My Life: A familiar story

Yes, I plan on doing an "idea" update. I still will in a day or more. But things changed again, and my mind is kind of directed on other things. Today, my latest temp job, well, became temporary. So I'm unemployed. Yet again. The good news is that this comes just before Nanowrimo, so I have a few days to prepare for that. The bad news is, well, I like money. And now I have to worry about unemployment benefits and the job hunt, in addition to the normal panic finding a roommate and everything else.

So that's my concern for now. That's soft of kept my attention away from Iji and karma meters, but we'll get back to it soon, I promise. Even despite writing some 2,000 words a day in the very, very, very near future.

Reviews: A whole of lot of flies, not enough ointment

I'll cut the actual reviews short this time. The only game I played since last time is Mirror's Edge, which seems to continue a theme I've seen a lot in my Gamefly rentals. It's a good game, but one with heavy flaws. That's true for pretty much every game I rented this way, including Dead Rising, Zack and Wiki, and Assassin's Creed. Call of Duty 4 is the only exception. I'm starting to appreciate Gamefly for exactly that reason. The games I bought or that were bought for me recently (by some definitions of recently,) are things like Super Mario Galaxy, Bioshock, Mass Effect, and Fallout 3, and while all of them are imperfect, as is everything, they seem much more coherent. Fallout 3, with its many glitches, comes the close, though it's also far too in-depth and long to even consider just being a rental.

The issues that these Gameflied games have are much more serious, with most threatening at least briefly to undermine the entire game or at least stop me from enjoying it. Mirror's Edge's positives include sheer innovation, the very possibility that you can play it without shooting anyone, and the moments where everything just works: when you effortlessly leap across rooftops, catwalks, and other convenient platforms like the trained and intuitive athlete like you're supposed to be. It's negatives include the incredibly precise leaps that require absolute perfection and thus result in dozens of deaths before you can advance, the obligatory or near obligatory fight sequences, and the minimal objects you have when you do fight. It doesn't help that you can maybe survive three attacks before dying. But I stuck with it until the end and tried some of the bonus material before returning it. That's a stop above Zack and a step below Dead Rising, where I beat it twice in a row. In fact, time has only made me appreciate that one more. Not only does it have the scariest enemy I've seen in years (the clock, I mean,) it's the only game that actually gave me nightmares. For a horror game, this is a plus!

I think of a scale when I evaluate these games, at least lately. The qualities and flaws are on both sides of the scales, and if the latter outweighs the former, the scale collapses and the game goes home. That's...true for pretty much all reviews, but more coherently designed games don't really need this treatment. I enjoy the games enough that the flaws are only occasionally noted, while these more questionable games have long stretches that make me question while I'm playing it. Dead Rising's resonating emotions and options outweigh the sheer stupidity, while the hours of wasted time and frustration from Zack removed the puzzle-solving excitement. Mirror's Edge are a generally positive flow with spikes of irritation. Call of Duty 4 had very few problems that I found, but my general disinterest in modern warfare and first person shooters lowered my positive reactions, though the game's famous set pieces were extremely compelling.

I find that the time it takes to beat a level and just advance also factors in. A level of Mirror's edge often took 45 minutes to an hour to finish, with two or three points were I got stuck each time. Dead Rising usually got me SOMETHING every ten to fifteen minutes, especially when I finally knew what the hell I was doing. The fact that I often had to restart levels from scratch was one of the big problems with Zack and Wiki.

Now, there was one issue I had with Mirror's Edge specifically that was less a joy versus anger scale problem and more a thematic one. In this case, it was the choices between passivity and aggression and its role in the story, or sadly the lack thereof. That's worth a more thorough evaluation, though, and comparison with another game entirely. We'll get to that next time, hopefully this weekend, and finally do a thematic discussion instead of another review or rant about my life.

Reviews: Where Free is Too Much

Like a lot of people, I've lost some interest in the Wii lately. Fortunately, Nintendo has a lot of new games coming out that caught my interest, but it shouldn't have to just be Nintendo. I want to get more third-party games, but there should be more out there than a dork murdering assassins with a light saber (not that I won't get that sequel, too.) I did try one game recently, though: the well-received if largely unsuccessful Zack and Wiki. I don't think anything is surprised that the game didn't do well. The Graphic Adventure genre was nearly dead anyway, with the exception of much cheaper games already tied to popular characters like Strongbad or Sam and Max. What surprised me, though, was how much I disliked the game. I got the game on Gamefly, where besides a monthly fee the games are free to play as long as I want until I'm ready to return it. I usually beat the game first, but here, I quit in disgust about two levels from the end.

There were a few things that bothered me about this game. The normal game play itself was fine, with one exception. There was too much use of the Wiimote (AKA the "waggle" stuff,) some of which merely hurt my hand, but quite a few that didn't work. The worst, and one of the things that finally put me off the game, was the "sword-fighting" in the penultimate level. Not only was it unwieldy and hard to block or attack, but three mistakes and you're defeated and killed! More on that point in a minute. I wasn't too fan of the game's art style, either. I love a lot of anime and Japanese-based design at large, but it can easily become too much. And this game, with its bunny pirates, high-pitched screaming monkeys, and hammy overacting pirate women, was too much. The graphics didn't exactly demonstrate the power of the system, either, not that it matters much for a game in this style.

But these weren't the things that made me give up on the game. What made me give up was the "lives" system. You see, nearly every level in the game has several ways for your character to die or otherwise lose permanently. When you die, you have only two options: start the level (which could take 15-20 minutes for the longer ones,) from scratch, or use up a limited number of lives to continue. That's bad enough for a graphic adventure game, but the real problem is the limited number of lives. It's not a limited number of lives per level, it's a number of lives per game! You only have a handful, and you have to buy more. And each life costs more than the last. To never redo the dozen or so puzzles you could have endured before yet another untimely death, you'd have to get dozens of lives and even grind for money! Have the people who made this game ever played an adventure game?

The question, I suppose, is why the combination of impossible control commands, often purely random deaths based on trial and error design, and having to replay entire levels added up to the last completely given up game for years, and the similarly flawed Dead Rising compelled me to beat it twice and still want to play it more should I find a cheap copy? For starters, as annoying as the AI and some game play issues are in Dread Rising, save points were plentiful enough that you rarely lost more than a few minutes. Wow, save points? Imagine an innovation like that in Zack and Wiki! But I think part of it was the feel of the game. I initially assumed Dead Rising was the easy zombie game, but after I learned otherwise, it was reasonable to assume a Mature-rated game based on a horrific zombie apocalypses. Zack and Wiki is so obviously a children's game that it comes into violent conflict with the difficulty. Hell, besides the limited lives, it also penalizes your score for beating the level. Where does that sound familiar? Devil May Cry, the ultra-violent, adult-themed action game famous for its difficulty. What's the point? Hell, why not just penalize the character's score and leave it at that? A player tries a level, dies a few times, beats the level, and if they really care, they can repeat the level again flawlessly. That's how I handled Dead rising. I beat the game with a bad-ish ending the first time, and then I did it again with the best level and while rescuing all the survivors. That may have literally given me nightmares, but in the end, it felt good. A monkey that turns into a bell can't say as much.

My Life: A Time of Endings

As my life gets more hectic, it's getting tougher to figure out my schedule, especially this week. It's my first 40 hour work week since my last job ended, and in the meantime I'm coming to an end to many things. My D&D game will have at the most 4 games left, including the one tomorrow. Everything from television show episode binges to web series are coming to an end and soon. Honesty, that's for the best, since the above work week means that a lot of what I could take for granted is over. This brings us to the beginnings. Sure, a lot of that are returning television shows. It also means starting a new living situation, though fortunately it might mean just having a new roommate for a few months, starting this new job pattern, and starting studies into a new toolset for a job application. Yes, this is all very complicated, and the message itself is disjointed and a bit directionless. But that's my life as well, and soon that phase will also come to an end. By next week, I at least hope to return to doing these semi-regularly.

Reviews: My First Bethesda, and Still More Zombies. Oh, and my life changes again.

Well, so much for THAT permanent change. The Monday after my last post, I finished my job. Or rather, it finished me. Apparently customer service is not my forte. Not that I mind, though part of me was bothered by the way that situation resolved itself. The real problem was how I had to hit the job running. Week one was "training week," except I had no formal training except for a guide to leaf through. Then during week two, I was tossed to a phone while one of their main customer services representatives was on vacation for more than a week and the entire office was being audited! It never got better. And the entire database was archaic, full of discrepancies and elaborate F key commands that differ for every menu. One day of learning these commands and the myriad exceptions would be enough, but updating the system with a real GUI and links to a map (say, with ties to Google Maps,) would cut the time to handle these questions in half.

Anyway, unemployment returned for a few weeks. I technically started a new job, but I'm in training AGAIN, so we'll see how this goes. So I had a lot of free time to play video games, including last month's birthday present, Fallout 3! This is my first Fallout game thanks to my focus on console games and my first Bethesda for pretty much the same reason. And my opinion? It's pretty good and I CAN'T stop playing it.

As a general rule, this isn't my type of game. Sure, it's an RPG, but it's also a shooter, which are fine except I've played little but them lately. Thank you, XBOX! Beyond that, I enjoy RPGS with strong main characters, but I also am not a fan of the constant sense of loss. In Fallout, you have to worry about how much weight you can carry (except ammo weighs nothing, nice that,) every weapon has ammo, and most importantly, every piece of equipment you have will degrade constantly. You have to constantly progress just to stay in place. Eventually, at least, that doesn't last forever. By the halfway point, the game mercifully gives out enough bonus money for minor, otherwise worthless items and just by adding places on your map. Ironically, the game then goes in the opposite direction in that I get too many rewards. The game has a maximum experience level of 20, making missions beyond that point pointless. That will change only when I spend money to get an expansion pack. As a result, I hit the maximum level after seeing barely half of the entire game! Since I plan on getting the expansion pack eventually, actually playing the rest of the game now would be a waste of the experience I would only get after I bought the expansion pack.

To make up for that, I started a second, evil character and am playing him until I'm ready to get the expansion pack. This time, I went out of my way to avoid experience bonuses, letting me see more of the game, though I still get shocked when I gain nearly an entire level from a single, short quest. Having played this game A LOT now, I can safely say that I'm ready to give my opinion. The best thing of this game is the vast number of options. Sure, you can save a town from destruction by evil forces. Or you can work with those evil forces and even press the button that turns the entire city into a mushroom cloud. The game lets you be as kind or evil as you want. Ally with noble knights in powered armors or massacre the downtrodden for evil indistrialists. Save escaped slaves or be a slaver itself. Return home to save your troubled people or murder and EAT your childhood friend! In fact, the biggest downside to the game (save for a glaring number of bugs still, from people reacting strangely to outright game freezings,) are the lack of options! For my "good person" game, I saved whole cities and am considered a messianic saint, but I didn't feel like I was helping the people overall. Hell, because random encounters get worse to match your level, the wasteland gets consistently more dangerous as you act. Thanks to the open nature of the game, this means tons of unique characters can be randomly killed off.

The one thing I really missed was any form of romantic options. Sure, the romance arcs of similar games like Mass Effect tend to be pretty limited, but at least they gave you an option. If I wanted to date, say, the quirky inventor of your hero's home base (unless you explode said home base,) why not set that up? I understand that no video game can equal your imagination. That's what tabletop role playing games (and, err, your imagination,) are for. But I still felt a bit unsatisfied. Still, that that's the worst thing you can complain about in a game, I'd call that a success.

Slightly less successful was the next game I played, Dead Rising. Dead Rising is a very Romero-esque zombie apocalypse game from Capcom. That was strange unto itself, since it was made by Capcom, who already has a zombie apocalypse series. In fact, they have the series that revolutionized the survival horror genre: Resident Evil. Capcom understandably wanted to make this series nothing like the other one, and in a way it was. Resident Evil was supposedly a survivor horror game, but it was a lot like a normal adventure game full of strange puzzles and labyrinthine police station/dungeons along with super-mutant bosses. If anything, Dead Rising cuts back on the horror in favor of the survival elements. In this one, your goal is mostly just to survive 72 hours and get as many survivors rescued and as many mysteries solved as possible. In many ways, the main enemy isn't the zombie horde, but the clock. Often you have to find a way to escort a horde of survivors with only minutes to spare before the next plot point flag.

The lack of "horror" also makes the zombie fights less horrific, and they knew it, so they made it more fun. Gone are the evolved super-mutants, with only two varieties of zombies: normal slow, shuffling zombies and slightly more aggressive slow, shuffling zombies. Instead, the boss enemies are all humans gone mad or just evil in the wake of the zombie disaster. The game's appeal comes, at least initially, from an endless hoard of slow-moving, shuffling zombies and the myriad ways you can mess with them.

This coupled with the time and survivor escorting elements, however, made for a game that seemed to hate itself. Yes, it's fun wacky times killing zombies en masse with a lawnmower, or running over them with a car, or putting silly hats on them mid-fight, or beating on them with novelty weapons like huge teddy bears, but if you actually try to, you know, win the game, the difficulty quadruples. Zombies you laugh at when you run past become deadly threats to the five or more very, very stupid people you try to escort to safety. And so you have to go out of your way to save them, which puts you in danger as well, and believe me, nothing is more fun than being grappled three times in a row and having to do quick-time events each time. And so you soon realize you have to forget the joke items and focus on real killing weapons like every other zombie game. The main offender here is a single optional boss fight that becomes an easy mode (or at least less hard mode) option. Defeat him and you get unlimited access to deadly hand-held chainsaws, AND you discover a convenient teleporter that gets you from the single farthest point from safety, a point that normally requires traveling though the most choked zombie points or into a battle with insane convicts armed with a jeep and turret, to within sauntering distance of the safe house.

It makes the game hard to appreciate it. I rented it expecting mindless fun and got something often frustratingly hard. The time limit and stupid victims, who eagerly avoided easy routes to run into swarms of zombies and needed help from inescapable grapples constantly, were a nightmare. Literally. There were some rough nights there. As a game, it worked and it was certainly engrossing (both in pun and non-pun definitions,) but it certainly needed just a little more time to get the rough parts out. And the story had issues as well. It was your usual horror movie cheese, intentionally humorous at times, but it had some clever twists involving multiple endings. If you just survive the 3 days, you get a generally positive ending, but if you finish all the story missions, you can get into longer endings involving secret government conspiracies, obvious sequel hooks, and a fairly uninspired final boss fight. What's odd, though, is the endings don't always make sense collectively. I'll avoid spoilers, but just for an example, one character who is perfectly fine in the normal ending becomes a zombie in the good endings, despite nothing remotely related to this changing. Similarly, the game is really vague about just how you become a zombie. Your fellow survivors become a zombie if they are killed by zombies, sure. But you and pretty much every one of them will get at least damaged by zombies, and yet some parts of the game insist that even a zombie bite could infect you. What, were the zombies just gumming people to death otherwise? Is this Schrodinger's zombie apocalypse?

Ultimately, I'd at least suggest people play these games. Fallout 3 is recommended for anyone with plenty of free time, and Dead Rising to anyone without blood pressure problems. And yes, this is at least two updates I merged into one after the first was embarrassingly late. Things have been weird, lately. I'll get into that more some time in a week or so.

My Life: A Change For the Permanent-y?

So, change is happening again! Yay! Yay. First of all, I may or may not have found a semi-permanent job again. That's the good news. The bad news is that, for now, it pays $10 an hour so people can scream at me about garbage. In other words, we're talking about customer service. I'm a temp to hire for now, so I'm temping and may get hired for a more reasonable $13 an hour in three months. Whether I'm up to that is another story, but we'll see. In the meantime, I have a more immediate concern. My roommate is declaring bankruptcy and moving out next month. That's not a big problem, since my lease ends that month as well and I was planning on moving out anyway. That means, however, that I need to find a new place and, more importantly, another roommate. I can find a cheaper place than this, yes, but a cheap place paid by myself is still much more than two people paying for a single place.

So that's my next two panic situations. I have at least one link for the apartment issue that I have to check out tomorrow, so my great fear, moving back with the parents, appears to be averted for now. But it's not so simple. Part of me hopes to live in or closer to the city so I can theoretically enjoy it's presence. But that makes me too far from my current job, so I likely can't keep it. No big loss, but it might mean losing my unemployment. And there's also the cost and hassle of moving. Being a nitwit, I bought a lot of nice furniture, and while I finally paid all of it, it's all really damn heavy. I need either a lot of help or movers. Either way, it'll be trickier, but at least it won't be in the winter like the one time I helped my brother move. And I probably won't need to drag a couch up a balcony by a tow rope and almost drop it on a car. That's a good story, that one, but not one I want to relive with stuff I paid for.

So that's the first two phases of my process. This isn't the best time to finally get back to my D&D game and try to sell my screenplay next year. But, I'm doing it anyway!

My Ideas: Something Quick and Crazy

Like most artists (and wannabes who want to call themselves artists) I get many of my ideas from my life. In my case, though, it tends to be less about my real life, and more about the lives I imagine had things been different. Or, even better, a life that's nowhere near normal and careens headlong into weird. After all, if I can't have a normal life, why not aim for something better? And because I have a decent number of regrets with how my life went, lately, my fantasies relate to how I could alter things if I could start over, armed with knowledge I had (or could get if I had a day to prepare.)

These ideas usually stat with me returning to myself at age seven, right about when my family moves to a new town. That's where I generally pinpoint where things went "wrong" for me. I never really adjusted to a new town, which lead to being bullied and ostracized, which made things difficult in high school, and so on. Now, it wouldn't be rewriting time itself. After all, any change I made could cause some people to die as they otherwise lived, or even prevent them from being born. My niece was born 3 years ago, and I wouldn't want to change anything if it meant effectively murdering her. So instead, I would be reborn in an alternate dimension, where "me number 2" could alter this dimension as I saw fit without consequence.

How I do that depends on how little and opportunity I had. My minimalistic version is mostly a matter of confidence and knowledge. I would approach school, for example, in a more assertive way, and much more importantly I won't give a damn about bullies. I still won't worry about sports, but I can try some that I might enjoy more than friggin' volleyball. You know, martial arts, goofy crap like fencing, even something like track. More importantly, I could focus on my video game interests from a much younger age, learning Japanese and even some programming as early as age eight.

But it wouldn't be my idea if I couldn't exploit it more than that. At the minimum, I could easily use it for simple acts of gambling. I certainly would be one of the few to know who shot Mr. Burns, for example. And of course I'll have at least a general knowledge of who to invest in. Now, my fantasies tend to be far more advanced, including not just one, but multiple iterations of this repeated life, letting me easily track lottery numbers and whatnot. I also included the concept of an extradimensional space that also follows me into the past. This ever-expanding "suitcase" would freeze in time when close, but when opened, I could put objects in for later time-skips. This could include newspapers, textbooks and scientific journals, and other ways to help the people of 1986 thanks to the people of 2009. I could warn celebrities and others of their upcoming deaths to prevent or prepare for them, advance science in 20 year iterations, and even prevent disasters like 9/11!

By iteration 5 or so, my theories become pure science fiction. I could even become a cyborg or something better as early as seven or eight. Eventually, I could even invite people into the extra-dimensional space, letting them travel to other dimensions as well as part of a permanent community dedicated to advancing technology. There is no overt end result, but I hope it ends with understanding space and time enough to end the cycle myself, even traveling to earlier dimensions to help the people I left behind when I traveled into the past; even leaving clones is a possibility. But I also wanted an option to stay behind if I ever was so happy with one iteration that I don't want to leave it behind. In that option, the "suitcase" and all the messages I have in it are left to a normal, otherwise unaware seven year old me and I could continue to live my life.

But eventually, like all my ideas, I eventually decided this could be more than a fantasy. It could be a game idea! The game, tentatively called "New Dawn," takes place in a more limited fantasy dimension, but the idea is the same. The player can improve mental stats and retain memories and evidence to change history, though of course each change results in consequences that the player didn't experience last time. Now, for a video game, a goal might be necessary. Maybe something catastrophic happens right before the time-skip, like an alien invasion or the planet being destroyed, and the player must improve technology or magical research enough to stop this threat, thus ending the time skip. There can even be other people with the same ability, and the player has to compete against them by advancing faster than them or finding them and stopping their progress in some way (erasing their memories? Destroying everything in their suitcases? Just making them happy enough that they won't pass their consciousness to another iteration?)

And because my ideas tend to be weird and focused on relationships, I also had one last addition. Either as the default or as an optional ability, exactly one thing would change about the player with every iteration: the player's gender. This would force a new perspective, and it would potentially open up entire new relationships. I say potentially because I don't even know how to start figuring out the player's sexuality in that situation, let alone that of every potential romantic interested, though in the former the ideal is probably just let the player decide.

Is it a possible video game? Sure, even if that last part might go, and provided the budget for a such an expansive game is there. But it's just as important a thought exercise. What would you do? What are the ethics of removing potential people, or potentially possessing your own seven-year old self? How much of your identity is tied up to your body and your experiences? And after a few iterations, how much of your humanity would be left? After centuries of knowledge and multiple body alterations, would you think of yourself as a person, a monster, or a god? How much evil would you be willing to inflict if you know that, at least from your perspective, it would all be reset? At the very least, it's a good insight into what the hell is wrong with me. As for when the "alternating gender" idea entered into the equation, well, I'll let that one go.