Merry Monthly Update: December 2014

Falalalalalalalalala,

I think things of note in the past month are all the many fun links I discovered by using google + and joining all these indie game, game map and game design groups.   I will be assembling a collection of said links in a post coming soon to an internet near you.

Another thing is that I started playing Chrono Trigger again.  Been a long time for that one.  So far, so good, it's a nice way to get my 16bit jRPG fix.  I think I might actually like the game more this time around than I did when I first played it.  I think it's a lack of competition - back then I was always playing like three jRPGs.

A third thing is I read a Michael Moorecock book: The Sword of the Dawn.  Very interesting, vaguely familiar and completely pulpy fantasy novel from the 60s.  It’s a far-future dystopia situation, following a sword-fighting German hero named Hawkmoon.  It takes place on earth, but bears little resemblance to our world.  There’s magic, and technology, and the names of current countries are vaguely based on present-day countries.  It’s fun sometimes to figure out what they are.  Amerikh – America.  Granbreten – Great Britain.  Asiacommunista – china.  It was a fun book, light reading with plenty of swashbuckling and a dash of gruesomeness.

In December, if everything goes according to plan,  I’m going to stop by the comic shop and buy another book in the series.   I'm also going to play Chrono Trigger and Magic the Gathering - queue of unplayed Steam games be damned!  And I guess I’ll see my family or something.  

-D

P.S.  I also picked up the novel Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut.  So far, it's very Kurt Vonnegut, which is a good thing.  

Emulator Hour: Xenogears (PS1)

Seems like a sufficiently villainous goal

You know, in my endless pursuit of nostalgia, I've come to the conclusion that the Playstation 1 actually had a lot of really great games.  Back in the great CD Burn-off of '01, I acquired quite a few excellent RPGs from Square.  In fact, I think the rate of US release for Square really increased around that time.  'Only in Japan' was no longer a phrase to frustrate the RPGphile.

Xenogears - it's been twelve years since I played through the first disc, but I still remember it like yesterday.  Would I do it again?  Maybe.  I think I'll just read a plot summary instead.   This is a very good plot summary, full of love and criticism.   You know, I played this game yesterday for barely an hour, and I've had its image in the back of my mind all day today.  I think this may be due to the sheer number of hours I put into it twelve years ago.  This  game is long-  50 hours on one disc!  (of two)

Playing Xenogears is like watching 300 episodes of some Shonen Anime.  You know - the kind whose story just keeps getting bigger and bigger, new twists, bigger bad guys, greater powers.  Xenogears is epic, sweeping, daring and strange.  The music is good, the environments have character, the battle system is fun.  All in all, a great jRPG from 1998.  

 But, there's no getting around it:   Xenogears starts to drag after while.  Then it proceeds to drag on for a very long time.  After a point, it's hard to say what is dragging the most, the story or the gameplay.  You start to notice the encounter rate is maybe a bit too high.  Or that the story simply takes too long to reveal things that it has been hinting at for a long time.  On the one hand, I like that the game takes its time with the story.  On the other hand, when two things are dragging at once, it really takes its toll.  This game is in dire need of an editor.

And yet... I would still consider playing it through again.  Or at least trying.  Boy it would be nice if I shorten some of the gameplay though.  It feels weird to say so, like some kind of betrayal of my young self, who loved long games.  But it's true, and I don't think it's just me being old. I think that Zeboyd games were onto something when they made monster encounters manual.  Or Chrono Trigger with the encounters being featured on the screen, sometimes avoidable, sometimes predictable, but not hyper-persistent and random.   There are so many times when I'd like to explore a little-- hell, even hear some more of the music play out, but I know I'm going to hit a random encounter every five seconds.  In an already long game, this is just too much. 

So, ultimately I'd say Xenogears:  play at your own risk.  If you like jRPGs, particularly 90s era RPGs, Xenogears is a great game.  Compelling, unique and mysterious.  But it takes like 50 hours to get through the first disc, and it can really drag.

It's really tough to encapsulate Xenogears in just a pic or two.  But here's a cast shot.

 
P.S.  I decided to read through the Let's Play Xenogears article rather than play through the second disc.  It was enjoyable and entertaining, with music links for each scene, and a pretty funny sense of humor.  I can only recommend it as a cop-out for those of us unwilling to dump another 20 hours into this game.  

P.P.S.  Xenogears gets a lot of criticism - the same criticism I also levied against it.  So here's an article from Joystiq coming to its defense.  It really is a great game!   Mostly.

Never Too Old For Video Games

I like to visit Cracked.com on about a weekly basis.  Conklederp knows which authors she likes while I usually don't remember who wrote what article.  I recently read two video gaming articles by John Cheese, whom I thought I didn't like after reading two of his articles, although I don't remember what those articles were about.  Anyway, one of his recent articles was titled "5 Ways to Tell You're Getting Too Old For Video Games."  It was a pretty good article, as far as Cracked articles go anyway, in that I was agreeing or disagreeing with what I thought were reasonable thoughts.

Here, I'll list his headlines along with my own thoughts on each topic.

5.  You Think Multiplayer is Bullshit.

While I don't think that multiplayer in its entirety is the collected fecal matter of our tasty bovine friends, I do not find it to be as much a selling point as other people.  Having grown up as a console gamer, multiplayer, let alone online multiplayer wasn't always an option.  The majority of the games I purchased and played were single player games (Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, Eternal Darkness, Dragon Warrior, et cetera), and those that had a multiplayer element to them (Duck Hunt, Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy III/VI, Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Time Splitters), I didn't play to their fullest extent.  Sure I played a bit of multiplayer on Goldeneye whenever Dr. Potts was over, or a couple other friends, but it was never my main purpose for the game.  

With current generation consoles, each have some type of subscription/fee  component (Xbox Live, PSN and Wii Points), which I don't feel that I will ever need, partly because I don't have either system, but also because I don't want to interact with teenage douche bags yelling obscenities at me.  If I'm going to play multiplayer (most likely on the PC), I'd rather just play online with someone whom I know.

4.  You Think Games Are Suddenly Too Long

The three games that John Cheese references in this article (Skyrim, Fallout 3 and World of Warcraft) I have never played so I can't comment directly on any of these games.  I do know what he is talking about when he says that there seem to be a lot more side quests than actual story points.  I on the other hand tend to like side quests, but only to a certain extent.

I didn't do the Golden Chocobo side quest in Final Fantasy VII so that I could earn the "Knights of the Round" materia.  I liked the initial idea of breeding Chocobos, but the amount of time that it would have taken to find Chocobos from all over the world, to me seemed pointless; especially when there was a chuck of rock plummeting towards the planet.  In other games like Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2: Grimoire of the Rift, however, I did as many side quests as I could lay my hands on.  Maybe this is something with more recent video games trying to drag out the length of time it takes to "complete" a game, but then that just reinforces that I'm aging when it comes to video games, but whatever.

3. You Miss Game Storylines That Were Actually Compelling

I'm about 50/50 with Mr. Cheese's views on this point.  While I do agree that some of the Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior  (I'm also going to throw in Chrono Trigger) games had very in depth story lines that would rival that of some of the books that I was reading at the time, I don't feel that I was putting myself into the role of the characters that I was playing, which would be why I felt they were more "in depth" when I was a kid than now that I'm an "adult."

Part of my problem might be that as I don't have any of the "next-gen systems," I haven't played many of the newer games that seem to lack story lines.  However, how many people who played Super Mario Bros. felt that the story line was lacking and how did an Italian plumber, presumably from New York got to the Mushroom Kingdom.  That's never explained in-game.  In The Legend of Zelda, all the back story is told in the instruction booklet and just after the opening titles, which don't even play when you start a game.

But yes, I feel that story, for me at least, is very important if I want to have any emotional feelings towards the game I'm playing.  Sometimes I don't want there to be a story, for example, in the first Doom.  You start the game without any introduction, but you know that you need to shoot anything on the screen, and sometimes, that's all I want to do.

2.  You Think Originality is Dead

Sometimes I'll think "Huh.  I've played this game before, why do I want to play it again?"  Being the person that I am, I will usually look into games before I buy them (although with the Humble Bundles, I don't really care too much, and just think that this type of business model is very awesome).  That being said, I sometimes don't mind playing a familiar type of game over and over again.  

Yes, I do appreciate originality in video games, but sometimes I like to play something that I know, even if it's a "brand new" game that came out the previous year that's based on a platformer from 1990.  Mr. Cheese acknowledges this too when he says "The industry looked just as cookie cutter then as it does now." It's very similar to the movie industry. There'll be a period when westerns are all the rage, or where we're at right now, where anything to do with zombies or vampires will sell millions, just because of the subject matter.

1. You Miss When Games Used To Be "All About Fun."

To be honest, it seemed like Mr. Cheese began to ramble here, as if he didn't actually have "5 Reasons...." but only had four and desparately tried to come up with the fifth.  He starts off about the "look" of games versus the amount of "fun" and then trails off  about how the repetitiveness of games meant they were fun for younger players.

Maybe it's because I've been constantly playing video games for, roughly, the last 24 - 25 years, that I'm able to go back and play Castlevania or Donkey Kong Country and still have fun.  Granted some of that fun may turn into frustration, but I'd rather have that feeling than the feeling that I'm kicking ass at a game because it's too easy.  I actually remember not being able to beat a lot of games, which probably bothered me on some level, but yeah, I had fun.

Conclusion:  No, I don't believe that I'm too old for video games.  Like anybody in any genre in any form of media, I'm not going to like everything out there, but I tend to know what I like.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

The Road Goes Ever On And On....