My Life: Eh, again.

I have almost two weeks off starting this Tuesday, so I might be able to get into a routine that includes my ideas, at least, and possibly even rants and somewhat. We shall see. For now I'll focus on my life a bit.

So, in the last few weeks, well, things have stagnated. This is a bad thing, because I hate the status quo. So I took my cat to the vet one last time (I sincerely hope) and save for some pills I have to feed him, that crisis should be over. There are no signs of urinary tract infection, so at worst it my be an allergic reaction or a change of diet might be needed. After spending hundreds of dollars on emergencies and things I needed, I said "fuck saving" and bought an XBox 360. It wasn't the most frugal or sensible thing I ever did, but look where frugal got me this year? At least now I can worry about the future with Bioshock. Oh, expect that review some day, and the reviews for the pack-in Lego Indy and Kung Fu Panda much, much later.

Love life? Nonexistent. Attempts at meeting people online have failed miserably as of late, and I'm seeing a girl I realized like and/or liked next week, as a friend, due to the fact she has a boyfriend. Wee! So that's something to work on next year.

Which brings me to my main concern. Next year. I'm turning 30. I'll have nearly completely wasted my twenties on idle hopes and jobs that have done little to inspire me creatively. What do I do? Do I try school again? And that's assuming the economy and job market don't make this decision for me. It's a scary time to face one of those numerical hurdles we all hate to deal with.

My Life AND My Ideas: Yeah, about that "Once a Week" Thing.

On the plus side, I'm still posting more often than Websnark. But the main reason for the lack of updates was Nanowrimo, AKA National Novel Writing Month. Writing 58,000 words in 30 days does tend to cut into other types of writing. But it's been a rough month anyway. There were trips to Chicago, I actually got some semblance of a life on Tuesday nights at least, even if said life and semblance mostly involves bar trivia nights, and my work got, well, tricky. Notably, I lost a week doing inventory, and heaving boxes around while counting tens of thousands of little metal and/or plastic thingies does not inspire.

There have been other downsides. My cat has been, well not sick exactly, but something worse. It involves words like "anal glands," "sedation needed," "Urinary Tract Infection," and "$700." And he's still rubbing his butt on the carpet. I also had to figure out some new ideas for insurance; my current one was too expensive. On the plus side, I think I found one that'll save me quite a bit a year. So there's that.

As for the Nanowrimo, it went well enough. I experimented with a first person perspective by making this year's project a journal for one of the characters. So it's all her voice. On the other hand, this means that I could do almost none of the dialogue that I find is my strength. That's not too surprising; after all, as much as I like writing, I'd rather do something visual like television, movies, or video games. But that requires artistic skills, technological abilities, actors, artists, and/or a budget. Anyway, this Nano ended up having some trouble with voices with other characters besides the main one. I especially noticed that I have a trouble making love interests, especially male ones. On the other hand, a female love interest proved surprisingly easy. I could even make children's novels around one of them (if there was a market for children's books about a lesbian demon, albeit an adorable one.) Nonetheless, I think I'm going to try to set up dialogue for each character. I like the idea of using "auditions" for new characters, giving them a chance to reveal some back-story and their voice even without in-story dialogue. Crazy? Maybe, but what in my life isn't insane?

My Life: A big day.

Did I resolve to write something new every week? You bet!

Did I fail to do just that last week, at least? You bet!

So it goes. This has been a busier month than usual even. For one, it's National Novel Writing Month, which I'm sure I mentioned before. If not, here's the summary: write 50,000 words in 30 days. Fun! I also have to finish a Dungeons and Dragons adventure for my group by Saturday morning, and tonight I had to write the questions for my writer's group exercises. Oh, and I was a little busy last Tuesday. Just a tad.

In fact, in lieu of a fully detailed new entry, I'll explain what I did on that fateful day of Tuesday, November 4th. Warning: you know how I mentioned before that I'll try to keep my religious and political views out of this blog? That'll be less true this time around. It's not like my position is a controversial one, though, especially around here.

And now, my harrowing tale! I left for work about 5, letting me get to the train station in time for the 5:37 train to the city. I met a friend of mine from my church (Unitarian Universalist, for those who missed it,) young adults group. Her brother worked in the campaign, so she and her family got free tickets up close with the Man himself. Lucky jerks.

I never saw the train so packed. And EVERYONE was an Obama fan. There were pins, T-shirts, stickers, the whole lot. My friend's mother was getting calls from her friend, I think, with election results. We learned Kentucky and Vermont en route. For a second, she said she thought McCain quickly won Virginia, making us panic, but the friend got it wrong; it was Kentucky. On the other hand, she did learn that Obama won Pennsylvania just as we pulled into the station. The entire car cheered.

My friend and I separated here so I could walk to the rally. I stopped at Wendy's en route, which was disappointing; the Mexican place I discovered last time I visited the city closed at 7. I originally thought that ALL of Grant Park was the ticket-only area, so I planned on stopping around Millenium Park instead. But that one was closed off completely, so confused, I followed the throng south.

And by now, it was a throng. There were at least thousands of people arriving at the same time, plus vendors of pins, T-shirts, and other souveneirs. There were even Tribune newspapers with the "Obama wins!" headline. I don't know if there were genuine, since I doubt the newspaper wanted a "Dewey Defeats Truman" on its hands should the unthinkable have happened. Of course, even before I left Wendy's, Obama was up 102-51, but still.

There were decorations and lights, of course. One building's lights spelled out "USA," another had "Vote 2008." The history museum had red, white, and blue lights shining from within. Amusingly, one of the "No dogs allowed" signs had pictures of McCain and Palin on it. Political satire!

Most entrances to Grant Park were closed, so we funneled in through the solitary open one, where the ticket holders were separated from us schmucks. This took longer, and we were virtually at a standstill for a good ten minutes, but we soon came out to Jackson, and at least initially, things were much more open. Giant TV screens projected CNN's latest results, which begs a question: why CNN? I know Fox News was unlikely, but what did make them decide on the network? And would it have killed them to switch one to Comedy Central at 9? Eh well, I taped it.

By the time I reached the screens, Obama was already at almost 200, and we were guessing this would be over when California and the rest of the West Coast could officially be counted. Even the news realized things were probably over when Ohio went to Obama, to the cheers of tens of thousands of people. Most people gathered in the street leading to the ticket area, but many of us, self included, opted to rest in the lawns of the park instead.

The first hour and a half were quiet besides the occasional minor, expected declaration. Mississippi and Texas went to McCain? Really? I made small talk with others nearby and eventually broke down and bought a shirt. And then it happened. First Virginia was declared for Obama, one minute from 10. So we were already cheering when the entire west coast went Obama. In sixty seconds, we had a new president.

The Man himself didn't get the chance to speak until almost 11, so in the meantime there was a lot of cheering, a lot of applause, and finally McCain's concession speech. We kept it mostly respectable; there were boos at his introduction and when he mentioned Palin, but otherwise it was quiet and we even applauded at times. At least he ended classy.

I thought the speech itself was an impressive one. It was the first one I didn't youtube. Save for the promise to buy his daughters a puppy, there were few jokes. And though he mentioned his grandmother, it didn't dominate his speech either. His focus, as always, was on the capacity for positive change and emphasis on having to work hard. It's hard to believe anyone calls this guy a socialist; he embraces the spirit of capitalism more than practically any politician I've seen.

And then it was over. Many stayed behind to celebrate, but I wanted to catch a train before it got too late. The exit was as packed as the entrance, but after leaving Grant Park, it got much easier. Of course, it helps when they cleared the streets! There's something surreal about walking up a busy Chicago street and seeing not one car. Things were overall peaceful; I didn't see anything resembling violence and barely even any inebriation.

And that's my story of the night. What was yours?

My Life: In Transit

My original plan to post more often remains, but I've been busy actually improving my life instead, or at least making an effort. For one thing, I finally have a roommate! We seem to get along okay, so hopefully we can be friends with time, but at the very least my first financial problems are over.

Secondly, I had a bit of a...project this week. I can't get into the details, but it could really energize me, life-wise, should it work out. At the very least, I learned new skills I should have learned years ago, and as a result I discovered that enjoyed some artistic designs far more than I expected. As a result, I'm far more confident things could change for me sooner rather than later.

No luck on the relationship front, but at least I got to hang out with friends more often. I even did one of those bar trivia nights today. We won four out of seven rounds, but our final score was just a bit off of the gift certificates. But it was an impressive first showing.

Of course, the next two weeks will be busy for two other reasons. First, next Tuesday is election day. Will I say who I'm voting for here? No. I will say that I'm extremely nervous, though. I don't trust these things until the polls are closed. Secondly, Nanowrimo starts up on Saturday. I'm actually still not sure I even will do this year's National Novel Writing Month, what with all the busy changes and projects. But damn it, I'm gonna at least try. I'll get more on that one in a future post, though by definition it exceeds the "100 page maximum" rule of details. But I'll do what I can to talk about it.

My Ideas: The Distrubing Freudian Elements Not Included

All it took was one vision.

Earlier this year, I played Persona 3, which managed to inspire me creatively more than any game this year, at least until Megaman 9. Like Symphony of the Night and Final Fantasy Tactics in the generation before it, I made two conclusions after playing it. One, it was a seminal, exceptional game among the most fascinating I've ever played. Two, I could do better. I could, at the very least, try. Persona 3 combined two of the most addicting game genres; the self-improvement, dating game and the semi-random dungeon crawl. By alternating the two and making the success in one essential to improvement in the other, it increases the desire for the one you miss. The game's time limit loomed over continuously. You had a month of game-time to prepare for each inevitable boss and less than a year of game-time to not only beat the game, but maximize the relationships with as many people as possible.

But the game always defied both your assumptions about how much time you have and suspension of disbelief. In most of the game, you could improve relations both when people call you, asking you to hang out on weekends, but for months on end, near the end of the game, this option vanishes. Other times, you get even less of a warning; your month-long plan could be ruined when your dorm-mates force you into summer school, for example. Meanwhile, while your friends are perfectly free to call you whenever the game allows it, you can never call them. As for the relationships themselves, they were too primitive at best and frustrating at worst. The game encourages you to "max out" as many relationships as possible, except five of those relationships are with women you date, meaning you have to basically cheat your way through multiple girlfriends at a time to actually succeed, which is made even sleazier when three of them are dorm-mates and members of your party.

Apocryphal Junction was an attempt to create my own, semi-Westernized interpretation of the same concept. The first thing that had to go was the Persona series' use of mythological creatures, from demons to gods, as allies. I'm already hitting too close to home for my comfort; I couldn't steal that as well. I started working with other themed monsters while still maintaining my original plan to make monster relations the same as human ones. "Date a succubus" was part of the original concept, after all. I eventually decided on the four elementals (earth, fire, water, and air) and combined with a completely different origin than mythology. Instead, psychology ruled the world of this game, and creatures were a combination of one or more of the above elements and the four conflicting identifications of the Myers-Briggs test, which I had recently tried out myself at the time.

The game took place in a typical small town in America with the secret that parts of it (and all of the high school) actually inhabited the alternate plane of reality called Apocryphal Junction, an amalgam of many other planes absorbed into a much larger community. The Earth is being considered as a candidate towards joining this united society, which the characters and many other factions have to decide about. There is no guarantee that it's a good thing. As for the high school, its rooms are actually no physically connected. Instead, they are scattered across the other dimension, so leaving school from various rooms will get you to different locations in the Junction. This serves as one of the ways that having better relations will improve your abilities, as it gives you access to other rooms in the school after hours. Similar, having friends and/or lovers from the Junction with appropriate powers will let them help you travel faster; a friend with wings will let you fly over obstacles, for example.

The original concept was good, but it didn't pop. That didn't happen until I had a dream about a much older, harsher school located on a land mass separated from the area by chasms. From what I remember, the dream's school was built like an ancient building, with thick stone walls and noisy pipes everywhere. It even had an indoor pool that looked like something out of an ancient castle or mad scientist's lair. I won't even discuss the bathrooms.

The strange thing is that the school/castle was full of anachronisms. It had strange mechanical bridges it always was struggling to use and connect to the world, but it also had an anime club! It even had a strange underground tunnel to a modern mall. Now this was a mystery that needed solving. Why was this school separated from the real world and yet connected to Anachronism Junction? What did its administrators know and want from its students?

The game Anachronism Junction will use a real-time system. Instead of using a complex schedule, you watch minutes and hours pass as soon as school ends, and you can only accomplish as much as you can get to in time. This returns to the use of school power and alliances to move faster, and the dangerous terrain in both worlds makes the travel much more dangerous.

At the very least, that's all I got so far. A game this ambitious requires something a little more, but the sense is there. At the very least, I'd much rather explore this one than Cataclysm by now. But as always, suggestions are welcome. Oh, and I also have made a decision. Barring disaster or a much busier new job (I'll talk about that later,) I'll at least restart this thing on a weekly basis, even if the posts get more personal.

Reviews: Yaaay! Super Fighting Robot!

As everyone who reads this thing knows (all none of you,) much of my last few weeks/months have, by and large, SUCKED. I am still panicking about my missing roommates, I lost money in a scam (and I just learned that the police have more or less given up on pursuing any potential crime, so I guess it's time to find a good lawyer for the civil lawsuit,) I'm depressed about being always single, and so on. But as much as my life sucked, the world occasionally does something that nonetheless makes me happy. For example, two weeks ago, Capcom released Megaman 9.

Megaman 9 is a sequel of one of the most sequelized series of the last 20 years. There were six games for the original NES, one (and a half) for the Super Nintendo, and one for the Playstation. And that's just the original series! There were eight games in the X spin-off series, two and a half for the Legends series (ironically, the only 3D series,) and four spin-offs that produced another 20 or so games. Also, there were two arcade-based fighting games and even a soccer game.

But despite all the sequels, most people think that of all the 30 or so games, the entire series peaked at around games...2 or 3. Oh, there are individual popular games, but many of the later series and the later games of the original series are considered to be formulaic at best, lazy at worst. New characters and options were though to be prioritized over balanced game play. So as the series stagnated and Capcom worried that the series' profitability was failing, they tried something new; they tried something old.

Megaman 9 was intended to go back to the roots, when the series was at its most celebrated. The graphics are intentionally as simplistic as the original Megaman 2, there are no elaborate cut scenes or tons of secrets to explore, and even Megaman staples like the abilities to slide and charge your attacks were removed. Instead of releasing the game in stores, it was downloadable for every of the current three systems. And the game's only $10, about a fifth of what the original Nintendo games cost, but since it cost about 1% of what a modern, triple AAA game with state-of-the-art graphics costs, it's probably a good deal for them.

But enough about the business side, what about my stance of the game. After all, one of my first posts was about me and my deep love of the series, which more than any series inspired me to be a game designer. So I was wary, despite of course getting the game on day one.

And I LOVE it. After playing it for weeks now, I beat the game three times and am working through the game's achievements (which we'll get to later.) Now, as a huge Megaman fan, I loved many of the later games, even the ones often derided by others. But playing this one helped me realize just how polished some of the peak games were. It also is easily the hardest game in the series, at least since the original, but it's fair enough to earn it. Case in point, some of my first experiences with levels was one of utter horror-spikes everywhere, enemies that dropped you into pits if you get hit once, and the horror that is the spinning platforms of Tornadoman. But after playing through it a few times, I feel like an expert. The game teaches you, and you will learn. Even the boss fights are perfect. Without the right weapon (this game, like nearly every Megaman game, has a series of weapons you earn from defeating bosses and a cycle of weaknesses, so each of the eight main bosses has a weakness to another bosses' weapon,) a boss fight is always hard enough that it's nearly impossible to beat it flawlessly, but it can fairly be defeated with some luck and enough skill.

This game captured my love of the series all over again. Every level felt like a gift, every challenge an inspiration. This is a game I will play again repeatedly and study. This is a game that, if you understand it well enough, will make you a better designer.

And the game is not all about nostalgia and pure game design. There are some concessions to new features. In time, you can download new characters and features, and while there are complaints that you have to pay for something as minimal as harder difficulties, the basic concept is welcome. The other addition are achievements for tasks as simple as beating the game once to complex one likes beating it under a certain amount of time, killing all types of enemies, defeating bosses using only your default weapon, or even beating the game without ever dying or taking damage!

Oh, there are some complaints. While the graphics are deliberately primitive, the music doesn't even live up to the standards of the old games. They're fine technically, but none are as catchy as the classics like Airman, Flashman, and the first Dr. Wily's Castle music from Megaman 2, which was so good lyrics were added to it and turned it into a Japan-wide phenomenon, complete with full orchestras or rock concerts (just search okkusenman on youtube. Trust me.) Second, there are some later additions tot he series that I did like. The slide and charged weapon are largely unnecessary here, but they still feel iconic to me. I even wish Bass, Megaman's rival who wasn't introduced until Megaman 7, showed up. If nothing else, I love his music, which brings us back to the first point.

The only other issue is, well, incredibly stupid. In Megaman 2, which is the game this is most modeled after, when you select a level, there is a brief introduction showing that level's boss around a starscape. If you press a certain button, there is an easter egg where the stars turn into little birds. In Megaman 9, you get the boss intro and the starscape, but no easter egg! Why? Why disappoint my fingers every time it instinctively makes birds?

So if we’re still doing this thing, I’d definitely give the game an A+. If you like action games, platformers in general, anything from the NES era, and especially anything Megaman-related, this is a must buy.

My Life: Is In Panic Mode

My life continues as normal. If by "normal," I mean I'm terrified out of my wits, or at least anxiety beyond belief. Most of my problems are ongoing. Still no girlfriend and crappy social life? Meh, I'm used to it. I hate it, but it's not immediate. Job not creative fullfilling? Also true, but not really problematic so much as dispiriting.

My main problems are financial, actually. My roommate was only here for a summer internship. In late August, he went back to school and I'm alone again. That was convenient at first, but now I live in a two-bedroom apartment while only using one bedroom. In other words, my rent just doubled. And I can't afford to pay for this for long.

So my hunt for a roommate continues. I tried Craigslist, but so far all I got were spam from people in other countries, claiming they want to live here but looking for a convenient banking scam. Roommates.com worked for me last May, but so far it's only come up short, and this one costs money for failing. And I'm not quite sure what else is even out there. There are a few other things to try. I'll look at both the apartment complex's own laundry room and the local libraries, and I heard some theories about trying Fermilab's newsletter. But I'm not sure what Plan C is here. And what happens if I can't find it? I have few options, none looking good. I may have to start hunting for single-bedroom apartments, which could take forever and lead to an inconvenient and costly move, and the whole thing still costs more than my normal apartment when I have a roommate. Beyond that, things look even more dire. What'll I do? Find a new job even though I couldn't for years? MOVE IN WITH MY PARENTS?

You can see I'm nervous here. If anyone actually reads this still, I really could use advice here. Do you have interested people? Are you interested? Do you simply have new ideas to search? Let me know. The place isn't bad here. I'm a nice, quiet roommate, the place is under $500 a month in a nice neighborhood, and nearly the entire place is already furnished. Well, that's about it. I'll write about the short story I'm working on later, but this is really not the right time for me, mentally.

My Ideas: A Game About Time, Which I Have So Little Of

I'm running out of my obvious ideas, but I won't stop this blog until at least I complete entries for all qualifying games of the original sixteen. Today we will cover Epoch, another game created in my college era and another of my "character" driven games, a classification more historical than accurate compared to my modern ideas.

Anyway, the concept itself is much easier to explain. The game revolves around time travel, though technically the main character travels back in time only once. The initial setting is an alternate Earth in the near future. Technology levels are actually all over the place. There are space stations, but space exploration is otherwise minimal, robotics technology is little better than it is for us, and society itself is mostly unchanged. On the other hand, government-run bio-engineering is the standard for some careers, including the use of biological energy weapons. Oh, and they created a prototype time machine.

The last one becomes useful immediately when aliens invade the planet. Their invasion force is overwhelming, but the people of this world had a chance at least of repelling it until it was discovered that more of the aliens lived under the surface of the planet, breeding and developing for millions of years. The combined force of the two armies attacking from opposite sides proved too much, and the planet was doomed immediately.

Fortunately, they had the time machine. Unfortunately, it was currently in a space station under attack by the aliens, and the entire original crew for the ship was dead. Instead, the only person who reached the machine without mortal wounds is Aurora "Aurie" Oliverio, a bio-engineered cop turned police detective. She readily agreed to the mission to save her planet, but her C+ level knowledge of history won't help, especially as the history books she took with her were blasted out of the time machine just as she left, causing them to be lost throughout the past.

Aurie's mission is two-fold and initially simple. The machine will take her to nine distinct time periods, including the one she just left, and spend two years in each one. In those two years, she has to use whatever help she can get from the locals to find any underground alien strongholds and destroy them. The time machine is immobile in the first three dimensions, so she will have to rely on each time period's transportation; thus, each later time period gives her a wider range she can explore. On the other hand, the strongholds get stronger with time, so the earlier she can find ways to destroy them, the better.

But that's the easy part of her mission, and her I have to make a convession about my design methodology; I have a strong tendency to overkill my concepts. This game is the best example of this. In addition to the alien strongholds, Aurie has to worry about the time stream itself. Due to a convenient quirk in quantum mechanics, Aurie, the time machine, and everything else in it are "paradox-proof" and thus can't be rendered nonexistent should Aurie, for example, kill her own grandparents. Everything else can be affected, so Aurie could alter the course of history, setting it back millennia or advancing it so the world she ends up with is advanced beyond her own comprehension. It's up to her to determine if she should make the world more advanced, even if it means unmaking everything and everyone she knows. Making matters worse are the risks of her screwing up due to her own ignorance and the aliens, should they learn of Aurie's success in destroying their bases, and their own plans to drive that civilization back.

So you can see why it would be a tough game to make. Even with the limitations I set, like limiting each era to only two or three major variants and using a reincarnation system that lets some playable characters potentially exist in multiple eras and circumstances, that's a lot of planning. It gets even worse when it factors in game play. There are obvious ramifications; for example, available weapons and armor changes based on the technology level Aurie helps civilization reach. I introduced other complexities as well, though. For example, Aurie can choose to invite people into her time machine and jump to later eras, which will remove them from their earlier historical roles, or even become romantically attached to some of them. Aurie and other time machine users get power ever era from satellites she launched at the start of her journey. The satellites absorb power for thousands of years and let these users, who synchronize with their power over the years, use special attacks at times. However, if she lets people stay behind, they can leave descendents with all the powers of their ancestors, plus enhancements due to generations of development. It makes for a tough decision for every character.

And the character focus is what makes this game qualify for the "character" category. Part of that is thanks to Aurie herself, which I arguably consider my first character with a real voice. Sarcastic, cynical beyond her years, and pragmatic even when casual, she remains well aware that the mission well out of her league, but she perseveres anyway. I planned on giving the player many ways to develop her, from chances for her to mature as she ages (remember, she gets 18 years older by the end of the game; when's the last time you saw a video game character, or at least an adult female, age?) There are even amusing quirks; she starts out a heavy smoker well aware that she'll spend years in time periods before her addiction of choice wasn't even invented, and she can either grow manic trying to speed the process along or learn to cut back or quit.

I could even imagine the ads. Many of them were "what if she had to fix our world" hypotheticals, where she would suddenly appear at, say, the Gettysburg address or next to Genghis Khan, and she would either completely ignore them while preparing to attack a nearby alien den or calm recite a list of instructions to the legends of the past, happily apathetic to their growing outrage or terror. It would have been beautiful.

The other characters were less developed, at least by the time when I stopped working on the design document, but it inspired me to grow up thematically at the least. Potential storylines included a years long, Columbus-style voyage by sea where Aurie traveled with one of the few historical figures she both admired and knew about, only to watch her disappointment as she learned of his faults. It explored the consequences of war and its aftermath, and it offered countless versions of the idealism versus realism moral debate, like whether it was right to let an evil tyrant rise to power if it meant preserving history. It featured my first gay and bisexual characters. Hell, the game even featured an alternate-planet version of Jesus! This was an old idea, and it's definitely one that that needs revision before I even could get started again, but I'd love to give it the treatment it deserved one day. All I would need is time.

My Life: Needing a Vacation From Vacations

On one hand, I feel like a jerk for complaining about what I'm about to complain about. On the other hand, this has not been a good month for planning, preparation, or advancement of my life. Of course, it is summer, so some of this should be expected.

I'm talking vacations, from my home and/or my normal life. I had the Wisconsin Dells/wedding extravaganza at the beginning of the month. I had one normal-ish week. I then had Gen Con last weekend, lasting from Wednesday until Sunday. And then today I went to the Renaissance Faire. Well, that covers all the normal things I like doing in the summer. I just wish it didn't all happen on one day.

We'll start on the vacations themselves. Gen Con went well after nearly going horrifically. Our badges and all event tickets were lost in the mail. So we (me and my father, this being our annual vacation together,) drove all the way to Indianapolis before we could even know if we could get replacements. And if my dad didn't talk to someone higher up that promised we could get the tickets printed, we wouldn't have. What made that especially infuriating is that it was all their fault; there was an error in their web site that erased our addresses. So we could have had a Gen Con without events, which would have been...

Ah, but I probably should explain what Gen Con is, huh? It's a gaming convention and one of the biggest "geek conventions" in the country; probably the biggest before Comic Con went insane and Penny Arcade got involved. Primarily, it's for role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, but it includes every popular game. Board games, card games, and all kinds of miniatures are also included, as are anime, video game competitions, costume concepts, and one big ass exhibit hall. It's heaven. Well, it's heaven when you have event tickets, because otherwise you're out of luck and have no chance of getting any games you actually want to play. Also less than heavenly was the Colts, a local Indianapolis sports team, opening their new stadium on the same weekend. So it was 30,000 geeks and 70,000 Colt fans in the same 3 block area. The city's lucky it's not on fire.

Today was something simpler. An hour and a half of driving and a friend of mine and I traveled 500 years into the past, or at least an alternate one with freezers and flushable "privvies." Nonetheless, even if the people weren't, the setting at least emulated authenticity. Electricity was in short supply save for the occasional food hut and indoor light, making the woods the Ren Faire is located mostly in as entrancing as most of its guests would want. Okay, many jokes were made at the "Ye olde pizzae store" and the inexplicable ability to get tempura in medieval Europe, but it was close enough, damn it! An early start meant we could see more of the shows than I have for years, from close seats to the local comedic swordsmen to the mud show. Mine you, just because I could see a grown man eat mud doesn't mean I don't want to unsee it, but I knew the risks. And I watched a joust. But I always watch a joust.

Well, it was fun, certainly, but now I'm pooped. And now I have a lot of things to think about. I have no new job coming up, which means no new apartment or plans to move to the city. I also have no roommate as of yesterday, so I have about a week to find a new one or this will also become a problem. For now, though, I'll try to enjoy the parts of summer that were nice. And get over the parts that remain utter bull shit. But I'll have to deal with those soon enough as well.

My Life: That's About It, Just My Life

I'll do a full "My Ideas" update this weekend, at least according to plan. For now, I'll just focus on how things have been for this week. It was...a busy one.

Wednesday! The last night before a vacation. Laundry was done. This...is why I don't do a daily blog about my life. Though, really, who can? Even Neil Gaiman has "Today I folded my underwear" times.

Thursday! This is more like it. My family went to visit Wisconsin Dells as part one of a trip to Minnesota for a wedding. The assumption was that since we had to travel for hours anyway, we might as well leave a day early and enjoy a water park. So we did. I was going to go with my parents because carpool is econominic and environmentally friendly, and who wants to drive for three hours when you can sleep and listen to your iPod.

My parents planned to get to my apartment and leave around 9:30-10. About 11:30, we left. I did additional laundry around 10, because I know my family. About the time we left my town, my brother, sister-in-law, and niece, who live much further away south than us, told us they already hit Wisconsin.

Friday! This was "Do everything you can in the Dells" day. We planned to get an early start and then do everything. We finished breakfast around 11 am. Again, I know my family. Afterwards, he did the Ducks for the first time. The Ducks, for those who don't know, are former military vehicles capable of going on land or sea and now mostly used for these sort of tours. That was fun, at least for my two year old niece. Afterwards, my parents took the toddler for nap and other activities, letting the "young-ish" adults have their fun. It was the first time I hung out with my brother like that in a long time, and arguably the first time I could just hang out with my sister-in-law Rose for almost an entire day. It was fun. Even if I was a bit of a third wheel in romantic terms, it was comfortable. Best of all, it was a real friendship. It's not hard to love your family members, but just having fun being with them is a rare thing, especially the ones you don't grow up with.

Saturday! Not so uplifting. More depressing really, which is not a good sign since that was the wedding. The wedding was 3 pm. We had a four hour drive. We left about 11:30. My fam...eh, you get it. It wasn't too bad. We had to stop at our hotel for a desperate clothes change, and in the end we were 15 minutes or so late. It could have been worse. We missed the introduction of the wedding, but we caught the vows, which was really the point.

The reception, on the other hand, was not the slightest bit enjoyable for me. It was all my introversion issues coming together with the always pleasant experience of being a single, dateless person at an expression of perfect love between two theoretical soul mates. When I was just hanging out with the usual extended family members and food consumption, it didn't matter. And I actually found the best man's speech to be interested (mostly because I gave the one for my brother and was eager to compare,) but by the time we got to the photos of the family, I started getting a vague and increasingly despairing feeling of isolation. I started to fear, or even grudgingly accept, that I won't ever get that experience. No happy montage of me with the woman of my dreams by my side; no little quotes on the wedding programs about how I'm special and what about me makes her happy and visa versa.

And then the dancing. Oh, Lonny, the dancing. I already dislike dancing, being shy, awkward, and having no experience or natural rhythm whatsoever. But what people don't realize is that I don't mind dancing. I'd LOVE to dance when I have someone to dance with. But I had nobody, so watching everyone, from married cousins years younger than me to older couples with decades of experience, was too much. I literally had to leave the room and couldn't go back. I never came that close to a public nervous breakdown, at least not recently. It wasn't so bad, though; I calmed down later that night, and nothing permanent resulted. But it was pretty scary.

Sunday! We drove back. Except for the fact this took seven hours, it wasn't so bad.

Monday-Wednesday! Work, writing, yabbade yabbade.

Thursday! Today was a bit anticlimactic compared to this weekend, but it was notable. The big thing about today was a friend who was stranded in another state and who needed for me to wire some money. That wasn't a big deal, except that it took TWO HOURS for me to call and get the money wired. The lesson here is that if you want to use Western Union, do so in person or online. Otherwise you have to wait for someone to call for your validation, which takes forever, and if you call to check on it they send you to the back of the list again, so you never know when you actually can give your increasingly hungry and desperate friend enough money for food and gas. It was a rough night, in other words, and I was late for my writer's group as a result. But at least I could do a nice thing, and even if no good deed goes unpunished, it felt nice to at least make someone else's day less unpleasant.

My Ideas: Pirates of the Video Gamean

Ah, the good stuff. We return to the good old fashioned video game ideas that make me so interested in writing this stuff. Today, we talk about a game idea I had some years ago, but it started someplace completely different. You may remember an earlier post, where I confessed to using random trait generators to create new characters, primarily in the game Ascension. However, I used earlier for simpler ideas and just training and practice. I would randomly generate traits, and then I would use those traits to make the main protagonist and an entire game idea

In this case, the three traits were...well, I can't remember specifically. I think they were electricity-using, power absorbing, and animating? It was something like that. At any rate, the idea I got from it was using a robot warrior in a dystopian world. The robot was a simple soldier or maintenance worker who was thrown out of the city of the elites for some offense and abandoned in the increasingly large piles of debris and rubble that formed under and around the city. The game was about him wandering the junkyard and, I guess, defeating evil. His powers revolved around draining electricity from the mechanical garbage and either using it for his electrical powers or charging the functional or slightly broken robots to create an army. It was basically a real-time simulator with a more powerful main character and resources to make new units drained directly from most enemies. Imagine Pikmin but darker and edgier. It's a moot point, because this isn't the game I'm talking about. I moved on to some more complex ideas.

And then Pirates of the Caribbean happened.

And so I was obligated to make a pirate-themed idea. It was the law, after all. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time also came out about this time, and the skillful, acrobatic, and witty hero (before the sequels made him angsty,) also appealed to me. The game idea that I had started with these two ideas. I created the idea of Derek Seawince, an adventurer and dungeon explorer of the Indiana Jones/Lara Croft variety. Sands of Time's abilities include a magic dagger that could reverse time, letting him reverse deaths and effectively replacing the "lives" of normal games. Similarly, Derek is a limited psychic who could see the future events of actions. As long as the power lasted, whenever he died, that didn't really happen; that was just a psychic projection of a mistake he could have made. It was a fun ability for cut scenes as well; he enjoyed saying the stupidest things possible to the violentest things possible and making that a psychic projection should the obvious happen.

It was fun, but he's still not a pirate, so we had a problem. This was rectified when I remember my electric-using robot and decided that if it worked there, it could work in the fantasy world equivalent. In this case, Derek discovered an ancient shrine containing the Weapons of Spirits, supposedly ancient artifacts. He manages to get in, but his methods caused the entire temple to collapse. Luckily, he found one Weapon called the Staff of Force moments before the thing fell apart. He was crushed instantly, while the other weapons were sent out of the shrine entirely, falling off the cliff into parts unknown. Fortunately, while his body was destroyed, Derek's soul was stored in the weapon, hence the name. He nonetheless was stored in suspended animation until the shrine was excavated almost 1000 years later, and then the staff created a new body out of its power, letting him effectively live forever and create new bodies as needed as long as the staff itself remains intact. He was shocked by how much the world changed in that time, though. For example, as he put, "And that ocean wasn't there the last time I checked, I can tell you that."

Yes, the local land flooded in the ensuing centuries, Wind Waker style, for reasons unknown. Lacking any land-based way to travel anymore, and discovering that the world is led by corrupt governments and even more corrupt bands of pirates attacking innocent travelers, he decides to become a pirate himself, though a pirate that only attacks the other pirates and other unjust authority. This was a tricky decision for him, as Derek has always gotten terribly seasick, and that is one thing his magic staff isn't capable of fixing.

An otherwise competent adventurer pirate hero who just happened to be seasick is a pretty neat concept. As for the whole "electric robot" thing, it came into play through the staff's magical powers. By fighting enemies, he gained overall and stored magic. The overall magic was used to give Derek new powers. My favorite was a "teleport" move where he threw his staff, turning off his body as he did so, and then catching the staff again by making a new body where the staff ends it flight. The stored magic is used to animate magical constructs to serve as his crew. He's a seasick pirate with a pirate crew of magic robots. I love this game idea.

There are so many little things that make this game so fun. For example, the Staff of Force is used to send enemies backwards at incredible distances. My favorite move? Hitting enemies off the ship so hard that they repeatedly skip across the ocean! Most of his other moves were, as you might have guessed, based on one of the only universally recognized good scenes in Matrix: Reloaded.

And the characters! I loved making characters for this one, from the names to the general ideas. Derek's allies included a number of other Weapon of Spirit users, like the gun-toting and extremely angry warrior woman Anny Celeshearer, or the centuries old weather and great sword user Mallan Weatherware. All had their own Weapon of Spirit theme, though none of them could skip enemies across the ocean, which is a downside. Enemies included Rillaum Menoit, the last good cop in a corrupt empire, but one who's attempts to catch the notorious Derek that these days, he's happy just making his eternal foe look bad for a while. The main villains for much of the game are the Order of the Terribly Bloody Blade, pirates gone corporate. Some are still warriors, like Pandemonium Carnage, the hilariously overblown demon-summoning sorceress, but others focused on the business. My favorite is Cameron Velica, captain of the Crimson Paradigm, who ran the pirate's marketing campaign and PR ventures. And not all the Weapon of Spirit users are good, either...Dun dun dun!

Ah, I missed these things, especially for my favorite ideas like this one. I'll probably focus on the game ideas more, possibly even going into further detail on some of them once I go through all the standard ones. But one step at a time. And tonight the step was ironic pirates.

Reviews: And No, I'm Not Dead.

I have come to a bit of a decision. I want to keep on doing this blog, in one state or another. But it won't be so set. More or less, I'm going to lose a lot of the history, inspiration, etc. parts of my blog. I was running out of things to write about, so what's the point? I will, however, likely still talk more about my life as it is now. It may get more personal as a result, and probably more whiny, but eh, nobody reads it anyway.

Expect more of my ideas, though. That's really what matters to me. Hell, until I get my social life together, it's practically who I am. But that's for another night. It will, I sincerely hope, be a night this week, but I can't tell you exactly which. That's how things work now, I'm afraid.

For tonight, I'll just polish off two quick reviews. The first is of Dr. Horrible, a 45 minute web thingy done by Buffy creator Joss Whedon, so of course I had to watch it. It was done in three acts that were released over last week and were free to view at drhorrible.com until...yesterday. Sorry! Eh, get it on iTunes or wait for the DVD. Basically, the thing is three mini-episodes of a musical partially done as a video blog. It stars Dr. Horrible, a lovelorn hopeful mad scientist torn between the path towards evil and the woman he loves, a decision made more difficult by Captain Hammer, a jerkish hero who soon battles him on both issues. Also, the whole thing's a musical.

Anyone who remembers the Buffy episode "Once More With Feeling" knows that Joss is surprisingly good at musicals, wringing both comedy and drama out of the musical format and making the songs themselves good as well. Dr. Horrible is no different, and it has enough brilliant lines ("Oh, look at my wrist! I have to go!") and concepts (the head of the local council of evil is a horse. An evil horse, but still a horse.) Just remember that this IS Joss we're talking about. He loves to open with a funny and light concept and toss in darkness and drama as it goes. Even with a total runtime as long as one episode of a television show, he manages it here as well. Nonetheless, I highly recommend the videos and would easily pay for them. If I had to.

The other review is for the Japanese RPG Rogue Galaxy, an oldish game for the Playstation 2. I wanted this game for two reasons. First, it filled a traditional RPG gap I needed to fill after Persona 3. Secondly, it had an interesting setting. Instead of ye olde, fantasy worlde, it took place in a futuristic galaxy, suggesting a space opera, and revolved around a group of pirates.

At least that's what I thought at the time. This game gets weird fast. For starters, the setting is certainly magic, and most of the monsters are technically mutants created by some weird energy, but this thing barely goes five minutes without invoking fantasy. Most of the character's "skills" are weird powers with no explanation, scientific or otherwise, given, leading to the assumption of magic. And then we get into people using voodoo for powers and ghosts, and everything just goes off the rails. But that's fine, I don't mind a little science/magic juxtaposition.

I do feel like the game bait and switched me on the plot, though. For starters, these are the Pirates who don't do anything. Okay, they do things, but they don't do piracy, ever. Now, I didn't go in expecting to rob harmless merchants or anything, but I expected at least raids against the evil government or something. Instead, the government, despite being in continuous war with an off-screen enemy and enslaving the main character's homeworld, barely gets acknowledged. Instead, much of the enemy duty falls upon an evil corporation, and even the party doesn't so much rob them as steal ancient artifacts nobody owns shortly before they can.

And speaking of evil artifacts, the second issue I have with this game is plot gets stupid fast. Now, it started out generic; we have an orphaned hero on a desert world who longs to get off and explore the galaxy. That sound familiar? And I'm guessing you, like me, figured out who his real father is really damn quickly and way before the game tells you. But I didn't mind that. I only slightly minded when the four quests that immediately followed the introduction involved our heroes stranded on two separate planets, first to get gas and the second to get their ship's license registered (Again, Worst. Pirates. Ever.) But shortly after that, any hope that the intrigue and politics suggested earlier, or at least a galaxy wide romp across countless mysterious worlds, ends when you learn you have to find three MacGuffins of power to visit some magic world lost to history. And then we got stuff about lost princesses, and reincarnations of ancient heroes, and yabbity yabbity. In short, it used every cliché used to disparage Japanese RPGs in a matter of hours.

The game has its up sides, of course. The visuals, especially for the cities, are often incredible. The Coruscant-esque city of Zerard in particular took my breath away. And the combat, a traditional/action-RPG hybrid, was often unbalanced but at least entertaining. I only really got sick of it in the occasional overly-long dungeon, and at least the use of long-ranged secondary weapons and spells that easily destroyed the more annoying random encounters helped. I'd recommend the game to fans of Japanese RPGs, but not to completionists unless they have a lot of free time. The game took me 50, but getting everything involves finding and kill as many as 30 of every random encounter in the game, including rare ones and ones that get much less common as more powerful ones replace them, and a stupid fighting insect mini-game I barely explored. At the very least, though, stay for the almost Cowboy Bebop-esque chapter 6. Well, it's Cowboy Bebop with an anthropomorphic dog, but otherwise it's fine.

My Life: Just Officially Got Longer

Yes, I've hit the big 29 today, which is relevant only in that it means I'm now less than 365 days from the much, much bigger 30. Today itself was pretty normal. Work was work, and then my parents visited to treat me to dinner and, as the first of the gifts and a rather weird one, a new suit. Dinner was good. Standing around Kohl's was a minor torture, but an acceptable one. So how do I feel?

Well, on and off, scared shitless.

My God, I'm almost thirty. My twenty something years can be measured in the span of one calendar. Okay, half of two calendars, you know what I mean. There's so much I didn't do. It's not age that gets me down, it's the accomplishments. I thought at this age, I'd be married, maybe have a career, or at least I'd have a job that I had some passion for. More importantly, I'd have a close group of friends, and adventures, and a life well-lived. Instead, I spent far too long rotting in suburbia, unaware of how to break out. Well, one way or another, this damn circumstance has to change. I'm letting life pass me by and ignoring all the warnings screaming at me; the high school reunion, the roommate that had to be replaced because he and his fiancée bought a house, and all the relatives getting married. And now this. Well, one way or another, I won't let it happen. I may not have a life per sec, but I refuse to let life win.

Now, the trick is to figure out how...

Review: A Quicky About A Robot

I'm still not sure how I'm going to treat this blog in the near future, but I did want to give a quick review, because I saw something worth acknowledging. That thing is Wall-E. And since I've been told that my reviews are too long, I'll keep it short: it kicked ass. That good enough?

Well, no, it's not for me certainly. But I'll keep it simple. This movie is my favorite Pixar movie, and I loved every Pixar movie I saw (which is all of them but Cars, incidentally.) It was tailor-made for me, though. Speculative future, satire working its way into sociological discussion, robots and technology in general; if it wasn't for the fact there was no possible way to get cute goth women into the movie, it would be perfect.

The movie is divided into two parts; there's the nearly dialogue-free first third, as Wall-E, the last sentient thing left on Earth continues to do his automated job while looking for the little pleasure of life that keep him going for seven hundred years. Not bad for a robot. The second half of the movie moves beyond Earth as Wall-E discovers the fate of humanity since his activation.

Much of what made this movie special has been said elsewhere, so I'll stick to a few things that made this film my favorite Pixar movie. There was the surprisingly dark storyline, especially for a Pixar movie, which suggested a doomed Earth and possibly a lot of dead humans. There was the simplicity of the main characters and how they acted, with a minimum of dialogue and brilliant reactions and emotive displays to compensate. There was the future of humanity, presented as neither dystopian as we normally see it and yet horrible in its own way. There was the art itself, with the bright future and the ruined Earth both masterpieces of design, and the brief scenes of space in between were awe-inspiring.

The biggest complaint I could have about the movie was an occasional logical detail that slightly warped my suspension of disbelief. None of them bothered me, and assuming you can accept the premise that robots either were programmed to develop feelings or somehow gained them despite the programming, I'm guessing neither will you. The movie gets and enthusiastic A+ from me.

And I would be remiss if I didn't at least mention the short at the beginning. This battle between a magician and his rabbit sidekick was a hilarious, possibly Portal-inspired bit of Chuck Jones-y slapstick.

My Life: This Blog, Again

And, more importantly, what to do with it. The lack of response to it so far has been disheartening, yes, and advice on how to get some people to notice it have suggested my writing itself, or at least my choice of topics, was the fault. That's fair, I suppose. I do have a bad habit of putting this thing off until the end of the day; I worry it's becoming a chore. I still plan on doing something with this, but I'm trying to decide what. It would be helpful, though, to get some suggestions of some of the writing that was good. Were there particular topics people liked? Particular articles? I suppose suggesting which ones really DIDN'T work would be helpful, too, though a "they all suck" would not. Regardless, I'll have at least one new post starting next week, as I decide what subjects are worth continuing.

No, No Review Again

Nothing really to review, and honestly, I'm starting to wonder about my plans for this thing. I'm going to get some advice on what elements to focus on here, not to mention things like posting rate. Besides, some of my topics are running out of ideas. One of my goals in this blog is to avoid the depressing elements of my life and focus on the positives. And, well, if I keep on working on my life stuff, that may not last. As for the other elements, I'm not sure which ones to keep and which to scrap. I'm open to suggestions for now, but we'll see what decision I'll be making in this next week or too.

My Inspirations: Too Much Mario Regrets

My latest inspiration is, admittedly, an inspiration I barely know that well, so this could be a short blog. His name is Tim Schafer, arguably the most famous video game writer in the industry. The reason I don't know him that well is, sadly, for much of my life, I was a console gamer, and Tim Schafer has until recently been a computer game designer. So I missed out on the Monkey Island games, Day of the Tentacle, and nearly all the other graphic adventure games. I did play the original Sam and Max, but I'm not sure that Tim was even involved in that one.

I did play Grim Fandango, though. And that one was indeed pretty awesome. But the first of his that I really loved was Psychonauts. It's not his fault it took so long. Honestly, I just never was mentally that attuned to the graphic adventure games. Grim Fandango took regular visits to Gamefaqs for me to visit. Sam and Max was a bit better, but not much. At least it had its own guide included with it.

Psychonauts, though, wasn't a graphic adventure. It was a platform game that sort of wanted to be a graphic adventure. And despite the sales suggesting otherwise, the combination worked wonderfully. Yes, occasionally, the platform descended into cliche (the collecting of some hundreds of weird items left something to be desired,) but, surprisingly, it often vanished completely at later levels so the hero could platform-game his way through a puzzle. Whether it involved telekinetically moving the parts of a board game or figuring out how to fool government agents using common household objects, you could practically see the "verb/noun" system running behind the scenes.

But it was the characters that made the game really shine. The game takes place in a summer camp for psychic children, and thus the game's cast is full of imaginative, weird, and hilarious characters. The only downside is that, as the game approaches its second half, these characters fade away. To make up for it, though, the game's levels take on a new, darker turn. The first half of the game's levels take place in the minds of psychic teachers, who are eccentric but not inherently crazy, but the second half takes place in the minds of mental patients. Learning what these people are really motivated by is both funny and tragic, and learning these back stories are the core of these later puzzles.


My affection for Tim's writing began here, but it continued as I learned more about him and his character-generating methodologies. He actually had a podcast about how he made Psychonauts, for example. This includes delving into the mindsets of his characters and the elaborate systems he used. For example, he would even created accounts on social sites for all of his characters, letting him think about what their favorite bands would be, what pictures they would use, how they are feeling from day to day, and so on.


That character planning is where my motivation comes from. As a result of works like Tim's, I have become much more deeply embedded into the mindset of my characters and struggled to give them voices unique to each of them. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't, of course, and I haven't gotten to the point of making a myspace for a character or anything. On the other hand, I have made Miis for a lot of them and have some of them vote as I imagine they would in the near-daily polls, so the way of the Schafer has been taken at least somewhat to heart for me. These days, I can imagine the voice of a character much faster, at least as far as I can tell. And I have Tim to thank for that. Now if only karma would make his next game a success, because the poor guy's due.

My Ideas: Cheating in the Wish Fullfillment Category

Before I start today's blog, I have to admit something; of the five major sections that I do here, this is increasingly my favorite. I'm running out of things to discuss about my life, at least not non-depressing ones, and even the rants are trickier, but I always am eager to share the work I've made, even in this limited format. Yes, I know that pretty much nobody reads it, but in a way that helps, and in another way completely it doesn't really matter. What matters is that out there, I have made at least that smallest contribution to the collective information and ideas of the world. It's very cathartic.

That being said, this is a fairly embarrassing update. You see, of the sixteen ideas that formerly made up my portfolio, plus the new ones of the last couple of years and the overarching mythology tying them together, I'd say I currently have three ideas that I consider my favorites. These are ideas I constantly study, revise, go over in my head, and even live out or at least imagine the dialogue and characters thereof. If given the chance, I would accept the job of making any of these games into an actual product in an instant. However, there is a tiny part of my brain that gives a different answer in the hypothetical universe where I am given the chance to make any game I want in exactly the way I want it to be made. This alternate answer is the game I named Goliath, and the reason for this answer can be summed up simply: pure fanboy-ism.

Goliath is, at its heart, a futuristic action game using a city as the setting. In other words, it's a Grand Theft Auto sandbox game set in the future. The innovations were pretty drastic, though. For one thing, you don't play as a person. Your character is Goliath, an experimental shape-shifting robot created for the military. Early in the game, you are lost by the unit that created you, leaving you to wander the city on your own. Over time, you get the ability to assume various forms, starting with a hovering, futuristic car, and later including a giant, robotic, cat-like creature, a humanoid better suited to individual fights, and finally a cat/bird hybrid form capable of flight. So, in other words, it's a Grand Theft Auto sandbox game set in the future, except you play as the car.

The other main innovation, and the one that motivates my cynical response above, is that the game doesn't have a normal, linear plot. Instead, it was intended to be an anthology divided into many chapters. Each chapter can be separated from the others by months, years, or even decades, since Goliath is a robot and doesn't have to worry about aging after all, and each chapter features a new master/driver to command Goliath (except near the end, when Goliath is so free-willed he needs no master.) More importantly, each chapter has a new designer/writer and a new storytelling style entirely! In my ideal version of the game, each chapter's designer would be a bigwig in the storytelling universe, and of course they would include figures like Joss Whedon, Tim Burton, Charlie Kaufman, and others of my personal idols. It should be noted that my earliest version of this list included the likes of the Wachowski brothers and M. Night Shyamalan, which should give you an idea on exactly when I came up with this game!

So, yes, the sad part of me would make this game just so I could hang out with my idols and work on a project with them, is that so wrong? It's not like I think that the idea of the game is lacking by itself. The anthology idea alone could be brilliant, but mostly it's the setting, the city of Unaris, that inspires me. Sandbox setting plus future has been done before (including the recent Crackdown, which I haven't played yet. I will, I will. Sorry. Shut up.) For example, Jak 2 and 3 for the Playstation 2 directly aped the Grand Theft Auto design for its own city. But I found it lacking. For one thing, unlike the Grand Theft Auto settings, the Jak cities never felt real to me. They were too labyrinthine, too lacking in notable landmarks, too empty of activities and stories and life beyond the slack-jawed pedestrians.

I wanted Unaris to be different, so I spent much of my development planning time on its design. What else could I do, after all; I was planning on making a multi-contributor anthology, so detailed plot work was impossible. Unaris is notable in that it is a much more vertical location than modern cities. Buildings and entire districts are stacked on top of each other, which both makes for a nice visual motif of having the most affluent parts of the city being the only ones to have regular sunlight and making city navigation much more fun for a character more capable of platforming than the average sandbox protagonist.

Admittedly, there were a lot of clichés in this version, from the surface-level slums that barely sustain themselves on reflected sunlight to the top-level church designed to encourage the rich and powerful, but the sheer visual and gameplay possibilities were endless. There was Angle City, a mini-community all of its own created underground and run by madmen. Or the White Noise, an industrial district permanently shrouded by fog and hazardous to human inhabitation. Or the floating sphere that represents this city's equivalent of Wall Street. My favorite, though, is the mercantile district, and empty shaft stretching from the city's depths to its peak, showing an easy cross-section of all of Unaris; a dizzying view even before the artificial rivers built midway up the city and other landmarks. Even simple things like swimming in the city reservoir could be amazing in the right environment, and there are very few environments I made that I'm more proud of than Unaris.

Even in the very realistic view that I'll never make this game alongside the creators of Buffy and Edward Scissorhands, I would place this idea among the top ideas I would ever create. Just the image of Goliath struggling its way onto a floating saucer owned by the inevitably corrupt government officials, or leaping his way through the city's launch bay on his way into space, or simply bounding to the roof of the tallest building in the city and howling like the urban carnivore that he is still gives me chills years later. It's an idea that I not only want to share with my idols; it's one I want to use to become one of their peers.

Reviews: The Awfully Familiar Hulk

Today's review covers yet another geeky movie seen this summer. This one is round two of the season's three big superhero movies. Yes, there was Hellboy 2, but I didn't see the original, so it doesn't count. Hulk 2 is this week's sample, and while it doesn't come close to the level of success of Iron Man, the first and best of the super hero movies so far this summer, it at least entertained.

I call it Hulk 2, but technically it's called The Incredible Hulk, on the semi-mistaken impression that the first Hulk movie sucked. It still is a sequel in any sense of the word, taking the original movie's story and working directly from there, but conveniently avoiding any reference to Bruce Banner's father, the nemesis in the first movie. In this movie, for at least 3/4 of the total runtime, the main villain is the U.S. Army collectively, let by "Thunderbolt" Ross, Bruce's love interest's jerk of a father. He was more blustering and trigger-happy than malevolent in the first movie, but here he's more than happy to capture and dissect the protagonist as part of a really poorly-thought plan to make super-soldiers. Because nothing makes a better weapon than a crazed, enraged, uncontrollable invincible guy who doesn't even seem interested in fighting until somebody shoots him first.

But anyway, the movie had some serious plot issues, most of which I'll save for a post-spoiler section below, but otherwise it worked okay. Now, I didn't hate the Ang Lee movie at all, but I can see how some of its more esoteric elements were annoying to others, and all of them have been purged. Gone are the comic-paneling scenes and the psychotic villain with rapidly fluctuating motivation. And gone are the Hulk-poodles. In its place are a lot more scenes of the Hulk breaking things and Bruce running from guys trying to shoot him and avoiding becoming the Hulk, with refreshing amount of failure. Eventually, his own plans, which revolve around finding a cure but tend to find the most complex and circular ways of doing, nearly come to fruition, just in time for him to fight the movie's actual villain, The Abomination, who's basically an evil Hulk. That makes for an interesting conclusion, but it's a tough one to pull off in practice. The difficulty is inherent in having two enemies with equal powers fighting each other; what makes the hero win without it looking like a cop-out? And there are the problems when the powers are basically super-strength and invincibility, since neither are especially subtle powers, and that the hero in this case is not exactly a tactical genius.

But the interesting thing about the Hulk is that it's not mainly about the villains. Hell, when you get right down to it, the only heroes with a really exceptional rogues' gallery are Batman and Spiderman, though on the plus side that means that other superhero movies feel less obligated to kill the villains at the end of every movie. The Hulk's more about the internal struggle. It's about a superhero who barely counts as a hero at all except when in the direct vicinity of a sufficiently evil villain and created by a guy who hates his very existence in his "superhero" form. This makes the struggle internalized, which might be why it's been harder to make successful movies about him. This one revels in this struggle, both through the exposition and visually, and the isolation of the hero is one of the movie's strengths. That, plus some excellent actions scenes (I loved the initial Brazil chase even before the Hulk shows up,) bumps this movie to a B.

There were some obvious problems, though, which I'll address after a spoiler bump.





Good enough. Okay, first of all, the movie goes into detail about how careful Bruce is and how he avoids detection almost perfectly. Why, then, would he send an email directly to the cellular scientist he was working with even after his computer was captured by the military? Even if he failed to assume they would tag his and the scientist's aliases, why even bother sending an email? Why not just show up, since the email didn't seem to help prepare the guy for the meeting at all? It seemed like a very contrived way to set up the finale. Secondly, the government already has a super-serum that lets its soldiers become regenerative, super-agile, and tireless warriors with only slight aggression being a side-effect. Why not just use that and not the formula that makes you crazy? On the other hand, I liked both the setup that ensured said genetic scientist will be the obvious villain for potential Hulk 3 and that the series overtly links to the earlier Iron Man and the implications of a full-on Avengers movie in the near future.

Rantings: Video Games and Community Contributions

The Internet! It's changed the world in countless ways. Business is redefined, communities are created, and globalism now is the standard. But enough about that. This blog is about video games after all, so lets focus on that element. But on the subject of video games, the concept started well before the Internet. Just like Dungeons and Dragons and other sub-cultures largely consisting of, let's face it, geeks, video games have formed a community regardless of the difficulty.

In ye olde early days, it was done via correspondents by mail and through the games themselves. Console games had few options on the latter, but arcades were defined by their community access. That was fundamentally the point of high scores, for example. Yes, there was the sense of accomplishment, but it wasn't just that sense that made it appealing. It was the ability to prove oneself to one's peers. Besides, it provides a much more dynamic challenge. Winning against a computer, however, briefly, was limited to the AI and the rules of the game. But the arcade system made both the game itself and the other players your challengers, and the latter only got better with time. There's a reason that this struggle is being made into movies even today.

But I have to admit, the arcade era of the video game community game was lost to me by and large. By the time I got into video games, I was seven or eight at the youngest, and that makes the date 1986-7. By then, arcades were already starting to fade, and those that remained had moved onto the Double Dragon style games, where the game play was longer and had a clear goal. The industry had reached the Nintendo Age, and linear, narrative storytelling was king. My first involvement of the community at large was in magazines like Nintendo Power. Here, community involvement was limited to letters at first, but at least this gave gamers a voice that transcended location and cultural boundaries. The magazine also had a "high score" section, where people could provide evidence of their successes with Nintendo's games. It effectively created a modern version of the arcade high score table. But even by then, the actual numerical high scores were disappearing. Many issues featured high score lists that were nothing but "game completed" messages.

Enough of the past, though! The Internet made the community an actual community in countless ways. For once, instead of competing for who did best against the computer, they could compete against each other in a greater way. But it was here where communities surpassed that limit. Instead of simply responding through playing the game, they also can actually alter and contribute the game through modding. Wolfenstein 3D, doom, and other games of this era let people create maps and missions for the game themselves, often letting them surpass what even the game creators made!

Let us look into the future, though. Now, we have seen the level of contribution increase since this point, from entire campaigns in RPGs like Neverwinter Nights, to full games through programs like the RPG Maker series, to parts of an entire virtual planet like Second Life. But what if they could affect the actual game itself? Imagine a conservative version of this theory where prototypes, betas, and demos for a game are released well before a game comes out, and the testers not only evaluate the game, but actually create new creatures and elements of the game? Or what if the game's engine is released well before the game itself comes out, letting its fans create new content using it?

Another option is through the use of sequels. Many games, especially RPGs, are known for their branching paths and multiple endings. We already know we have ways to submit game play information online directly to the game's creators; see achievements for example. Imagine if the game automatically uploads the first ending achieved to company automatically, and these affect the sequels' plots.

Or let's look at the really crazy possibilities. What if the sequential, narrative game came out at the same time as the game's editors? Thus, when the game comes out, there is a complete story, but as time passes, the creators release constant updates with new enemies, new quests, or even new endings, characters, or levels based entirely on the contributions of other players? Or it could be used in an episodic game, much like the modern Sam and Max series. Imagine that levels 1-5 are released immediately and for, say, half a normal priced game. Levels 6-10, though, are either cheaper and released later or are free, but the modified levels 6-10, with new enemies and other contributions by the players who altered levels 1-5 already, cost extra.

One last idea uses the Intromo concept I used back in the first few weeks. Let's say the first game is a single or limited player narrative game, but a sequel is a MMORPG or similar community based game. In this case, the community not only affects their own experience with the decisions they make and content they create, but that stuff will become the basis for the MMO. Your monsters become the spawn everyone hunts, your hero is the poor immobile dope that assigns quests, and the giant city the players all start in was completely or partially made by your own adventures!

These are just hypotheticals, of course, but they combine two aspects of video gaming today without compromising either. The network age is here, and this fact can't be ignored. But I refuse to believe that all the best games of the last two generations, from Metal Gear Solid to Silent Hill to Resident Evil to Shadow of the Colossus and even Katamari Damacy, were mistakes with nothing to contribute to the future of gaming either. By marrying the two, not only will video game costs potentially decrease, but the interested user base will increase at the same time, and it will be a great way for the industry to recruit new employees without much of the confusion that exists today. This may be only one potential view of the industry's future, but I'm optimistic it could be a successful one. If so, I'll let you know which of my creations is currently busy killing you!

My Life: A Minor Major and a Major Mistake?

I have to admit, I'm running out of obvious sources for these "life" posts. Too much of my time is invested in the art I absorb, contemplate, or write, which make up for the other four updates. What's left is some of my other interests, groups, and past, and some of that includes some of the relationship issues, which I don't like to discuss here, and some of my beliefs, which I tend to consider off limits. I can do some historical choices, however, starting with one I sort of regret. I already mentioned that I'm not satisfied with my college life. I'll specify one element, though, which I really tended to question: my major.



Now, I went into college with a number of idealistic assumptions about both college and my career plans. You see, ever since I was a child, I always wanted to be one thing: a video game designer. The hard part, now and as always, was figuring out how, but at the time, I assumed the path was pretty easy. You get it by making games. And at the time, I assumed that also meant one thing: programming.



Naive, yes, but keep in mind the state of hte industry at the time. I grew up with an Intellivision and was raised with a Nintendo and a Super Nintendo. As I was going into college and considering my choices, I remember the many choices Digipen offered. For one thing, they recently included a BRAND NEW MAJOR in, amazingly, three-dimensional game creations! This is the days before Maya, and where games took less than a year to make and a handful as many developers.



So I assumed that my first step would have to be being a computer major. I wasn't exactly wrong, mind you. This was also the era before official game writers, because, well, have you read the writing in video games at the time. For one thing, the video game industry was still largely dominated in Japan, so we were lucky to get a reasonable localization without obvious typos and grammar errors, let alone believable dialogue and descriptions. And I never had much experience in art or music design, which is a shame as those were pretty obvious paths into the industry even back in the day.



But there was more to video game designing than the programming I learned. Some of the most basic stuff was essential, yes, from learning basic programming languages to assembly language principals to the classic logic gates or electrical engineering. But programming is not my passion. As the classes got more advanced, stretching into creating an entire operating system or database administration, it became more obvious that this was going far, far away from what I planned on doing what I want in life. No, I wanted to create. I was into designing worlds, creating settings, and writing. And it's not like these elements are factoring into my real job now. I write C code in most days, or at the most some other programming or just assembly.



Now, there is one thing I didn't learn at school related to computer and really needed. That is becoming, well, the Computer Guy. That most translates into IT work, from getting people's computers up and running to troubleshooting the inevitible software errors and bugs. Oh, I can do most of the basic stuff like physically assembling a new computer and installing the basic software packages, but setting up specific requirements for, say, the office email network is nigh-impossible for me. I still have no idea where to start. The assumption that I can do these things easily and just assemble a weird, alien computer for scratch is common and very annoying to me. I don't do these things for fun. Hell, I almost never program for fun or as a hobby, I do things like, well, this.



If I could redo this, I would like to be an English major and a Computer Science minor. That woudl give me the basics

We'll take this one off.

I think my review schedule may end up becoming more erratic and much simpler, really. Instead of having one a week, have one whenever somethign reviewable comes along and aim at shorter reviews of the one page or so size. For tonight, though, this fairly weak week (heh) of blogs will have to come to a late conclusion due to lack of inspiration.

My Inspirations: The Universe and Other Mistakes

In the beginning, I regularly went to camp. This was commonly regarded as a mistake and many regret it. But we've been over this.

I did, however, make some friends, even though some of them also proved to be mistakes. But nonetheless one of them had similar interests and some things that he liked were ones I never heard of. One day, he showed me the text of a radio show from England. It involved the quaint life of a put upon British guy dealing with government imposition and bureaucracy.

And the world exploded.

Yes, I'm talking about the great Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by the late, even greater Douglas Adams. At the time, I barely got as far as the space stuff, but it was among the most hilarious thing I had ever read. It took a while longer, but I finally got a copy of the actual book, which as fans of the series know is the same basic story minus some parts, plus other parts, and with everything else rearranged into a completely different story. Douglas Adams was either a perfectionist or a loon, or to a degree both. After reading the first book, I quickly bounded to the three sequels that existed at the time and even tracked down my own copy of the radio script, letting me finally learn the original story and best of all read Douglas Adams' comments about the script and why he made decisions with his story. A lot of his reasons was "I had no idea what I was doing," but it was brilliant nonetheless.

With time, I of course read the fifth and final novel, and best of all, I had the chance to meet the man himself, mister Douglas I Don't Know His Middle Name Adams! I got my books signed, and a towel, and I even got to ask him a question. That question, which only people who read the books will admittedly get (but it's not like the rest of you got the towel thing,) was "If Earth was really the most powerful computer in the universe, why did the Hitchhiker's Guide only list it as 'Mostly Harmless?'" His response was "I screwed up." It was a classic.

The last book was nonetheless a depressing book at times, especially the end where all the protagonists apparently die. I later read in an interview that he didn't like it much himself, and he planned on writing another sequel. And then he died.

So it goes. That's a reference to another late, great, science-fiction author, but it applies here.

But despite that depressing ending, I love the series, for many reasons. The first reason, before I even learn about the wonderful characters and science fiction, was the sheer dialogue. Maybe it was because it my first bit of British humor before I even watched Monty Python. It was the little things; Arthur Dent outsmarting the construction crew, at least for a while, or his tale about how he learned about his home being destroyed in the first place. It really took off for me, though, when I got to the story and really surreal stuff. Best of all, it improves with knowledge. For example, when I first read the story, I laughed at an infinite number of monkeys writing Hamlet because of how weird it was at first, but after I learned about the theory, it was even better. It's all those levels that make this book among my favorite books every made. For a long time, it and them (especially the first three) were my top two books along with Brave New World. It's ironic that both of the original books were shorter than a Nanowrimo novel at under 50,000 words.

So, how did it inspire me? Well, part of it was the theme, but few of my ideas tend to be so depressing, with the casual death of so many people as a laugh. It's funny in a black comedy, but most of my ideas tend to have dramatic elements that make it harder. The cynicism, though, has appealed to me. I think the most important idea that affected me was taking the future and making it human. Even in a universe of aliens, advanced technology, and civilizations beyond our imagination, stupid people do stupid things for stupid reasons. I also loved the frenetic style of adventure, where there is little to know status quo. People get separated or even die, characters are sent halfway across the galaxy by accident, and people can end up in places that are not that pleasant. It makes for a very fluid method of storytelling, especially for a video game junkie so used to more linear plotlines. It does admittedly give the protagonists little control, but for the concept of the series, it makes perfect sense. Even now, I try to avoid the "hunt x bad guy around the continent in a convenient loop" or at least a very overt "defeat all the members of bad guy team y in the convenient order of their strength."

Also, I make up words all the time. Because that's just hoopy. And I know where my towel is, but it's in the car, so I might be in trouble.

My Ideas: To Boldly Rip Off Other's Intellectual Property

A long, long time ago (in Internet years,) I wrote about the first role playing game of sorts I invented and played with my friend. That sufficed for a while, but like I said, it was limited, and I tended to dominate the creative elements. In the meantime, I worked on some of my own projects, including projections of myself into fantasy, but we'll get into that more in a later blog. The bottom line is a new universe in a sci-fi/fantasy vein was being slowly created, and it was starting to take up my attention.

In the meantime, I found inspiration in a completely different way; a stupid one. You may remember Yoshi, the goofy little dinosaur Mario first rode in Super Mario World before he entered the brave new world of spin-offs himself. One of those spin-offs was a game I'm a little embarrassed to say I owned, but I was a kid and my parents got it for me, so no big deal. That game was Yoshi for the NES, which is silly since Yoshi made his debut on the Super Nintendo. This was a puzzle game in the era when "puzzle game" meant "slight variant of Tetris," and Yoshi was not the exception. But what really mattered here was that Yoshi had a simple two player mode that I played regularly with my friend. As we played, we bantered, we joked, and we made puns. We were in the 11-13 range or so, so the jokes were terrible, of course. At one point, we were joking about placing Yoshi in strange circumstances, and I suggested "Yoshtrek," which featured Star Trek with Yoshi as a captain. For some bizarre, surreal, ungodly reason, the term stuck.

My ideas outside of the game turned towards silly sci-fi epics with a bend towards humor and space exploration, with the whole Yoshi theme tying around it and my own universe at the center. Eventually, as the last RPG idea wore out, I started this one, on the assumption that all my friends would create spaceships and crew, with the potential of a silly dinosaur at the helm. It was even more free-form than my last idea, with whole aspects of the universe coming out of my mind at once. Part of this was necessary; when I let people design their teams, I didn't put any limits on how powerful they were. So many of my friends would have armadas with the equivalent of twenty Death Stars!

The entire thing was often ridiculous, like the very worst cases of escalating power struggles between power gaming munchkins and a railroading DM minus the part where there are any rules. It nonetheless somehow lasted for years before the whole mess collapsed. I'd like to think this was a testament to my storytelling skills. But I'm pretty sure it was a testament to how bored we were. Nonetheless, this was the first time I created a universe this large and complex. With time, the joke elements began to take more serious tones, the Yoshi concept was slowly phased out (later versions were just called Trek,) and, in the end, I had the basis for nearly every idea that came before or since. This multi-dimensional setting was where it all began for me, creatively, and many of the characters that are 15-18 years old now came from these silly little adventures.

The lesson here, I guess, is that inspiration doesn't necessarily come from saying "I will be inspired HERE!" Sometimes it takes taking something small and simple and letting it grow. Rarely does one have a decade to let it grow, but any time can be helpful if you don't give up on an idea. That is one of the reasons I'm posting some of these ideas online; to revisit them years after their incarnations. It's certainly not to brag, though dinosaurs piloting spacecraft arguably would be something to brag about.

Blog post tomorrow

I'm starting to realize that days I go to the gym on weekdays are not always the best days to blog. It throws my whole schedule off. But then, tomorrow's laundry day, but eh, I'll work around that.

Reviews: Getting Lost

Well, I thought the joke was cute at least. This week's review covers the entirety of season 4 of Lost, which I thought was the best one since season 1. There are many reasons why, but the first may be a matter of timing and brevity. Thanks to plans by the creators and the writers' strike, this season was little more than half the length of earlier seasons. Despite this, by waiting until so late to even start the season, the show managed to avoid having many gaps between episodes, a problem earlier seasons (especially season 2) suffered as weeks or months could pass between new episodes.

But it's the structure of the season and strength of the new characters that really made this season work. Now, nearly every season as of late has far too many "the characters walk from point A to point B" episodes, letting them take a good four episodes or so to resolve anything. For example, season 3 had an expedition from the base camp to the barracks, featuring everything from another Dharma base to a strange electromagnetic fence slowing things down. Now, any real obstacles between these points have been removed, and while it apparently takes anywhere from a few hours to over a day to get between these points, the trip itself is more of a non-event. This season's "location of mystery" is a boat located just off the coast, and while it again has a habit of taking a variable amount of time to get to and from, at least there's not an explanation of sorts; the implications are that the island has some sort of time-warping field around it, making it more obvious than ever that there's something overtly supernatural or even divine about the island.

As for the plot of the season, it revolves around determining how trusted the arrivals on the boat are and how to use that boat for all of them to escape the island, a story arc made more ominous by the general replacement of the "flashbacks," where we learned further history about the island's inhabitants, with "flash forwards," where we slowly learn that only six of the islanders manage to escape and the identities of these six.

That ominous, as we slowly learn that some conditions are inevitable while others are ambiguous, makes the season more suspenseful than many earlier ones. For example, we don't know what happens to anyone not listed as escaped until the season's finale. Are they dead? Hiding? Still trapped on the island?

As for characters, I approved of the arriving boat characters much more than the doomed tail section cast from season 2 or the overtly and pointlessly mysterious Others from season 3. Their pragmatism was refreshing, for one. The Others are mysterious because they follow some weird island-related cult not revealed for three years now, even when logic would suggest otherwise. For example, I know Juliet was forced to join and probably knew little about them, but it would be nice for Jack to at least ask, "So, what's with that whisper teleport thing you guys can do?"

The boaties, on the other hand, are mysterious because they have very conflicting objectives and some of them have the objective of "Kill everyone on the island, so let's not tell them about that yet," which makes sense. The less evil ones are there to do a job, and while most are sympathetic to the heroes, they're secretive because they have no power to decide what happens to the "locals." Again, it makes them both intelligently secretive and free to be explored as deeper characters. And many of them actually are open about their plans! The captain of the vessel, for example, will happily tell the locals anything they ask without misdirection. The only negative is that some of the season's villains, notably the mercenaries responsible for trying to kill everyone, evil to a cartoonish level, with no real signs of depth or redemption. On the plus side, this lets former villains like Other leader Ben get some sympathy and humanity, since we sometimes can root for him against a common threat. All of this leads me to give the season a solid A, making it one of my favorite shows this season once again.

The only real downside, as far as I'm concerned, is the death of one regular character (spoilers ahoy!)


That of Danielle Rouseau. She was a regular since season 1 and deserved a better death than the one she got. More importantly, her death left her character's past unexplored. We never learned what really happened to her science expedition, what drove her crazy specifically, and what she did with her life since then. But so it goes with this who; we never got a full resolution with Liddy or Mr. Eko, either. And at least the four surviving members of the expedition are more than worthy replacements. I like Charlotte the best of the four, but all four have their fans. Let's hope they are smart enough to drive sober!

Rantings: Genre Ranting #2

Today's genre discussion will revolve around another genre I don't really know huge amount about. It was a huge, though, back in ye olde days, or at least the ye olde days I experienced in junior high and early high school. As big in those days as the first person shooters are now (actually, first-person shooters were almost as big in those days too, but that's a coincidence,) the fighting game genre had just come to life at this point in history, which ranges from more or less 1990 to 1995 or so.

The first reason I'm focusing on this era, though, is that it was the only one I really followed the genre faithfully. It was the only time I really could. After this point, the genre continued, but it escaped its humble beginnings to enter sub-genres, become big on systems I didn't own, and like nearly any game with a strong multi-player component, attract a following that I clearly couldn't compete against.

But nonetheless, I should start not with my opinion on the genre but on what the genre really is. Started with primitive games like Street Fighter, the genre didn't get mainstream attention until Street Fighter 2. It also set up the systems fighting games used for years. In the usual fighting game, two fighters faced each other on (what started as) a two-dimensional battlefield, facing each other. Each character had a number of attacks ranging from weak but quick jabs to longer-ranged, more powerful strikes, and usually separated into high and low attacks like punches and kicks. These range of attacks shift by crouching or jumping, and they can block by moving the character in the opposite direction. But the characters really differentiate themselves by their special moves. Using esoteric combinations of button presses (which are usually not documented in the game themselves, more on that in a bit,) characters can leap into the air with uppercuts, perform spinning kicks, or even radiate electricity or shoot fireballs. These unusual moves helped define the game and attract them to new players.

After this game got big, many other games followed the trend with initially minor variations. Mortal Kombat simplified the number of attacks button, added a simple block button, and made normal attacks uniform in exchange for more outrageous special moves, better graphics using characters modeled on real life individuals, and lots more violence. Capcom, the makers of Street Fighter, started Dark Stalkers and other games that took the Street Fighter design but added even weirder characters. And as the next generation of consoles slowly rose to power, many series began as or moved into 3D gameplay and tried to avoid projectiles in favor of more physical special moves taking advantage of the polygon-based characters.

The unusual thing about fighting games is they have a continual conflict between two types of players; the casual gamer and the hard-core ones who seek to master the game. The series initially started favoring the latter types of gamer. In fact, special moves, which were so essential both for balancing the game and providing appeal, required the player to guess at them until they could stumble upon them or look for help elsewhere (and this was usually before obvious resources like Gamefaqs.) As the genre continued, though, especially in the 3rd edition era, the balance shifted slightly towards the beginning players as the "button-mashing" philosophy became more prevalent. In this system, a player, usually without any understanding of special moves, could simply walk up to the opponent and press buttons randomly, and yet still win. This isn't that surprising. Without projectile and other long-range movies, there's no way for someone with knowledge of special moves to catch a neophyte opponent before melee. After that, it gets trickier. Most of advanced combat is a matter of rock-paper-scissors style tactics. A strong move might be more effective but will leave a fighter open if the opponent dodges, while a fast attack is more likely to hit before the opponent can respond but could be stopped by a strong attack with better range. Against an opponent with NO strategy, tactics are reduced to guesswork.

Modern games have sought to compromise things, often by, well, making everyone unhappy. Special moves are provided more readily, and in fact more anarchic fighting games like Smash Brothers and Power Stone use a single button for special moves, making them easy to implement. For advanced players, the series expands a players abilities to dodge, evade, counter, and otherwise block attacks more efficiently. Beginning players are free to use the most interesting attacks and traits of a character. Advanced characters, however, can largely ignore the attacks in their totality and simply counter them. This is fine for beginning players and for advanced players who have earned their skill, but it makes random fights against players of each level of competence totally pre-ordained. This especially annoys those who play the above-mentioned chaotic games like Smash Brothers, which works around letting as many as four people play at once, randomly generated items that rain down on the battlefield, and battlefields themselves that are full of obstacles and shifting positions. The experienced players tend to ignore all these features, allowing only a handful of the total players, the flattest and least random landscape, two players fighting at any times, and little to no items.

As for me, I tend to hover around a mid-range level of experience. Even before the special moves were freely offered, I learned at least the basic abilities of each player and regularly used them while playing. At the most, I would learn about some of the super attacks or evasion abilities. However, I never could get into a game to point of mastering the complex counters or focusing on priority of all attacks, the exact collision boxes for attacks and frames of the attacks, and other master features. This is why my enjoyment of fighting games have petered off. I know the basic games of the series, but it's been almost a decade since I even looked at, for example, a Soul Calibur game. I nonetheless respect the genre and the difficulty of both balancing characters within a skill level and between skill levels. There's a reason my only major fighting game idea is ancient and barely a skeleton. Nonetheless, I do still play a mean game with Link!