t be mentioning here. Of course, there are songs that have been on the chart for months but I only recently covered like “This City” by Sam Fischer, “Kings & Queens” by Ava Max and “Don’t Need Love” by 220 KID and Gracey, as well as some gradual losses from the late Juice WRLD, those being “Smile” with the Weeknd and “Wishing Well”. Returning to the chart are “Real Life” by Burna Boy and Stormzy at #71, “One Too Many” by Keith Urban and P!nk at #57, “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac at #55 43 years after release because of this guy on TikTok drinking cranberry juice (That’s 2020 for you) and finally, “Levitating” by Dua Lipa at #30 thanks to a pretty good DaBaby remix. Now we have two album bombs to start this season off. Let’s go!

NEW ARRIVALS

#66 – “Always Forever” – Bryson Tiller

Produced by J-Louis, Teddy Walton and CAMEone

Bryson Tiller. I don’t really get or even know his music enough to spark any insight before listening, and to be transparent, no, I didn’t listen to that comeback album. Anniversary is a sequel of sorts to his debut album, Trapsoul, and I can expect just that, I imagine, from this very quick pre-release single dropped just a week or two before the album proper. This drowned-out, watery R&B style doesn’t usually work with me, especially when Drake does it, and Tiller’s nasal, high-pitched squeaky crooning here also does not fit this otherwise lovely production, with some fat bass 808s I really enjoy. The chorus is a mess of fleeting background vocal runs and the performance here while not embarrassing feels kind of lifeless and checked-out. Admittedly, some of the harmonies he hits in the third verse/bridge are pretty nice-sounding, but it feels wasted when the song just continues to flutter off afterwards with the same dull key patterns and frankly, this is just an uninteresting and clearly unfinished track barely under three minutes and never reaching a point where it feels worth listening to. If I were a Bryson Tiller fan, I would be pretty underwhelmed with this.

#65 – “Years Go By” – Bryson Tiller

Produced by Streetrunner and Tarik Azzouz

Well, here’s the opening track from the record, where Tiller has to make that impactful first impression, and with this reverb-drenched guitar melody in the intro and the distorted sound effects that start off the song proper, it starts off solid, and, I’m afraid to say, continues to be so. This obviously goes for a more direct trap-rap vibe with a skittering drum pattern that really bumps and a... pretty underwhelming two verses from Tiller here, who prefers to just kind of impersonate the Weeknd until the beat abruptly cuts out for pointless Auto-Tuned vocal riffing, and, yeah, this is just clumsy. The flows here are tired and messy, often clinging off the ledge of the beat, and even if I really like the cute synths in the outro, I can’t excuse this. Once again, it just seems unfinished, and lyrically on both tracks, he’s saying nothing of any substance. I guess he shouts out Jack Harlow and... Danny Phantom? He also seems to refer to himself as “Godtiller” by the end, as in Godzilla, because no-one’s stopping him from doing so. Sigh, next.

#62 – “Bet You Wanna” – BLACKPINK featuring Cardi B

Produced by TBHits, Mr. Franks and Teddy

You may be able to recognise a pattern here but no, I didn’t listen to this really short debut album by BLACKPINK either, pretty fittingly called The Album. This isn’t really a collaboration I understand or expected but it’s not that far-fetched, especially since BTS did collaborate with Nicki Minaj a year or so ago. The songs features the girls only singing in English over some finger-snaps that sound painfully fake and some demanding piano that is completely switched for the pre-chorus only for it to come back later and then technically in the chorus but covered in tropical-like percussion and some background squealing, only for Cardi B to interrupt with a surprisingly PG verse – you can really tell she had to censor herself here – and that’s all she does in the song. This actually is a fair bit more refined than K-pop I heard previously as it seems to at least stick to a musical motif which seems to be a pretty difficult concept for a lot of these bands. I mean, that’s probably just because of the Western producers on this song like TBHits, who’s worked with Ariana Grande before. It isn’t a headache like “Kill This Love” and I really love the vocal performance from who I thinks is “Jennie” here although the others seem to scroll through ugly distortion effects, particularly in their verse. I mean, it sure is listenable and honestly kind of a far cry from the earlier songs I heard from them, but it’s still not very good. Sorry.

#60 – “On My Mind” – Diplo and SIDEPIECE

Produced by Diplo and SIDEPIECE

So, in 1996, R&B girl group 702 released a pretty solid new jack swing jam as their debut single, featuring Missy Elliott, called “Steelo”. It was a minor hit in itself and even sampled the Police – the rock band fronted by Sting, I feel the need to clarify considering the current climate. It’s not a bad song, albeit perhaps overlong and unintentionally intimidating at times. You can tell Missy’s phoning it in a bit here, but she’s still as charming as ever here. 24 years later, we have “On My Mind”, a glorified house remix of the tune by Diplo and two of his buddies, basically. Is it any good? Well, yes. The sprinkling of cute synths in the intro combined with that leering vocal line really replicate the vibe of the original song, and it does that even better when a single vocal sample from the bridge is looped constantly under a pretty pounding bass and a typical four-on-the-floor house track. This song’s bridge of its own is incredibly pretty as well, to the point where the squawking and low-tone beeping don’t really bother me, especially when it just... crashes with buzzy bass drops that sound like a mix of a dubstep track and a car zooming past. It shifts up the entire song and honestly it works, it’s an effective climax, this is pretty fun, albeit lacking many ideas. It doesn’t really matter if those ideas are executed as well as they are here, so, thanks, Diplo.

#54 – “Rich Gnarly Dude Stuff” – 21 Savage and Metro Boomin featuring Young Thug

Produced by Metro Boomin and Peter Lee Johnson

Of course, it’s not actually titled “Rich Gnarly Dude Stuff” but I’ve got to at least try and keep this show clean. Now, I haven’t listened to many albums this year but 21 Savage and Metro Boomin’s collaborative album Savage Mode II is definitely one of the best of those few. Admittedly, it has a pretty lacklustre beginning and it doesn’t really make sense as a sequel to that Savage Mode EP, particularly because it’s trying to pay homage to a bunch of different styles of 80s, 90s and 2000s rap to the point of identity crisis, but it is one of the best album listening experiences I’ve had this year, with some absolutely killer production from Metro, the sheer brilliance of the Morgan Freeman interludes and 21’s improvement as a rapper being really on show throughout the record. “Rich Gnarly Dude Stuff” is one of my absolute favourites on the album, with the smooth as hell synths and that violin sample that is just hypnotic. 21 Savage slides on this beat and he actually sounds pretty slick with Auto-Tune here, especially over this production which is just beautiful; Metro really is the highlight of the record all things considered. In fact, 21 kind of loses me with his brand flexing and the weird empty spaces that he seems to compensate for by jumbling words together to fit the meter which is unfitting for the mood of the song. Thugger, however, I’m convinced can do no wrong. His upbeat, joyful inflections are in great contrast with his crooning in the second half of the verse, and even though he only really uses one flow through the verse, it leaves a good impression on me fast enough for me to dismiss that. Are they on-topic? Barely. Are they saying anything of substance other than some flexing, sex talk and threats? No, I mean, it’s 21 Savage and Young Thug, but the most important thing here is delivery and these guys have it in spades. I’m a lot more convinced that Thugger has hit men than YoungBoy Never Broke Again is all I’m saying. That being said, please don’t send your shooters, Mr. Broke Again.

#43 – “Runnin” – 21 Savage and Metro Boomin

Produced by Metro Boomin

After the gorgeous introduction from Metro and Morgan Freeman, you are met headfirst with the wrath of... a pretty Diana Ross sample. The way Metro flips this into this head-nodding almost Memphis-like trap beat makes it sound a lot more ominous and menacing though, and it really hits when 21 comes in with his opening bars that start off the project, giving you a basic rundown about what he’s going to do in the album only in the first verse: beat people up, buy cars, spend money on women who he only keeps around for sex and finally, shoot the opps. In fact, he calls his Draco a paedophile because “all of his opps gettin’ touched”, which is a questionable line. 21, are you saying your opps are all children? Regardless, 21 does have some pretty funny wordplay and punchlines, particularly in the second verse with a really clever line about biblical marijuana (Go figure). Basically, he grows his weed in the Garden of Eden, but “zaza” is really high-quality marijuana and also a name mentioned in the Bible. I don’t know if that was intentional or not but if it was a coincidence it at least adds to the lyrics of the song. I have to say though that the chorus is weak and tedious as all hell, and by the end of the song that sample has well-overstayed its welcome, making the song hit a lot less harder than I think was intended. Hey, at least it has Morgan Freeman on it.

#40 – “Lovesick Girls” – BLACKPINK

Produced by R.Tee and 24

So, here we are in the top 40, with more BLACKPINK and to my surprise, honestly. I figured that the song with the big western rap star would be here but I suppose this did have a video behind it – that was controversial in Korea because of how the Korean Health and Medical Workers Union objected to Jennie wearing a sexualised nurse outfit, because, well, sure. This time the lyrics are mostly in Korean, and it sounds immediately much more like what I’d expect from what 2020’s K-pop has to offer. There is a pretty clean guitar loop that the whole song runs off of, some great vocal performances amongst simple rap flows and a drastic shift into an English chorus with some 80s-like synths and admittedly a nice synthpop beat. I prefer this a lot to “Bet You Wanna” but as it is it’s just inoffensive. I like Jennie’s rap verse though. “Don’t want to be a princess, I’m priceless / a Prince not even on my list”? Come on, that’s kind of fire, at least for middling Korean electropop standards.

#38 – “Heart of Glass” – Miley Cyrus

There aren’t any production credits on Spotify, Wikipedia or Genius, mostly because this is a live performance from iHeartRadio Music Festival – however they’re still doing that in these times – that was just dumped on streaming and impressively got all the way into the top 40. To be honest, I can’t say I’m a fan of the original – it’s a well-written song flattened by weak albeit infectious disco production and whilst the groove is infectious, the song has just never clicked with me, so I’m not excited to listen to Cyrus’ cover but hey, anything to delay talking about back-to-back Drake features and D-Block Europe. I WAS excited however when it started with a rock breakdown, especially that drum fill, but it soon restarted to the groove that we all know the song for and one that again, I never was too fond of to begin with. Miley is energetic, raspy and almost growling here at points but the instrumentation is somewhat stiff, which again is a problem I have with the original. It also doesn’t replace the synth riff with an epic guitar solo as I kind of hoped. At the point where Miley drops into “na-na-na”’s and unintelligible yelling is when I just zone out. I really hoped this could have been better, but I’m not a fan.

#35 – “Come Over” – Jorja Smith featuring Popcaan

Produced by Izaiah and MadisonLST

It’s rare there’s a song on these charts that intrigues or excites me in the way this one does, not because it’s particularly novel or groundbreaking, but just because this is a new song from two artists I like but haven’t checked out much from, and I have yet to hear it so I’m glad it debuted this high. I’m happy for Popcaan too, he seems to be having a good year signed to OVO and all, even if I’ve never really tried to listen to his solo stuff. I’ve heard many features from the guy though, with Drake, Kanye, Pusha T, Gorillaz on “Saturnz Barz” and especially alongside Jamie xx and Young Thug on one of my favourite songs of all time, “I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times)”, and he does not detract from a single one of them. I enjoyed Smith’s debut album a fair bit and whilst nothing she’s released since has really clicked with me, I’m still excited to hear what she has in store. I really love the production here, even if it is a tad fragmented, especially with that awkward vocal sample, but the atmospheric and hell, even spacey dancehall beat really evokes dub. I also hate the way that vocal sample is manipulated to a nasal, pitch-shifted tone in the bridge, but I guess the chorus is really pretty. Popcaan is kind of obnoxious crooning on here but he flows when he starts really flowing... then he’s immediately interrupted by Jorja singing the first verse again for whatever reason, and, yeah, this song’s a mess. It’s so oddly produced that by the time the air horns, yes, air horns, kick in during the outro, you are left with no real idea of what you just listened to. Or at least I was.

#28 – “Mr. Right Now” – 21 Savage and Metro Boomin featuring Drake

Produced by Metro Boomin and DAVID x ELI

And now, Drake. Thankfully this is the better of the two Drake-featured songs we have here, but this is still a low point on Savage Mode II and definitely an unnecessary inclusion. The production here is actually incredible, with those sweet strings and a quiet vocal sample that is absolutely infectious. The issue here is 21 Savage cannot really do an R&B hook that well, and even when he’s in his element on a trap beat, his bars are non-existent and generic. That pre-chorus is just awful coming from 21. I hate to say it, but maybe Drake could have been more involved here other than the second verse, where he starts by just repeating what 21 said, and then continues to just be Drake, and I’m not sure about the general public, but listening to Drake being Drake is nothing more than monotonous at this point. The only interesting thing he really says in his verse is that he used to date SZA in 2008, which, according to SZA herself, is actually inaccurate by about a year, which is just... well, Drake being Drake. Also, I’m really sick of quarantine music already. You should always reflect on the experience before making art about something like this, and I feel like a fleeting reference to the pandemic with a one-and-done bar I’ve heard a couple times before already (“We in quarantine, but my M’s long”) just dates this slow and sloppy R&B cut even more. Calling it now: if Metro hadn’t produced this, this would be unlistenable.

#24 – “Outta Time” – Bryson Tiller featuring Drake

Produced by Nineteen85, Vinylz and 40

Well, I guess it’s time to test this hypothesis. I don’t think that Drake has come out with anything salvageable this year, mostly because he’s been releasing leftovers and branding them as such, and they still top charts. I mean, “Laugh Now Cry Later” is okay but that’s mostly saved by 20 seconds of Lil Durk being an absolute treasure. The way he croons gargled nonsense and follows it up with “Bring Drake to the hood, surround Drake around Drac��s” might be the funniest and best moment in pop music this year. This song with Bryson Tiller is nowhere near as amusing but honestly Drake mumble-singing over a pretty classy 90s-reminiscent R&B sample is usually quite pleasant... here he just sounds whiny and immature, and he’s pretty clearly recycling cadences and flows he’s already used. He also has zero chemistry with Tiller, maybe because they never interact on the song, with Tiller’s Auto-Tuned crooning saved for the last half of the track, mostly because I imagine it’s easier to get streams with Drake at the start. Honestly, I prefer Bryson Tiller’s part. Hey, I don’t like his voice, but over that sweet Snoh Aalegra sample, I’m not going to say it doesn’t work. This is the best I’ve heard from the album but I mean it’s not like there’s competition.

#21 – “Wonder” – Shawn Mendes

Produced by Shawn Mendes, Nate Mercereau, Scott Harris and Kid Harpoon

Really? Only #21? Okay, well, I suppose some Shawn Mendes songs are slow burners but considering how successful “If I Can’t Have You” and “Senorita” were right after release I did expect this new lead single to seep at least into the top 15, especially since the UK has a tendency to just let anybody in the top 20, but, hey, if the song’s good, it shouldn’t really matter. Much like “In My Blood” from the last album rollout, this is a ballad, although this is specifically a post-breakup ballad where he contemplates on his manufactured relationship with Camila Cabello. So it couldn’t get into the top 20 even with fake personal drama surrounding the single? Wow. Well, I actually kind of like the lyrical content here, especially the second verse where he briefly addresses toxic masculinity, and how it makes him feel like less of a man when he cries because that’s what society’s conventions and norms programmed him to feel. I would like it a bit better if it weren’t as on-the-nose and kind of clumsy as it is, especially since the rest of the song is just wondering what it would feel like to be loved by Camila Cabello and some dreary, post-breakup lines. The first verse taps into more profound and insightful territory to but it goes nowhere and I find it hard to care about this melodrama at all, even if it is backed by a pretty powerful choir arrangement. Much like “If I Can’t Have You” and some of his other tracks before this, especially “Mercy”, this feels like a pretty overproduced, underwritten angst jam with absolutely no teeth to it other than a performance from Mendes that goes into some belting territory but is overall too restrained to fit this kind of anthemic orchestral instrumentation and especially those drums. In conclusion, this is a waste of potential but at least it had potential to begin with, unlike...

#11 – “UFO” – D-Block Europe featuring Aitch

Produced by Cardo, Cubeatz and DY Krazy

People complain about the charts all the time, particularly the type and quality of music on it. This is especially true with the USA’s Billboard Hot 100 and I understand that chart has incredible flaws it hasn’t made up for, but at least it doesn’t have D-Block Europe every other week. I mean, a pretty great British rap song even ended up on the Hot 100 thanks to TikTok and DaBaby, that being “Don’t Rush” by Young T & Bugsey featuring Headie One. That proves that these recurring antagonists of REVIEWING THE CHARTS are not necessary; I like Young T & Bugsey. We could just replace these oversaturated whining idiots with those guys, but no, we have Young Adz and Dirtbike LB, and they’re here to stay. Oh, and even better, they’re here with Aitch, pioneer of the new “gentrified drill” genre. Apparently to Young Adz, this is a “different” song that could isolate their audience, but I just see this as pretty normal Young Adz moaning over guitar-trap beats. It’s not drill, but it’s not like this is all that different or interesting... like at all. Adz has this hilariously bad “ooh-wee” flow that just sounds ridiculous on this beat, and Aitch proves his status as the whitest man in UK rap – and this is the country that brought you Professor Green. The song isn’t even about spaceships or any type of unidentified flying object! It’s just about having sex with drug dealers, with the only reference to the supernatural being the intro where Young Adz says that this sex is apparently happening in space... for no reason. And Dirtbike LB, well...

I’mma cover my pain with these shades

Just as embarrassing as usual. These guys have got an album out this week by the way, with 29 songs and a full 91 minutes of this same garbage they’ve been pumping out mixtapes of for two years now. They’re still funny occasionally and never on purpose, but the humorous inflections and stupid lines are now so few and far between that it’s barely worth pointing any of that out anymore. God.

Conclusion

This wasn’t just a busy week to start off on, but also a week where I’m not left impressed by really any of this, even from the album I liked. Worst of the Week still goes to D-Block Europe and Aitch with “UFO” with Bryson Tiller picking up the Dishonourable Mention for both of his first two lousy tracks here. Other than that, well, I only really like “Rich Gnarly Dude Stuff” by 21 Savage, Metro Boomin and Young Thug so that runs away with Best of the Week, but I guess I’ll give the Honourable Mention to “On My Mind” by Diplo and SIDEPIECE, for at least being kind of fun if not anything else.

Here’s the top 10 for this week:

...and that’s all from me. Follow me on Twitter @cactusinthebank for more garbage and hopefully I’ll see you next week.

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tumblunni · 8 years ago

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Digimon World Next Order!! For once a game that ISNT a weirdly named sequel, even though it still sounds like one. 'Order Points' is the name of the revamped battle system. ^_^ Ive only been playing for about four hours but so far I'm really enjoying it! RANDOM RAMBLING ABOUT MY JOY, AHOY!

* First off, its a sequel to the original Digimon World rather than to Cyber Sleuth, so do a bit of research before you buy it, I'd say. Its more of a tamagotchi hybrid rpg than a regular turn-based one. Lots of hugging virtual pets and feeding em snacks! But this has always been my fave genre so I'm happyyyyyy~ * I named my two digimon Hershey and Zephyr cos they started off as terriermon and lopmon. But they immediately diverged off into wildly different digivolution paths instead, so now the names dont make sense XD By some grand coincidence they ended up becoming snowogremon and icedevimon at the same time, so that's what they are now! :3 my popsicle buddies! * Hershey's favourite food is mushrooms/vegetables, and Zephyr is a bit of a diva who hates everything except mineral water. Its funny since Hershey is the fragile magic user of the duo, and then we have this hulking ice shoulderblades yeti being all 'no my carbs'. DUDE WHY U GO AGAINST UR EVOLUTION REQUIREMENTS aaa but i luv u anywayyyyy * Hershey lucked out and got a super powerful technique early on by random chance, this thing that costs 700 mp to deal 700 damage, when everything else is like 50 power. And then they lucked right out of it again, cos Icedevimon cant use that move XD fifteen seconds of power as a rookie... * why do the levels mean basically nothing, yo? the game says this redvegiemon is level 3 but its stronger than the level 6 everything else in the area. Maybe the game is just dumb and levels dont take into account digivolution level? Like.. this is stronger cos its not a rookie, and they didnt even bother to make the level counter say 13 or something so the player could actually tell Well, now i know to ignore that thing entirely and just judge on their digivolutions! * The difficulty is far lower in the actual raising aspect yet higher in battles... its weird... * Its also a shame that training no longer has unique animations! It doesnt have any animations at all, its just push button dispense stats. They did at least clear up the problem of having to walk manually between each training area and waste valuable time, now there's just one training area that contains all the different trainings in a neat quick navigation menu. But its also a bit less charming and less gamelike when its JUST menus. BUT on the other hand they did mitigate it a bit by throwing in new features like a roulette roll to get bonus stats, and a whole system of complex ways you can win an extra turn on it. (Training next to each other, training opposite skills, having max happiness, someone having just digivolved, one stat gets a bonus turn each day at random...) * Its really nice that the intro of the game has you meet your digimon partners in fully evolved mega form and have a few scenes of dialogue with them before they get poofed down to digieggs by the villain. It helps mitigate the weirdness of your partner digimon being the only digimon that cant talk! * BUT ALSO. NOW THEY TALK. !!!!!! * You get some cute random dialogue popups on the bottom of the screen as you adventure around, and each digivolution has a different set of stuff to say. Its still very minimal and can get repetitive, but its adorable and helps you get more attatched to these lil doofs! * Also its hella nice that you can now pick to play as a girl, for the first time in the tamagotchi-style digimon games! I actually think her design looks cooler than the dude, he just has a streak of blue hair while she has this awesome poisonous-looking striped ponytail that bleeds pixels as you run! Badass! * ALSO thank you for english dubbed dialogue yo. Its not perfect but then again namco bandai games rarely are XD And they included an option to have the original japanese voices if you prefer! * I missed Jijimon so much. Why he never get to appear in anything aside from this spinoff series? He was in one episode of Tamers but that was an awful cameo He has THE MOST STEREOTYPICAL grandpa voice in the english dub and i luv im * The environment design so far is a lot more basic and boring than the old ps1 game for some reason? It seems to fall prey to the usual ps4 designer logic that making stuff BIG makes it automatically good, even if its just annoyingly huge spaces to traverse with barely anything in them. And so far its just been Generic Field A, B and C, with only occasional stuff like a giant battery to let you know its the digital world. And the main town is super small now that everything training has been smooshed into one building... * Its also a lot less sandboxy and interesting to explore, and the digimon recruitment quests kinda suck. I've already found three guys and all of them were fetch quests to gather a certain amount of an item. And now you also have to gather certain amounts of an item from special gathering spots in order to actually build the new shops, which is annoying because its in these huge boring maps that you have to backtrack thru again and again * The battle system is VASTLY IMPROVED, holy SHIT! Its like they somehow read my brain?? Back when i played the first digimon world, i would always get so frustrated at the auto battle and its bad AI that i'd just mash the X button even when i had nothing to do. Somehow I thought it would make my digimon stronger. AND NOW IT ACTUALLY DOES!!! The X button has been remapped to the new cheer function, and if you cheer at the right moment you get more or less Order Points. if you use them you can manually select to use a move at the right timing, use a move without consuming MP, or use a special super move! (waaaay easier than the shoulder buttons thing in the old game) It spices up a very inactive battle system! * Oh and HELL YEAH FOR QUIDE PUZZLE SYSTEM THINGIE! In the first game you had NO WAY OF KNOWING what requirements you needed to meet for each digivolution, or what digimon could turn into what, until after you'd already unlocked it. You had to consult fanmade guides if you wanted to try 100% completion. Now the guide is an actual ingame menu where you unlock tips as rewards for various good actions as a virtual pet owner. You'll likely never unlock all the guide points for a particular digimon stage before you're already past it, unless you raise the same one a bazillion times. But the lil tips every now and then can be useful enough to help you choose which direction to take your training! Just a lil 'oh, ive already hit the HP requirement for this one? i guess I'll try and go for it!' or 'oh darn this one requires maximum deliquency, i guess i wont get it so I should try for something else'. Its useful. My only complaint is that maybe the way to unlock them could have been less random and less easy? Its just a random chance whenever they eat food/get praised after a good thing. * Ultimately so far the few bad points arent bad enough to ruin the enjoyment for me. It just seems a little soulless and rushed, maybe? But I'd enjoy literally anything in this genre, I've been waiting so long for a sequel that even if this was terrible I'd still adore it! And its far from terrible, its just a lil bland. It probably wont have as much replayability as the first game, but it still feels like it'd be fun for one playthrough! * Also, Hershey and Zephyr are my new lil best friends. SUCH A CUTE GIANT MONSTERS YES YOU IS

#bunni plays next order

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geeksofnewyork · 8 years ago

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Dragon Ball FighterZ And What Led To It

It’s the middle of E3 2017 and one of the most anticipated games from this year’s expo is Dragon Ball FighterZ, an oddly-titled candidate answering our prayers (Seriously. Was there always a [space] in DragonBall? Dragon...Ball?).

Fans of Dragon Ball have always wanted one thing; a game that captures the fury and urgency of your classic Dragon Ball Z fight. In the anime and manga, fights were always portrayed in a very particular way. Characters can fly, charge up, deploy a literal flurry of fists, launch all sorts of ki blasts. On top of that, fights in the series were often one-on-one matchups. It’s a series that very much lends itself to translation to a fighting game. That is in no way an original thought, as developers have been trying to make a good Dragon Ball Z fighter for over 20 years. It’s one of the holy grails of video games. Whoever makes a good Dragon Ball Z fighter will be rich beyond their wildest dreams. Hell, even if you make a mediocre Draon Ball Z game, you at least break even. The series was THAT popular. It was the most googled thing for a number of years straight in the early 2000′s. There’s a reason why the main character in Boyhood had Dragon Ball Z bedsheets. It was, and still hold up as, a singular anime series for multiple generations. I am naming my son Gohan, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Many attempts have been made at getting this holy grail. Each attempt told two stories; the first being the story of Goku and his friends defending Earth, and second being that of game designers trying to solve a very difficult logistical puzzle.

The first Dragon Ball Z fighters appeared on the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis, in the form of the Super Butoden Series and the Buyu Tetsuden Series . They knew exactly what the fans wanted, and tried really hard to make it happen. What was delivered was a game that had great art and sound production but was held back by it’s clunky fighting system. Ki blasts could only be shot straight ahead or at 45 degree angles. Fighters could not engage in combat unless they were at the exact same altitude as each other. The game felt super slow. On top of that, it was only available in Japanese. So Americans only got their hands on this game if they downloaded a Rom and [most likely] played it on their keyboard.

A couple of years go by, and video games make the jump to 3D. Namco Bandai takes this opportunity to take a couple of cracks at the holy grail. The first was Dragon Ball Z Ultimate Fighter 22. This was basically an up-scaled version of the SNES / GENESIS titles, which was huge letdown. Still slow. Still Clunky. You got to sort of fly this time around though, by toggling your character between the ground and the air. Again. Not how Dragon Ball Z works.

The second attempt on the original PlayStation was a landmark one. Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout was the first 3D iteration and had a lot of hooks to get you on board. Fully 3D characters and backgrounds, a sick animated intro cut scene to get you hyped, and (especially for the American fan base, which was years behind Japan in the series) you got to see and control characters from the anime following Dragon Ball Z, which was Dragon Ball GT. You got to control the characters you had only heard about in forums or in image searches. My childhood was a lot of “OMG WHAT IS SSJ4?!?”

It was a truly noble attempt. In fact, it was good enough for me to save up and buy a mod kit for my PlayStation one JUST to play this game. And I remember being thoroughly disappointed. The pacing was slow. Everything operated in these odd 45 degree angles. Really stiff combos. For developers, it must have been a nightmare. 3D fighters hadn’t even found their footing in the Tekken series yet. What were the chances a Dragon Ball Z fighter would leapfrog them? Not likely.

The third attempt during the PS1 generation was Dragonball Z Legends, which focused more on scope and speed. You were able to fly up to 3 different elevations and a single press of the punch button launched a volley of 20 lightning fast punches. It was the best attempt at a fighter that generation, but it had super slow combat and crummy presentation. The fighters didn’t even have a health bar; the objective was the push the “balance-of-power” meter all the way to the right. Cause that’s was Dragon Ball Z was about, right guys? Pushing the “power-of-balance-meter” all the way....

All three games made during the PlayStation 1 generation were obscenely bad. Thankfully things start getting better during the PS2 era.

So Holiday 2002 rolls around and Dragon Ball Z Budokai hits store shelves. I bought this game within a week of release. It was the first DBZ game in a long time and I was seriously hooked on the show. I even got highlights in my hair because I wanted to be a Super Sayain so bad.

Budokai tries to solve the “clunky fights” problem by basically taking flying out of the equation. You can technically fly, but it’s not with the sense of freedom that all the games for PS1 at least had. You can launch an opponent into the air, and follow him to the skies by running towards him. While airborne, you are also slowly drifting towards the ground like rose petals. Super lame. But the presentation was otherwise very smooth. And the grounding of all flights in this game lent to a more active battle that felt like a modern day 2D fighter. The entire original title sequence was redone in 3D for this game, and it looks great. The story mode is lengthy [with full 3D renditions of landmark scenes in the series] and has great acting. At this point, it was unanimous that this was the best Dragon Ball Z game to date. But the holy grail had not yet been achieved.

The next two Budokai games for the PS2 were huge improvements over the first. The combat was relatively balanced, the characters were highly customizable, the rosters were gigantic. It seemed like the dream had been achieved. And for the causal gamer, it had. But it was only missing one thing.

...it wasn’t competitive.

It did not have the chess-match like aspect that is found in the competitive fighters you’d see in EVO every year. It was so un-conducive for competitive play in so many ways. Special moves played 20 second long cutscenes. The chase-down mechanic was resolved with a rock-paper-scissors match. Not exactly good for spectating. It would be some 12 years later until an attempt at that a competitive Dragon Ball Z fighter would be made.

But in those 12 years, the Dragon Ball Z fighting games went in a different direction. Specifically, camera direction. Starting with the Budokai Tenkaichi Series (it was smart of them to keep Budokai in the title, as it was now a trusted brand), the camera was now positioned over-the-shoulder and you chased down your opponent by running/flying straight into the screen. While this did wonders for building immersion, it did not help when it came to being a competitive fighter. This new style of DBZ game would do wonders to satisfy fans across the globe but it introduced some new problems. Mainly, every character played exactly the same.

Which brings us to the announcements in the past weeks about a new DBZ title. Dragon Ball FighterZ. A 2D fighter. The trailer they showed us blew our minds. Just when we start to think it’s all been done, a studio that you think would have no business making a DBZ game (Arc System Works) just goes out and does it. It seems balanced. It seems high energy. The animation is friggin spectacular. No really. Every special move executed is a spectacle. And it’s made by a studio that is known for their highly technical and balanced fighters.

Arc System Works dazzled the world with their trailer. The screams feel real. The power feels real. Can this really be it? Will this be a game we see at EVO every year. I sincerely hope so. Cause it has been a long time coming.

#dragonball super #dragon ball super #dragonball fighter z #dragon ball fighterz #arc system works #evo 2017

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tumblunni · 8 years ago

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More of me exploring the dual language script-dump localization file thingie for Azure Dreams GBC! I haven’t ever been able to play the GBC game myself so I’m not sure how close this is to the final version? Its very inconsistant in places, but then again the PS1 version shipped with a fair few mistakes too.

Long pile of random stuff I found interesting!

* The town is Monspire in the intro, Monspire in the internal listing, Monsbaiya in the manual and various other places within dialogue. * The tower was just the Monster Tower in the PS1 version, here it’s called The Tower of Monstrosity, Tower of The Monstrosity and Tower of The Djinn. The intro changes name mid paragraph! * Monsters were just monsters in the PS1 version, here they’re called monsters, creatures and ‘Tamaeons’ interchangeably. Consistancy, plz! I actually like ‘Tamaeons’, its nice for them to have their own unique name cos they are a rather unique kind of monster, with the whole thing where they change back and forth from eggs. In japanese I can’t find a single useage of ‘tamaeons’, they seem to be called ‘mamono’ which is a kinda uncommon word for demons. (For example you’d more often see ‘bakemono’, ‘obake’, ‘yokai’, etc in videogames) * Humans are rather awkwardly called creature-handlers instead of monster tamers. Weird...

* The monster now called ‘catawump’ is indeed the one that was ‘pulunpa’ in the PS1 version. i’m not sure why they decided to actually translate it this time, but left a lot of other monsters with japanese names. (oh, and the new ‘wump’ baby form is called ‘puloon’ in japanese) * Weirdly enough, it turns out that Manoeva is indeed called Manoeva in japanese, so they changed it to Analoeba in this GBC translation for basically no reason?? Also, uhh, good job japan for making a great english pun! * The monster called Unicorn in the PS1 dub is Unicap in GBC dub and japanese. Which makes more sense cos that’s actually what it is, its a completely non horselike dragon shaped like a witch’s hat. Though, honestly it was kinda charming imagining it as a ridiculous misinterpretation of a unicorn! * Huh, that’s... weird and very lacking in explanation. Apparantly the Quack monster was called ‘Ahiru no Gar’ in japanese, so now I’m doubting that the word gar is supposed to mean the fish. Wtf, what else does gar mean in japanese? i can’t find any answers on google! Also it’s odd that this is the only monster that has a full sentence for a name, this is like ‘The Duck of [something]’...?? Also it’s beastiary entry says its actually a toy that came to life, which raises a lot of questions. ILU Quack, u are the strangest!

* Beldo’s name is spelled as Veldt in this version, which kinda sounds even cooler? And for some reason he has this dummied out beastiary entry, which even managed to get translated! TCRF.net says that this definately wasn’t used in the actual game, there’s no monster book update after the final boss. “Veldt’s a mystery, and not the kind you can trust.“ * There’s also unused entries for a lot of the other human npcs, and it seems they have beta translations here. Protagonist is called Koh on PS1, Kou in this GBC version, and ‘Cor’ in this beta entry. And Ghosh is Gauche, and Selfi is Thelfi. (Though that might just be because your little sister is the one reading out the beastiary?) Ghosh’s entry is a bit weird sounding, I guess cos they tried to cram it into character limits? “He does mess with you, but he may be OK.” And then Selfi is just “It’s Selfi!” and Koh is “Its you, the player!” * Skale and Attley (the new characters for this version) have their names rendered as Scale and Atelie sometimes. (Atori is the original japanese, honestly I wouldn’t know how to translate that either!) Interestingly their monster book entries have ‘person’ written on them in the japanese, while Beldo, Ghosh and Selfi are all listed amoung the monsters. I guess its cos they’re boss battles? Though actually I dunno if you still get a fight against Selfi in the GBC version...

* Not really dub related, but its interesting that in the GBC version they added multiplayer functionality similar to pokemon. However you can actually trade a monster for money or an item, instead of just monster for monster. * Back to dub related- its a lil cool that instead of just ‘original trainer’, the stat screen shows the person who hatched the monster AND the latest previous owner(s) it had. This game wasnt super well known though, so I wonder if anyone actually did have a monster they traded often enough to fill up that screen?

* THE SPELLS!! *

* This is a bit I was really excited to get to, cos Azure Dreams PS1 kinda annoyed me with how badly they were all translated. It was like they all had a 4 or 5 letter limit for some reason?? I’m gonna go pull up a PS1 version guide and try and match the translations as best as I can.

* ‘Breath’ (PS1) is like the only spell that got translated correctly. Though it was F.Breath in japanese which makes a bit more sense. It got a bit of artistic license to become ‘Sunmaker’ in GBC, and that is A VERY COOL NAME * FINALLY. FINALLY I KNOW. FINALLY THE QUESTION IS ANSWERED. What the FUCK was ‘Brid’ supposed to be? Thats like the first spell you get and it confused me forever! The answer is that its the localizers trying to translate something that was already english- it’s ‘bullet’ written out in simplified kana. GBC version goes with Shot instead of bullet, which would have honestly been a logical decision in the PS1 version.. * The other EXTREMELY CONFUSING ONE- why am I throwing a ‘Sled’ at people? And why is this not ice type? Apparantly in japanese it was ‘Fire Thread’! GBC version changed it entirely to ‘Salamand’, like.. Salamander as a verb...? * Rise was Rise in japanese, thus achieving the grand title of Only Correct Spell In All Of Game. Praise be! GBC changed it to Flamenco for no reason, which, again, it sounds cool so I don’t care if it makes no sense. * In the PS1 version all the attacking spells here were exclusively part of the fire element, all the other elemental versions were marked as a modification of it- Nea/Noa [insert name here]. In the GBC version there’s a far increased spellset for every element and its only the Breath spells that keep the Nea/Noa naming scheme. This dub changed them to Sun/Gill/Dune Maker instead, losing the callback. * Other Thread/Sled types: IceNoose, Wildride Other Bullet/Brid types: PaleRain, DrumRoll Other Rise types: Oasis, Tesla In general the GBC dub took a lot more liberties with the names, but it had a great knack for picking stuff that would sound badass in english. Its far preferrable than just a butchering of [insert element here] [awful romanization] crammed into as few letters as possible!

* Oddly enough, the poison spell was also expanded into an elemental changer in the GBC version! So you have Poison, Noa Poison and Nea Poison in japanese. But the dub seems to have really messed up on this one- regular poison is ‘L Borgia’ which makes absolutely no sense, and then the others are Quarantine 1 and 2, which sounds like the opposite of what they actually do!

* All the Wall and Mirror spells became -dra spells for some reason? Except the earth one which stays as Thor Wall. What. * Good save, dubbers! fire/water/rock Rock was changed to more of a description of what it actually is, which is good cos it would have been a bit confusing how only one of them is a rock and its not even the earth type one. Seriously, how is a tornado an ‘earth rock’? i guess maybe it could have been ‘earth lock’ instead cos its various types of pathway-blocking attacks? * I do like how they add a lil justification for the elemental heals in the flavour text. ‘Comforting warmth restores HP’/ ’Refreshing breeze restores HP’ /'Popping cute bubbles restores HP’. They’re called Zephyr, Nasim and Wellfall now, instead of just Heal. (what’s a nasim...?) * What was up with the level 2 heal being called Forth in the PS1 version? Actually supposed to be Force! Its at this point the GBC artistic license starts to stop being a good thing though, who would think of changing something as simple as Fire Force/Air Force/etc to ‘Imblat’ and ‘Absolution’..???? You ARE trying to sell to kids, right? The flavour text is also cute on these ones. The earth element one is just ‘a charged up breeze’ but fire is ‘sunny weather’ and water is ‘holy water’. I like how that actually gives you an image of how it progressed from before! Also its sweet to imagine you and your monsters taking a break to have a pleasant picnic or something.

* The status spells are a bit confusing now, ironically. It seems to say that you cold actually gain a player-useable version of Confusion? But no its a mistranslation of Blind for some reason. Only the earth version was translated correctly, and had the wildly different name ‘Adnoctum’ instead of [element] Mist like the others. What’s really stupid is that the spell is literally named Blind in japanese! Its another case of ‘whoops, tried to translate an english into english’. How did they even manage such a wild result? * All the Bind spells got changed to Lock for seemingly no reason. i would say maybe it was to make them more distinct from Blind, but yeah they turned Blind into Confusion Mist... * I find it kind cute that F.Sleep is now Siesta. +1 point again to artistic license! Just stick to this and less ‘Imblat’! * okay wtf, now the LoDown spells are Emberin, Waterloo and Chinook. What does that even mean... I think those ones really needed a name change, too! They’re one of the few multi elemental statuses that wildly changes based on element, but they were just LoDown and LaDown on the PS1 and now they’re... this. I mean couldn’t it have been AtkDown, DefDown, LvlDown?

* Now there’s a whole bunch of spells that’re either GBC exclusive, or they’re stuff that was enemy only in the PS1 version or something? Cos I can’t find them anywhere in the PS1 guide to do a comparison. But still WOW its interesting how different the dub names are! [element] Glaive moves all got names that sound like spaceships for some reason. Helix 13! Why! What! And there was a line of punch attacks named Frey Finger, Ice Finger and Eleckfinger, which became ‘Voltpaw’ and seriously that sounds even weirder... * Out of the Mixture Magics, it seems like they were all (for once!) completely correctly translated in the PS1 version. But this version changed Flame Sword to Red Saber and Wind Cutter to Airfoil. And then the Blade upgrades got to be the badass-as-fuck MetalCry, Pulsecut and Sharkjaw. SHARKJAW! Water Blade to SHARKJAW! give that translator a raise! I forgive the Imblat!! Huh, I’m a little sad that [Element} Shoot is gone, but their new names are pretty neat, referencing three of the four cardinal direction deities in japanese myth. Firebird, Blue Dragon and Pale One (but its called White Tiger instead in the flavour text) And [Element] Wave is now Boltar, Wintros and Pyralai. I severely improve of the unnecessarily cool changes, hell yeah!

* OH MY GODDD The secret dark type attacks on the postgame Kewne upgrade have the stupidest names in japanese! I’m kinda glad we only got Dark Shoot in the PS1 version! Now its joined by Wo La Wola, Wash Ashido and literally Wow! Death.

WOW! DEATH.

The GBC dubber changed them to Darkling, Baelen, Vitrios and Necro, which are all kinda cliche sounding evil names but at least they’re not “Wow! Death.” Man, I wonder if we english folks sound just as stupid when we try and use random asian words to look cool? is there someone out there whose terrible fake-japanese tattoo says Wow! Death? Wow! Death. I cannot get over that...

* ....man this post got long and probably nobody even cares XD If you take anything away from this, let it be Wow! Death.

#azure dreams #wow! Death #I CANNOT BELIEVE

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