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...