Feliz Navidad!

Not much to say at the moment other than merry Christmas and happy new year! Please enjoy the scariest Christmas carol of them all:

Smothered in hot sauce, Buffalo-style

Time was, I used to pick up any video game that look reasonably interesting whenever I went shopping. More recently, I’ve chosen to be a little more circumspect. The problem isn’t money, really, but time: I’m still sitting on a couple of original PlayStation games that I’ve not ever really had the time to tackle. If I never bought another video game in my life, I’d probably still have enough to keep me occupied until I retire. I still buy games, of course, but seldom with the impulsiveness I once did. On Black Friday, for instance, I bought Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja and Hoshigami: Running Blue Earth Remix for the DS based on a review from a friend and an gaming site I generally trust, respectively. Both games have been out for months, and I had a pretty good idea what I was getting into in advance.

I did, however, buy a third game that day, against my better judgment. It was a new release, and I’d not read a single review or even heard any word-of-mouth coverage of it. The game was Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, which goes to show you how much of a sucker I remain for the “Final Fantasy” brand. I knew it wasn’t a traditional RPG, and I’d been following some of the news of the Japanese release, but I was a bit nervous about blindly taking the plunge. But I was burning off my turkey-and-cranberry-sauce high from the day before, so I threw caution to the wind. Now that I’ve had some time to play, I figured I’d share my preliminary thoughts.

The game is actually a pretty impressive melding of Final Fantasy XII’s hack-and-slash gameplay with the RTS genre. You get a party of five characters to control, and each of those five characters gets to command his or her own group of disposable troops. The gambit system returns, in greatly simplified form: each of your five characters has his or her own special abilities, and you can set one of those abilities to be performed automatically. There’s also a resource-gathering element to the game, where the resources you gather are used to craft new equipment for your characters. The structure of the game itself, with mission boards and chapters, is strongly reminiscent of turn-based tactical RPGs like Final Fantasy Tactics or Disgaea.

As for the story, it’s a direct continuation of Final Fantasy XII, with appearances from most of the main cast of that game. I’m not that far into the game yet (third chapter), but the plot itself doesn’t strike me as particularly revolutionary. The script is quite good, though, with the same antiquated-English style. Visually, it’s about as impressive as one can expect from the DS, looking like a fairly early PS1 game.

My biggest complaint is the heavy use of the DS stylus. This is the first DS game I’ve purchased that actually requires the stylus for play: most games seem to stick stylus-support on as something of an afterthought (the Phoenix Wright games or Final Fantasy III) or just omit it completely (Izuna), but this game provides no way to control your troops without at least some use of the stylus. On one hand, I understand that doing the sort of things the game wants you to do with a traditional D-pad setup would be tricky, but on the other hand, I hate the stylus! It’s an awkward, uncomfortable control mechanism that becomes even more awkward and uncomfortable when you try to use it in the car or bus. Call me old fashioned, but I’m still a firm believer that a portable handheld system should be usable on-the-go. I can get used to using the darned thing for this game, but I’m far from thrilled about the situation.

Ultimately, I’m enjoying the game quite a bit. My inexperience with the genre and occasional frustration with the control scheme, however, make me worry that I’m going to hit a brick wall at some point before reaching the end. If I do, I suspect I’m going to put the game aside and forget about it until some indeterminate point in the future, like I’ve done with various other games. But there’s enough to like about the game that I don’t regret buying it either way.

Pardon me for a moment of self-indulgent whining

Okay, I’m suspect this is going to turn out atypically depressing. Honestly, I’m not sure why I’m writing it: I can only see it garnering two kind of reactions, and neither put me in a good light. You’ll either think I’m being overly pessimistic and possibly even worry about my emotional stability, or you’ll actually agree with what I have to say, which would do nothing to make me feel any better. I guess, under the circumstances, I’m lucky that no one reads this thing.

Anyway, as I may have let slip in a couple of prior postings, I’m a proud left-winger, politically, economically, and socially. In general, my attitudes would probably be classified as radical as things are determined here in the U.S.A. Obviously, the United States of America nowadays is not the most encouraging environment for an extreme left-winger, but I’m used to that sort of displeasure, and if I didn’t admire and respect the ideals on which my country was founded, I wouldn’t still be here. But for a variety of reasons, both personal and political, 2007 has been an unusually upsetting year for me.

I’m at a bit of a crossroads in my personal life, having just finished grad school and started looking for not just a job but a career for the first time in my life. I feel like I’m in a really unstable position, looking at an uncertain future and twenty years of student loan repayments. I’ve got a fair share of health problems stemming from a poor hand dealt to me by genetics, and I’ve had numerous run-ins with a health insurance industry that vacillates between disingenuous concern for my wellbeing (”we worry about you: let us send an adviser with limited medical training to assist you in taking care of yourself”) and downright hostility to my attempts to get them to cover my medical expenses. I still can’t find any other logical way to connect these two positions without resorting to malicious conspiracy theorizing. Given how little my insurance seems to care about covering the medical supplies necessary to keep me alive, I’m not sure what an insurance-provided “health coach” (or whatever the heck they call them) is going to do except to try to convince me that I don’t really need to see a doctor about any gaping head wounds I may contract in the future.

That’s not the extent of my worries, though. As bad as my health concerns are, I take some small comfort in the fact that they are, at least, my health concerns. I may not be able to control them, but at least I can take out my frustration directly with typically unhelpful telephone support people. I also worry about things almost completely out of my control. Like, for instance, the environment. I do everything in my power to have as little impact on the environment as possible: I don’t drive, I rely on public transportation. I try to avoid unnecessary heating in the winter, and air conditioning in the summer (which, given how much I hate hot weather, isn’t easy). But none of these measures practiced on the individual level does much to change things, and doom-and-gloom predictions of catastrophic global climate change and peak oil-induced economic disaster seem less outlandish every day. And all of this feeds back into my overall sense of uncertainty. It’s bad enough that I’m not sure how I’m going to make it with the world in its current state. I can’t begin to imagine how I’ll survive following periods of persistent economic downturn, global pandemic, and mass food shortages.

I realize I’m not unique in experiencing some minor anxiety and depression about the future. And I hate to think how self-absorbed and whiny this all sounds. I guess what I’m really trying to do here is to exorcise my personal demons. I don’t want to dump all this on my family or friends directly, but I need to get it out there somehow. Undoubtedly, all of this will fade from my mind, and this ebb and flow will have very little to do with whether my situation has worsened or improved. The holiday season is supposed to depress people, so I guess I share that with everyone else.

It’s only Mega and Roll (but I like it)

While I’ve been busy grinding my way through Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness on my PSP, my brother has been busy with Mega Man Powered Up on his (when he’s not busy emulating NES games). I’ve messed around it with it briefly, and I figured I’d share my thoughts.

First of all, the super deformedness (not an actual word, Firefox’s spell checker informs me) is a little disturbing, honestly. I like cute things as much as the next guy, but you can have too much of a good thing. But the character designs are better than they could have been, I suppose, and overall the game is pretty impressive looking. As another of the PSP’s seemingly endless supply of remakes of older games, it’s actually a pretty impressive work. Truth be told, it’s more of a reimagining of the NES’s Mega Man than a true remake. The levels have been totally redesigned, and they’ve brought in two new robot masters to bring the total number of bosses up to the series-standard eight. That being said, they’ve introduced none of the additions from the later games in the series: there’s no Rush, no Mega Buster, and no sliding. And they still have the point counter from the NES original, and, yes, it’s still as completely pointless as it ever was.

The other major difference from the original is that the original game was sadistically difficult. This… isn’t. It has the benefit of three difficulty modes, but even though the hard mode is still more than capable of kicking my ass, it’s much less cruel about it. I can actually beat four or five stages in easy mode, which is something of a triumph for me. I know there’s plenty of gamers out there who’d bemoan the dumbing down of contemporary games, but I’m not one of them. The fact that I can actually make some headway in this thing is a major selling point for me.

Also kind of neat is the ability to play the game as one of the robot masters once you’ve defeated them. It’s all quite well done, and adds a lot of depth to the game. It’s also led both me and my brother to salivate over the prospect of Powered Up 2, since we both want to play as Metal Man. Also noteworthy is the fact that, when you’re playing as one of the bosses, Mega Man takes his place in the lineup. To denote the fact that he’s now eeeevvviiilll, he wears a cute little red cape, which I’ve decided is by far the coolest fashion accessory in the long history of the franchise.

The voice acting is pretty good, and the new cutscenes actually add an enjoyable, if not particularly deep, layer to the story. There’s nothing really revolutionary here, but it’s the whole package is pretty slick, and it’s made me nostalgic for the old days when you could expect a new installment in the Mega Man series every winter.

Painful confession time

It is now that time again, when I get to whine and moan to no one in particular about one of my shortcomings (and no comment from the peanut gallery about how many of those there are, please). This one has always been a particularly painful one for me to admit, given my age and the circles in which I travel. It is my secret shame, of which until now only my closest and dearest friends and family have known. Actually, that might not actually change, given the number of people who I suspect frequently visit this blog (maybe I should, y’know, tell people about it one of these days…). Just what is this terrible secret, you ask? Simple: I suck at video games.

I love playing them, of course. And there are a handful of specific genres at which I’m fairly skilled: turn-based role-playing, strategy, and tactical games, and traditional adventure games (of the text-based and and point-and-click graphical variety). But the kind of games that the average member of the public thinks about when the topic is brought up? Things like Super Mario Bros., or Grand Theft Auto, or Halo? I’ve no skill whatsoever. The last platform game I was able to complete without cheating? I’m pretty sure it was Kirby’s Dream Land for the original Game Boy.

The really obnoxious part about all this? Since elementary school, my self-identity has been pretty closely tied up in gaming. My friends are all gamers, and they’re pretty much all significantly better at it than me. For a time, I was able to at least keep up with the discussion through the generous use of cheating, particularly with devices like the Game Genie or the Action Replay. Unfortunately, what with the rise of online gaming, and the increase in console lock-down techniques, such devices are becoming fewer and farther between. So I have come, for instance, to accept that I will never be able to make significant progress in Metroid Prime 3.

Not that I’m asking for sympathy, mind you. Over the years I’ve learned to live with my lack of gaming skill, and I remain at relative peace with myself. I’ve even resigned myself to having the majority of gamers to whom I reveal my secret go all sanctimonious on me, telling me that all I need to do is practice, and how I shouldn’t cheat because “I’m only hurting myself” (an argument which still boggles me). So why bother sharing this in the first place, you ask? Is it part of some weird passive-aggressive messiah complex thing?

Well, no. Partly it’s the catharsis, partly it’s in the hope that I can just refer people to this post when I’m trying to explain why I don’t want to deathmatch them, but mostly it’s because I haven’t posted anything here in months and I feel obligated to say something, lest this blog lie as fallow as my last attempt at blogging. It’s also because of this blog I just came across from a fellow not-very-skilled gamer. I really like the idea of providing occasional game reviews from the perspective of a shitty gamer. And since I strongly believe that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and because the previously linked blog hasn’t been updated in almost a year, I’ve decided to take a crack at it. I’ve no idea how frequently I’ll get around to adding new entries, but look in the coming few weeks for a few such reviews. Or don’t. Your choice, I guess.

Sorry, Mario, but our princess is in another castle

Those of you who know me may be aware of the fact that my brother is something of a connoisseur of vintage video game consoles. At any given time, he has no less than nine systems hooked into his television (the Magnavox Odyssey, the Atari 5200 with 2600 adapter, the Colecovision, the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, the Sega Genesis/CD/32X, the Nintendo 64, the Dreamcast, the PlayStation 2). In the past two weeks, he’s added several new devices to the mix. First was the Atari Jaguar (with CD attachment), purchased from eBay. Yesterday, he and I trekked out to the nearest CD/game exchange, armed with a variety of duplicate games he’d picked up as part of lot auctions (fun fact: did you know that it’s scientifically impossible to get any Atari 2600 games on eBay without also getting another copy of Yar’s Revenge?) and a couple of truly horrendous anime DVDs I should have sold years ago (Battle Athletes, I’m looking at you…). By the time we left, he was accompanied by a Xbox 360 and an “FC Game Console.”

It seems that the market for hardware clones of old Nintendo consoles produced by Chinese manufacturers with questionable quality control practices has been blown wide open by recent legal developments. Nintendo Entertainment System hardware clones, once restricted to shady international websites, flea markets, and the backs of particularly unsavory trucks, have apparently been found legal to sell in the United States, and moved into the big-time, high stakes world of used media exchanges. This particular exchange was selling two such knockoffs, both produced by a company called Yobo Gameware. The first was a pretty straightforward NES knockoff called the FC Game Console, a top loading, card-slot reader system that uses standard NES controllers. The second was a more ambitious effort called the FC Twin, which boasts support for both NES and Super NES cartridges. My brother and I opted for the vanilla FC Game Console because the FC Twin only featured SNES controller ports, and we couldn’t accept buying a system that didn’t support such must-have accessories like the Zapper, the NES Advantage, or the Power Pad.

My first observation about this thing is that the cartridge slot is really rather poorly designed. It’s simple enough to insert a cartridge, but getting the damned thing out again is exhausting. My second observation is that the controllers packaged with the system are actually quite nice. The overall form factor is roughly the same as a SNES pad, and the standard Dpad/start/select/A/B buttons have been augmented by a slow motion feature and two turbo buttons. It’s not quite as fancy as a NES Max, but for a $30 knockoff, it’s not bad at all. The system connects to the TV with mono RCA cables, and the picture quality is superb. The sound is a bit off in places, though: my brother specifically noticed some of the samples from Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!! sounded wrong. Even so, it’s not like it sounds awful.

To be sure, we already had a working NES. My brother even has the redesigned, top-loading NES that Nintendo released in 1994 or so to deal with the fact that the original front-loading, “toaster”-style units were badly designed pieces of crap. It’s a nice system, but it has problems. The biggest of these is poor picture quality: there’s no composite video output, so the only way to hook the thing up is through coaxial RF output. Which is bad enough, except that I swear there’s some kind of magnetic/electrical shielding problem that increases the amount of signal noise. Or whatever. I’m no A/V expert, I just know that the system produces poor quality video. It has other problems, as well, which are of particular interest to a piss-poor gamer like myself: it doesn’t support the Game Genie. Yes, there are adapters floating out there which allow you to use the device, since the problem is purely mechanical (the thing physically won’t fit into the deck), but the draw of a system that would address both the graphical quality issues and the Game Genie issue for only $30 was too much to pass up.

As it happens, the FC Game Console addresses both of the above issues admirably. It supports the Game Genie, and it looks damned good doing it. Unfortunately, it introduces some other flaws. Compatibility, while certainly not awful, is less than 100%, and some of the holes are significant: it won’t play Castlevania III at all. It will play The Legend of Zelda, but apparently exhibits some significant graphical glitches while doing so. It appears, despite horror stories to the contrary, to have no problems with Super Mario Bros. 2, but that’s apparently dumb luck, as I’ve seen numerous forum postings saying that it does not.

So the console currently sits alongside my brother’s official NES, rather than replacing it as originally intended. For the vast majority of games, it works flawlessly and really is preferable to the officially released system. But the shortcomings are unfortunate. My brother has already started talking about getting a refurbished toaster-style NES from Nintendo Repair Shop, Inc. Does anyone have any experience with these? Do they effectively deal with the gray screen/blinking light problems faced by the system?

That’s all for now. I’ll be back in a bit with comments on the Xbox 360, once I’ve actually gotten the thing up and running properly….

And a bottle of rum

I saw Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End on Thursday evening. I’m not really in the right frame of mind to write a comprehensive review, but in a word: j’adore.

The overall impression I got from the various reviews I read was that it was overlong and overcomplicated. The former doesn’t really bother me: I sat through and loved all of the Lord of the Rings movies, not to mention Grindhouse (which was my favorite movie until now). As far as I’m concerned, the longer the better: if I’m going to spend $9 for a ticket, I prefer to be entertained for more than an hour and a half.

As for being overcomplicated… I personally had little problem following the plot, but I can see where others might have been lost. But that entire line of argument strikes me as a little beside the point, frankly. The entire Pirates franchise has been a shining example of the sort of Saturday matinee adventure genre. Like other stand-out films of that type (the Indiana Jones films, the 1990s Mummy remake), the story is pretty much just an excuse to get have impressive choreographed action sequences. And the action sequences in this movie are better than anything since Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (which, similarly, had plot holes you could drive a mack truck through).

And that, to me, is the key element here. Most modern action movies are certainly exciting, but they’re almost universally dour affairs. Take Casino Royale for an example: one of the major selling points of that movie was that it removed the sillier aspects of the James Bond franchise that had managed to persist even after the series turned its back on the deliberate camp of the Roger Moore films three decades ago. Daniel Craig’s Bond was a wounded, humorless individual. The same thing applies to, say, Batman Begins, which was advertised as a return to seriousness for a franchise that had descended into levels of camp that would have embarrassed Adam West (which, come to think of it, was pretty much the same way that Tim Burton’s 1989 film was advertised…).

Please don’t get me wrong: I loved both Casino Royale and Batman Begins, and I think both films deserve credit for revitalizing their franchises, both of which had sunk pretty low with recent installments. There’s a difference between doing lighthearted and doing lighthearted well, after all. The difference between Batman and Robin and At World’s End is that the latter actually does manage to have fun with itself without descending into pathetic self-parody. It’s not a comedy, to be sure, but when Johnny Depp gets involved in a sword fight, it’s a lot more fun than when Daniel Craig gets involved in a gun fight.

And that goes a long way towards letting me overlook any other flaws in the film. I went expecting to be exhilarated, not necessarily intellectually engaged. As it happens, I think the film was well written, but even if it hadn’t been, I’d have come out of the theater satisfied. Which is more than I could say for the rather disappointing Spider-Man 3. And given my disappointment with Shrek the Third, I’m relieved to say that At World’s End managed to finally break the string of bad second sequels that had been building ever since the execrable X-Men: The Last Stand.

Since I mentioned Daniel Craig earlier, I should also point out that I got to see the preview for The Golden Compass as well (in which he features). As a fan of Philip Pullman’s books, I must say that I’m quite thrilled about the overall look of the production, and the casting seems pretty much spot-on, as well. So that’s another film I’ve got to look forward to before the year’s out. Even considering the disappointment of Spider-Man 3 and Shrek the Third, it look like 2007 could still turn out to be a great year for the silver screen.

Dio, can you hear me…?

I’m not a big fan of metal. The music, that is. I’ve nothing again a good chunk of tungsten. But I’ve a few acquaintances who are, and they might well be thrilled with this news.

In brief, Holy Diver, the Japan-only Famicom game based on the album of the same name by Ronnie James Dio, has finally been fan-translated to English. I personally never quite got over the fact that there was a Dio-centric video game, let alone a Dio-centric video game released only in Japan, but whatever. It’s actually, against all expectations, a halfway decent action game, so if you’re into that sort of thing, it’s worth checking out.

Bugness in his veins

They Might Be Giants’ new album, The Else is out now at the iTunes Music Store. I really, really like TMBG, enough that I’m even willing to swallow my distaste for the klunky, unintuitive, and poorly configurable mess that is iTunes in order to purchase their latest album 56 days in advance of its official CD release date. Since purchasing it shortly after midnight on Tuesday, I’ve listened to it so much that, if it were an old vinyl LP, I’d already have worn a hole through the album itself and into the turntable itself. Since I’m now so intimately familiar with it, I feel like sharing a few of my thoughts. It’s not exactly a full review, as such: if you want that, I suggest you head over to Critical Hits. This is a just a few scattered observations and opinions from a dyed-in-the-wool TMBG fan.

To start with, it’s certainly different than I expected. I don’t want to diminish the breadth of John Flansburgh and John Linnell’s impressive catalog, but there’s a definite TMBG “sound” that’s pretty much unique to the band and has remained identifiable for over twenty years. That sound isn’t exactly missing from The Else, but it’s been significantly transformed. While the two Johns remain as lyrically inventive and irreverent as ever, the music itself feels a great deal more polished and, I dunno, mainstream than usual. Which is far from a bad thing, actually, particularly when the result is as rocking as it is here. My experience with the Dust Brothers (who co-produced the album) is limited to their previous remix of the band’s “Snail Shell,” which set my teeth on edge. But they’ve certainly done right by me this time.

There are a number of truly excellent songs on the album: “I’m Impressed” is a nice opener that reminds me a little of “Certain People I Could Name” from their 1999 internet-only album Long Tall Weekend. I’m not as impressed with the second track, “Take Out the Trash,” nor the third “Upside Down Frown,” which are basically by-the-numbers Flansburgh and Linnell compositions, respectively, that bring very little to the table that I’ve not heard before. After that, though, it’s one superb song after another. Climbing the Walls boasts some fairly traditional Linnell-penned lyrics, but sounds like nothing else they’ve done. It’s nothing short of electrifying, and quickly became my favorite song on the album. Running a close second is the next song, “Careful What You Pack,” which may be Flansburgh’s best tune in years. Next up, Linnell’s “The Cap’m” is a fun, if not particularly original, song. “With the Dark” is a bit of an oddity, more of a collection of three one-minute songs than a three-minute song in its own right. But that’s not a knock against it: it goes from moving, to powerful, and back again and is up there with the best of the album. “The Shadow Government” is a bit of a let-down, really: Critical Hits’s review I linked to above described it as the next in an ongoing series of Flansburgh songs with interesting lyrics but a boring melody, and I think that’s pretty much spot-on.

“Bee of the Bird of the Moth” was one of only two songs I was familiar with before buying the album. It strikes me as having a very “Particle Man” vibe, with more-or-less nonsensical lyrics, ostensibly about the Hummingbird Moth. What sets this one apart, again, is the musical arrangement, which is a lot glossier than I expected when I first heard the song performed live in concert a year ago. I’m not sure what to make of the next song, “Withered Hope.” I like it… but it’s hard for me to say why. It’s not that interesting, musically, and the lyrics fluctuate between the clever and the banal. The best I can say is that it’s Linnell’s delivery of the lyrics that really does it for me. “Contrecoup” is the other song I was already familiar with, having heard the demo version performed for NPR on what was basically a bet: take a handful of obscure words from the dictionary (”contrecoup,” “limerent,” “craniosophic”) and construct a song around them. The album version here isn’t fundamentally different from that demo: it’s extended slightly, and more polished, but nothing major. And I still like it. “Feign Amnesia” is a cute throwaway, as, for that matter, is the final song, “The Mesopotamians,” a weird little piece clearly inspired by the theme song to the Monkees about a band comprised of four historical figures from ancient Mesopotamia (where else?).

As I write this, The Else has catapulted right into third place in my personal list of the best TMBG albums, after John Henry and Lincoln. As much as I liked their last full-length studio album for adults (2004’s The Spine), this one has surpassed it in almost all respects. I can’t say with certainty what I’ll think of it once that “new album” glow has worn off in a few weeks, but the initial signs sure look good. And I can’t wait for the official CD release in a month and a half, complete with a full-length bonus disc of new recordings. If you’re not already a fan, The Else might not win you over, but it should, dammit….

In need of Heroes

First, an administrative note: my old URL of wildfiredarkstar.net should now redirect to my current digs here at WordPress.com. Unfortunately, I’m still working out some of the kinks, and you may notice a variety of odd bugs if you don’t come in directly to the WordPress site. I’m going to see what I can do to correct those, and I’ll let you know when I’ve got it all sussed out.

Anyway, with graduation under my belt I finally have a limited amount of free time on my hands again, which I have decided to waste by returning to Heroes of Might and Magic V, which I began months ago and subsequently forgot about as real life caught up with me. My first impressions, from oh-so-long ago now, were that the gameplay itself was quite impressive, with a good battle system that borrowed successfully from games like Final Fantasy X while keeping the best of what worked about previous installments in the series. On the other hand, the story has serious flaws, both in its conception and its execution: a cliched fantasy plot delivered through outdated-looking 3D cut scenes with laughably bad voice acting. But now that I’m giving it another go, I’ll see if my initial perceptions have changed. I’ll keep you posted on my progress.