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.