Arivall’s and Departures

I had this 1000+ word manifesto chronicling the these past two weeks and my computer decides to randomly turn off and do no saving at all.

Shitfuck! Damnit, holiday language Roly, holiday language. Um, Eff this ess, man!

Instead of frustratingly pound on my keys until they break, I’m just gonna go ahead and calmly not rewrite it all from memory, and do a slight paraphrase on some of the things I touched on and maybe get to it at a later some other time when I don’t feel like putting my monitor on the floor and continuously stomp on it until my leg gets tired.

Week before last: heartbreaking. Games for Windows magazine left me. Thankfully, all the editors are still around at 1UP.com and will continue their content delivery there, but unfortunately the art team Michael Jennings and Rosemary Pinkham were both laid off. I have a soft spot for GFW, as they are my favorite, most intelligent group of editors whom I look up to greatly for their integrity and commitment to their careers. Had it not been for them, I’m not so sure I’d be determined in this whole writing thing. I owe a lot to them.

Weekend before this one: amazing in every respect.

This past weekend: I did a stupid amount of nothing and it kept teetering back and forth between semi-entertained and absolutely miserable for reasons that I’d rather not go into, thanks.

I bitched about stupid game conventions like, artifically lengthening gameplay time, putting a lot of the blame on Japan. They just can’t seem to wrap their heads around a lot of modern game design conventions. Case-in-point: Lost Odyssey and Devil May Cry 4: Lost Odyssey in that near end-game it falls apart by making you grind, thus making you backtrack to areas that you’ve already been and run around in circles like a fool until a random battle decides to occur and you do this seemingly insessintly and unendingly until you gain 5-10 levels, I didn’t take so kindly to that.

Then there was Devil May Cry 4 — you spend the entire game going through above-average designed levels and bosses, until the main character thus far gets taken out of the picture and you get to run through all the levels again before you’re allowed to see the ending. Again, man. Japan. I’m not putting all the blame all developers, but the majority is certainly guilty of retarded game design conventions that artificially lengthen game time, and now they don’t really do anything but frustrate me.

I just put Devil May Cry 4 down the second it even proposed that to me, and since I was actually vested in the Lost Odyssey narrative, I found a guide on the internet, read up on the events leading to the end and got whatever closure I could from the thumbnail sized YouTube screen.

Karen Chu and Patrick Joynt had the most kickass wedding ever, complete with Rock Band, an acoustic rendition of the evergreen Still Alive, and rick rolling. If and when I do wed, I definitely want it just as amazinggly incredible as theirs. Best wishes, guys!

Grand Theft Auto IV can’t make it to me quick enough, the wait is unbearable. It’ll be here by Wednesday if the United States Postal Service and God loves me, if they don’t, probably not.

And that was about it, kiddos. Except last time, it was way more drawn out with many, many more words, with much, much more detail.

Spring break was so full of fail. Not spring break itself, but moreso the timing of everything during spring break. And when it finally decided to get good, it ended. Funny how it works out that way. If it was at all possible, I’d like to relive this past weekend, if not stretch it out to the length of the week. It wasn’t terrible by any means, it was just kinda ‘blah!’ and then it decided to end.

In honor of the impending release of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, the first half of break was spent (re)playing through as much Metal Gear Solid I could get my hands on. For me, that meant Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. I don’t have $30 to just all out spend on that amazingly cheap and tempting Essential Pack.

At first I was kinda down on the original, simply because the visuals. But with upscaling filters and an 8800GTS, that problem was solved pretty easily. By and large it looked like a PS1 game (i.e. shit), but I dealt with it somehow. Probably because of the codec sequences, the character development and pure nostalgia. As bat-shit motherfucking insane as Kojima is, he and his team know how to take a concept and turn it into nothing short of a masterpiece.

After marathon-manning my way through the first I immediately jumped right into the second, and still don’t get why everyone bashes Raiden. Sure, his girlfriend, Rose is royal pain in the ass, but that’s not her fault! Actually, I do kinda get it. Everyone wanted more Snake. But even so, the game was every bit as good as the first. Get a few drinks in me and I may go crazy and suggest that it’s better, but shh don’t tell anyone.

That nostalgia fueled trip reminded me that it’s been a full 10 years since I played through the first. That means I was probably six-ish, or so — that’s a long time to be following a story of any kind. Of course, my feeble six-year-old mind couldn’t make anything out of what the hell was going on. But I do remember loving every second of it. And what’s more is I don’t replay through games often, if you recall, but I savored every moment while revisiting of those two games.

I guess it’s a sentiment as to how much I love those games, now I can only hope that MGS4 won’t let me down and that I’ll have my grubby little paws on it day one. Now it’s time for the MGS media blackout, I want to go in clean. Probably not gonna work so well.

I think the only other game I’m looking forward to as much as MGS4 is GTA4, but I’m sure I’ll splurge about that when I am good and ready.

Speaking of games you’ve played through before, I was able to get a hold of Lost Odyssey. And while I haven’t actually played through it per se, I may as well have. I mean, this is Final Fantasy, just without outright being called Final Fantasy, and it also doesn’t have the suck that quite a few Final Fantasy’s have had as of late.

It’s pretty much the spiritual successor to Final Fantasy and for two big reasons – producer and director Hironobu Sakaguchi and composer Nobou Uematsu were heavily involved with the project and from what I’ve seen so far it has reinvigorated my love for JRPG’s — but I think very specifically in the context of next-gen.

After playing for a good 14 hours or so, I’m still enamored with the world that they’ve built and the characters that they’ve surrounded it with. Kaim wasn’t so great until the end of Disk 1, he finally opened up and started talking once he stumbled upon Cooke and Mack. Seth is kinda take it or leave it, she doesn’t annoy me, so that’s always a plus. Jansen is hilarious in every sense of the word, and is by far my favorite so far. And then there’s Cooke and Mack. So great; both of them — I don’t really ever recall playing as children in any game. But my selective memory is probably kicking in right this second.

I’m not really gonna speak on the visuals, it’s on AAA caliber. Probably due to the UE3 engine, but I think that it may be selling the talent of Mistwalker Studios a little short. What I do blame UE3 for are the oft load times, and when I say oft I mean “Shitfuck, it’s loading again! Time to go make dinner.”

The audio definitely struck a chord, though. From the voice acting which is spot on with every single character thus far and Mr. Uematsu has definitely not lost his touch — his compositions, while very FF derivative, are still nothing short of great. I’m looking into finding the OST, that’s how good.

There was a depressing sequence of events that went down near the end of Disk 1, won’t really go into specifics for fear of spoilers, but it is by far the most emotional moment I’ve ever experienced in any game ever. Even teared up a bit. Shut up.

I’m not sure if that whole gaming renaissance was me being late to the party, or if it was just my homecoming party to all the games that I was in complete, utter love with games that were (or might as well have been) in my childhood. Either way, I’m quite content with being a gamer right this second.

I know I’ve stirred up the pot when it comes to cutscenes, but as you may have heard, I’ve been playing the MGS series and a JRPG, both notorious for cutscenes. And although they are quite verbose, to say the least, I was quite content with sitting through them. Even though they were cutscenes I still found myself being perfectly content throughout. Guess I don’t detest them as much as I thought I did, even though I would much rather have embedded narrative, instead of taking a break from gameplay and watching a movie. But that’s beside the point. The point is that I enjoyed them, regardless of length and occurrence.

And since fortunately my break wasn’t just games, I was able to hang with friends and meet new people.

For the most part, I was falling asleep during the wee hours of the morning and waking up in the early afternoon, was either up playing games until my eyes hurt or until whoever I was speaking to would decide that they’d like to go to bed. Go figure. A lot of the week was spent talking to Cindy — Update: she’s still awesome. Except for on Friday, for reasons I won’t get into.

On Friday we decided to hang out at a local mall, The Falls. It was between semi-fun and fun. But regardless, it beat a night just by myself. She brought a few of her friends; David and Kirsten. The only real way to describe them altogether is interesting.

As they were making a video blog (at the Apple store) some random guy decided to walk right by and intrude. When we inquired about said random guys’ name, he simply replied Captain Jack Sparrow. So, like any other fun loving group we humored him, and proceeded to interview him. I’ll see if I can convince Cindy to upload that ish on YouTube.

After that meeting of meetings Cindy had to go, and I soon after.

The next thing I know it’s Saturday, and I’m playing Lost Odyssey for entirely too many hours, then decide to toss it off for a little while because there was some girl named Andrea Gabriela Lopez begging for attention, and thus far, I’m pretty content with having put LO aside to talk to her, because so far, she’s pretty cool. She’s fairly entertaining and she gets me. She’s also quite forgiving, as I woke her up at 1am, because my brother had just woken me to inform me of his whereabouts and I decided that I wasn’t gonna be able to sleep. So I decided I’d call her, and she was surprisingly not mad, and even more surprisingly she humored me and talked until we decided that we should at least get an hour or two of sleep before the day begins.

I lied.

It was actually just mostly her, because I know that I can function on E, so I felt really guilty for keeping her up because she had like a billion things to do, and wake up at 5:15, as opposed to my 6:30.

So, yeah. This is a semi-apology for what I put her through. I’m Sorry! Kinda. A little.

Now. Back to Lost Odyssey.