So This Whole 'Terra Battle' Thing...

On October 9, Terra Battle was released on iOS and Android platforms. Oh, I'm sorry, you haven't heard? That's fine, neither have the rest of us. The gaming press has been strangely (and maybe a little bafflingly) mum on the game now post-release, and only a handful of previews made it out of PAX this year where the game was finally shown off to the Western audience.

As a game built for cell phones and tablets, this isn't that confounding; most video game outlets are either overwhelmed with the ocean of regular releases for games found on Apple's App Store or Google Play Store to have time to sift through them all, or simply shrug their shoulders at the whole idea of iOS/Android gaming because most this ocean is polluted with obvious shovelware. The good stuff out there, your Hearthstones and Ridiculous Fishings, tend to be tiny islands.

But even if it were a numbers game alone, this would make the good stuff seem that much greater. There are a lot of, say, free-to-play card games out there, but games like Rage of Bahamut, Assassin's Creed: Recollections, and Hearthstone stand out among because of their smarter, more tactical design, higher production value, and careful balancing of the format's nearly uncontested free-to-play business model. The fact that AC:R, Hearthstone, and others like Epic/ Chair's Infinity Blade and Capy's Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP have the other major attention grabber at their disposal --a developer's name recognition-- is the other side of the iOS/Android popularity coin. We know that a game made by Blizzard will at least look great and play well and, while that doesn't guarantee a perfect product, they're at least made with some thought behind them.

So why in the world has there been no mainstream press for Terra Battle?

It's certainly holding a distinct pedigree. Chiefly designed by Final Fantasy series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi and a small team at his Mistwalker studio, the game has decades of RPG experience behind it with all of the success and struggle that's come along for the ride. Production value isn't exactly through the roof for such a low-key game, but the art and music (made by the same art directors as Mistwalker's Wii release The Last Story and Final Fantasy series vet Nobuo Uematsu, respectively) is clean and eye-catching. Sakaguchi himself was in the media eye a few weeks ago to drum up some interest before the launch, but since then, a whole lot of nothing.

And, you know, the game is good, too; it's easy to pick up and play but has a fair amount of depth, and the balance of free-to-play mechanics doesn't feel so mercenary. I'll get into more of that with a review in a day or so.

But come on, people. Why aren't you talking about this?

The Double Down: Destiny and Diablo III

Hello again, everyone and no one.

Last November, you may recall, I got really, really drunk one night and bought myself a PlayStation 4. I played varying degrees of of Resogun and Warframe for a month or two, and then kind of said, alright. Good stuff should be rolling along soon enough. No sense in spending virtual money on free-to-play nonsense and the occasional DLC update. And then a year went by. Still no games bought for my snazzy PS4.

Sure, being a PS+ subscriber has afforded me a steady drip of indie content provided to me every month by Sony, so I guess you could say that the $50 I spend every year to keep the service means that I dropped at least some coin into this thing (if we're being semantic jerks about it), but I passed on InFamous: Second Son (which is still a stupid name to type), the Metal Gear demo, and a few other things. Then, and for some reason I was even surprised by some of this, games were getting delayed left, right, and center. Where's The Witcher 3 (and a bunch of other stuff I can't remember off the top of my head), I would say. Yes, the network capabilities of the PS4 is monumentally better than the PS3, so firing it up and streaming Netflix is a lot easier, but that's not why I bought this thing; I wanted cut up bad guys, shoot monsters, and agonize over stats in new and interesting ways. Where was the cutting and the shooting and the math-ing? My god, WHERE'S THE MATH-ING?

And so, with summer and the fall release calendar looming, I finally decided that enough's enough, and I need to get some return on this investment that's more than a sort-of-free PS+ copy of Don't Starve and a re-release of Pixel Junk: Shooter (though they're both really good). There is one game that I'm legitimately looking forward to in Dragon Age: Inquisition (I'm starting to hate colons, by the way), but that's not going to be here until November. What to do, then? Impulse buy Diablo III: Reaper of Souls, that's what.

I had never played a Diablo game before this, but I've played plenty of its progeny. The two Torchlight games are crazy good, and I spent enough hours with them then this should be a slam dunk, right? Well, yes, right, D3 is really good. But for some reason, I never want to play it. I come home, hang with the wife, fire it up out of duty because I spent $60 on it, and work my way into enjoyment like Cagney forced himself into a rage for White Heat. I knew that I would have a good time with the game, but I needed to push myself into it. After a little bit of thought, I think I've figured out why.

First, I love RPGs. I love getting new equipment and screwing with the stats. Note that I never said that I'm good at them; I'll never get involved in MOBA competitions, loose connection that they have, or play PvP Dark Souls just for the sake of it. But, as a personality quirk, I love killing things efficiently. Higher level weapons and grinding for the experience points to use them means I can stomp on things faster and, by my reckoning, better. If I have to learn some sort of arcane JRPG system with a silly name to do so, fine. Just let me get beefier, and let me make much shorter work of that dragon over there. Yes, that one, with the curry stain on its chest. Diablo lets you do this from jump street. Yes, the first few missions of the game leave you a little weak as far as equipment goes, but you gain levels with such reckless speed that this doesn't seem to be a problem since you're pretty much constantly gaining new special abilities for better enemy swatting.

But it was all a joke. After ignoring the advice of the internet at large, I played through it the first time with the Demon Hunter class on normal difficulty and --literally-- blasted my way through the game. The endgame bosses were bullet sponges, sure, but posed about as much of a threat as the pad of sticky notes right underneath my monitor. Yes, I've been slowly picking at it since on the various Adventure modes with different character builds since then, but have only in the last few days have I found a renewed interest in Diablo III, but I'm leaving it alone for now. That's because I'm a weak-willed idiot.

Destiny is an RPG about shooting things. It's unquestionably the biggest release of the year, and it's a game that I already had buyer's remorse for the second I agreed to pre-load it from the PlayStation Network on Monday night. Why did I do this? Again, I'm kind of an idiot. I played the beta build of the game earlier in the Summer and thought, yeah, this is good; the shooting feels smooth and the production value is through the roof, so at least it will run well. But it was joyless. The Borderlands games have taken the concept of the RPG/shooter and placed in its own very distinct wackiness. Bungie, talented and well-funded production studio that it is, has ostensibly remade Halo for a wider audience and with a wider expanse. It's all very self-serious and dramatic. Do all games need to have a sense of humor like Borderlands? No, but the concepts aren't very far off, and you don't need to take too many steps back to see it. Destiny is a beautiful shooting game, but it's a game with guns and enemies and jumping and the occasional grenade when you're not feeling too conservative with your armaments. That shit is everywhere. Full disclosure, then: I didn't plan on buying this, even though I thought it was pretty good from the beta. A friend of mine that lives kind of far away suggested that we get it and play it together. So maybe I have erratic purchasing habits, but at least I'm a good friend.

Let's go back to Diablo for a second. I mentioned a second ago that I had just found the carrot dangling in front of me to keep playing it. Ok, I say "found" when I really mean "started doing." In the Torchlight games, my favorite activity would be to find amazing, low-level equipment, dump it in my shared stash box, and superpower brand new characters. I get sick of it sooner or later, and just move on to another class. That's how this genre of game tends to work: make a character and battle through it the first time, but having something tangible to show for it when you want to try things a different way with a new character. In Diablo, this means forging crazy armor sets and scoring super rare loot. I can't say enough how much I love overpowering characters and steamrolling the idiot monster mooks that get in my way. I'm finally at the point in the game where this is a viable concern now that I've got one maxed out character and another pretty close. Rare loot is coming fast and loose these days, which means that monk I want to roll up later tonight will be a lesser god before it hits level 10.

Destiny doles out the new gear with much less frequency. So far, it's only been an hour here and there over the last few days, so I don't even know for sure if there's crafting yet, but I can't wait until I hit that same threshold. This morning, I scored a sniper rifle that, for whatever reason, has a minimum level requirement much below where I'm currently at. That will be for you, future second character. Maybe the buyer's remorse is starting to fade away.

But that's what it took, I guess: two games that I talked myself into buying to make this nearly year-old gaming console a going concern in my home. Even though it's a little early to tell with Destiny, it looks like got lucky with them. But, man, so I still want some new, brain melting stuff.

This Funk is a Deep Funk

Your concern for me has been heard, internet. Even though you haven't called or written or sent over a casserole, your Jungian group think has nudged at me, and let me know that you care. The disturbance in the Force was felt. Here I am. Alive, writing words into ether. But it's been a long time, amiright? Yes. Yes, it has; and I don't have a very good excuse for being away this time other than the cold hard truth: I'm in a funk.

Not a depressive, angsty funk, but a writing a funk. I tried hard after the New Year to use some valuable freed up personal time to get back to finishing a draft of The Book, but it hasn't gone well. Part of it was that I was out of practice, and some of the skill that I (not really) possessed had atrophied. The real reason, though, is that I just cannot find any mojo, and it's turning into a real problem. The stuff that's come out is decidedly sub-par, and the drafts of a few chapters for the second half of the book don't jibe at all with the earlier, better stuff, which is discouraging. From everything I've read on the subject it seems that this is a common lull that people fall into, so I'm trying to stay optimistic.

So here's the plan: a long time ago and in a small refinery town far, far away I read an article in a magazine that told you that if you can't sleep, it's probably because your mind's racing. The cure? Get out of bed, keep the TV off, and make a list of something. Preferably, it should be a list of what to do the next day, but any list will do. To spin the metaphor, writing this fucking book has kept me in an insomniac's malaise and I'm getting more frustrated than dreamy. So I'm going to make a list, and it's a list of how to get my memoir swerve goin'. Follow it with me:

Step 1- More Writing, Dummy: Obvious, but essential. Whole sections of the first half dumped out of me like a frat brother after St. Patrick's day. Other stuff -good stuff- came out with a little pushing and a lot of elbow grease. But it came out because I was in the mode to work through it. I need to get back to that and not expect that some nerd deity will descend upon me for word-typing possession. The simple truth is that I don't carve out enough time to write, and I have to do that. No more excuses

Step 2- Read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Before you leave, hear me out. This is something I've been avoiding since I started this little project a few years ago. When I read this book about a decade or so ago, I, like a bunch of other folks, thought it was the cat's ass, and it influenced a lot of the ways I would turn phrases when I was a lot more serious about blogging. Over the years I read more (and probably better) memoirs, and those influences slowly evolved, as influences do. The book I'm writing has two direct antecedents, but I won't be mentioning those right now. I know I should keep an open mind and let the work grow organically and all of that horeseshit, but the last thing I wanted was to reread a book that I (still) hold in high regard, cliched as it has become, and start bending the prose to be Eggers-esque, subconscious though it would be. It was a kind of hasty decision the other night, but I didn't want to dig around for a newer memoir, and those other two books still firmly in my mind during my process, so I made the call and decided that AHWOSG might kickstart something that I desperately need. Maybe I'm not a creator, and more of a synthesizer; a 2004 Ryan Adams rather than a 1987 Guns & Roses.* I guess we're going to find out. This will happen in the morning before work and, ideally, close to bedtime.

Step 3- Ingest More Comedy: Cancer's funny, even when it's not. Ok, that's a bit of a lie, but I'm working on it. Problem is, I'm not that funny of a guy, so you could say that I'm spinning my wheels a bit in my own way. I have lots of friends that are really into comedy, a few of them amateur stand-ups, and they've recommended me a couple of really good podcasts to sort of expand these influences. This is a lunchtime activity.

Step 4- Severely Cut Down on Video Games: For a book about cancer and video games this might sound kind of dumb, but really, it isn't. While it's true that I can play simple games during my lunch breaks (while following Step 3), long nightly gaming binges need to cease. Luckily, I just put Dark Souls 2 to rest (hundreds, yes, hundreds of hours later) and am almost finished with the Last of Us (finally), but I'm thinking I might just throw in the towel on the plight of Ellie and Joel like the ritual burning of a pack of cowboy killers. Ok, it won't be that dramatic, but this is a priority now.

Your collective silent screams have been heard internet. Stare at the wall for a split second and send me your good vibes.

*Not a comparison you should take seriously

A Fighting Chance to Live

After taking a week and half off from work to basically do nothing but intensive field research on Dark Souls 2 (you can divert your judging eyes now), I'm struck less by the showpiece new additions to the series compared to the last game -its expansiveness, for example- than I am by the subtle, yet significant changes to basic rules and old movements. After mulling it over and testing as best I can the differences without taking that much more time off, I thought I'd go into some depth over a few of the aspects that I find the most interesting. I suppose you could also call this something of a review after a fashion, because I can't help but be picky with the minutia just enough to form some subjective opinions about how they make up the larger game.

Grab yourself a cup of coffee. This is going to be long.

Let's start with the new wrinkles in character building and growth. While the addition of respeccing your character is definitely welcome and fun to mess with when the mood suits you, it does serve to ultimately make the game easier as growth decisions can carry a bit less weight than in previous games. I'll come back to this a little later, but even though the amount of needed items to rebuild your Undead from scratch are finite through each new game cycle, it's a bit of a let down to know that a safety net is underneath if you really screw it up. As such, I've limited myself to respeccing only once when I went from a heavy melee tank to a a more lithe, but brittle sorcerer. Let's talk about both.

First, the addition of a few new and rejiggered stat parameters really change how a tank can operate in DS2. Equipment weight is no longer tied to the Endurance stat and is now entirely made up by the Vitality. This means that in previous games, a melee fighter or damage sponge could only logically be responsible for two stats; Endurance and either Strength or Dexterity for their preferred weapon choices (Vigor -previously Vitality in DS1 and Demon's Souls- for HP growth goes without saying for nearly every build). Now that there is separate stat to add levels to for effective movement in heavy armor, players that build tanks are now roughly on par with magic-tossing characters, whom previously had to deal with not only their magic school stat of choice (Faith or Intelligence) but also Attunement for spell slots. In practice, though, I didn't really find heavy characters to be as affected by poor movements as the previous games. Even at 95% of my equipment weight, movement wasn't slowed to the point of DS1's sluggishness, and even rolling out of danger would be of use, something that in previous games would make a character with that kind of pudge seem like a stumbling drunk.

Magic doesn't seem to have the heft of the last game from an overall damage perspective. Monsters, and especially bosses, rarely reel from the pain of getting pelted with your shot of choice. I can only assume that this was done to actually make the game a bit harder on these types of players (and one of the few instances of it, but again, we'll get back to this) since it wasn't entirely out of the question in DS1 to suit up in some of the heaviest armor you could find and just blast away at certain bosses with lightning bolts knowing they they were absolutely going down before you would. Still, the addition of Hexes, a fourth, sort of hybrid magic discipline between Sorcery and Miracles is the most significant change. Since I've only really messed with Sorcery at this point, I don't have a lot of opinion on Hexes quite yet, but I like that there isn't a starting class with Hexes in this game, and that a player has to do a little digging and very calculated stat building to use them correctly as many Hexes require both Faith and Intelligence to work. As a quick aside, the starting classes also lack a Pyromancer, too, which was probably a smart move. Plenty of speed run videos for DS1 prove that Pyromancy could get pretty beefy pretty fast, and make much of the early encounters a joke to solo.

Though it might still be too early to tell, perhaps the biggest addition to the game is the Agility stat, which is governed by growth in the Adaptability stat. Adaptability basically takes the place of DS1's Resistance stat, which was fairly worthless overall as it only raised poison and fire resistances, which can be easily mitigated by common equipment. Adaptability, though, raises the resistances of a wider variety of ailments like petrification and curses, but as the sole way to reliably raise your Agility makes it noteworthy. Agility, then, is the catch-all for how quickly certain basic functions take place like drinking Estus Flasks and rolling (even with heavy armor equipped). Since it's only been about two weeks since the game's been in the wild and the PvP metagame is still finding its feet, this might prove to be very important as the next several weeks carry on. I'll let you do you own research down the road.

Overall, it seemed as though the amount of souls needed to gain levels felt less than the last game, and a quick jump to the wikis proves this to be true (compare this to this). Since I couldn't find a way to easily power level  as in the previous games (though I'm sure the internet has. I like the way it is, so I'm just not going to check), I enjoy this wimping down of things as a fair way to balance the game. Grinding level by level from fighting enemies in the world was almost non-existent for me, though. All of my growth came from fighting bosses, which I also felt was well balanced, too; an added reward for a job well-done. Speaking of which, chests for loot are certainly more plentiful this time around, and especially after boss fights, so the rewards for beating them were tangible, too.

Let's move on to the engine. I don't typically care too much for the technical side of a game so long as it runs well, and this is something that From Software has struggled with to greater or lesser extent since Demon's Souls, though that game ran at a consistent frame rate outside of a few very short, specific spots. It's logical to assume that the old engine simply wasn't built to adequately run an interconnected world of the size of the first Dark Souls with how badly the Blighttown section slowed everything down to a slide show. With two games under their belt and a new engine constructed to scale with next-gen and high-end PC hardware, you would think that FromSoft has learned to make the aged PS3 and 360 sing at this point. Sadly, that's not the case from what I've seen.

While nothing within the game comes close to the stuttered mess of Blighttown, frame rates generally drop when the camera moves too fast and enemies or debris storm around you. The Havok physics work very well when you're in a confined space and are smashing through all of the tables and boxes in near proximity, wider open areas with this happening can stutter things here and there. Since this is a game where every minor encounter judged incorrectly can make for significant tension, a dropped frame here and there can certainly break your rhythm, especially if you're taking on three or four enemies, melee-style. Environmental stream loading is also slow to catch up to your travel plans, too. Run too quickly through a series of rooms and larger areas and the game will lock itself for a second or two until everything catches up. Typically, this isn't much of a hassle since you're probably just passing up anything of interest (or danger) if you're trying to move this fast, but for a new engine, this is a little on the strange side. All of this also comes at the cost of making your hardware really dance for its meals. Part of the reason I'm writing this is to give my poor PlayStation a break since just about everything in the game is constantly loading and pushing the disk around. Anecdotal evidence as this might be, it doesn't seem to be as bad as playing Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen (which worked my system to the point that it sounded like a helicopter was going to land on my television), but after the 45+ hours I put into the game during week one and the dozen or so more since then, I'm fearing for the longevity of my PS3. Wasn't the forced installation when I loaded the game supposed to alleviate this?

Probably the most irritating hiccup, though, is how easily your PvE foes can cheese the physics of the game and pound you through a wall. On more than one occasion, I would slip outside of a doorway to let my stamina recover or to take a quick swig of my Estus Flask and have an arm reach right through the brick and pound me for a kill that, if we're being honest with ourselves, is cheap. Yes, it can sometimes work in your favor; a monster too large to fit through a doorway and stuck lumbering outside can be hit with distance-friendly overhead strikes from your giant club that should, logically, be stopped by the overhang of the door. Still, monsters and bosses always have a leg up on you with laser beams and swords mysteriously finding their way through solid objects and into your Undead's unsuspecting dome at a much more consistent rate. The Old Iron King fight in particular is hilariously strange for the consistently broken laws of physics, if not for being much harder than it probably was built to be.

This actually baffles me, really. While a lot has been made over the past week or so about how different (meaning, not as good) the game looks from the initial video unveiling of the game last year compared to what was actually shipped, anybody with taste will tell you that graphics are an ultimately minor component to a great game, especially if it runs well. Sure, it's not fair to say that Dark Souls 2 runs poorly, but a game of this size with a new engine built specifically to run it should be constructed well enough to at least solve the odd problems of its predecessor, which this engine only does most of the time. The better frame rate is certainly welcome and definitely handy, but the occasional dropped frame during heated fights and selective physics elicits a few more stink eyes than I would like.

Overall, the game does feel significantly easier than the last one. Enemies are certainly challenging and most of the bosses I fought were done in co-op just so I could see as much as I could in the time that I had, both of my character builds could easily take on just about everything with some forethought and deft movement (full disclosure, I spent more time as a tank knowing that I wanted to go through it pro-co-op). I'm certainly a different case than the green Dark Souls 2 player, though, in that I've got two games' worth of conditioning behind me, giving me clearer ideas on how to build effective characters and tackle most of the environments.

The addition to extinguish enemy respawns is controversial in this game compared to something like Lightning Returns (which handled it to great effect). Since every death in this series is meant to be a lesson, I suppose it's helpful when bad guys stop showing up after you kill them a few dozen times, but it takes away from the overall point of a game that wants you to learn from your mistakes. Granted, having the ability to reset them (and thereby make them more difficult) is a nice touch, I don't really find it to be necessary.

Having said all of that, NG+ is significantly harder than I was expecting. While enemies have their requisite 40-50% boost in stats that was true for the previous games, red phantom version of enemies are now placed in environments in key locations, and it completely changes the rhythm of the game. Imagine you're fighting a boss that you're pounding on because of the differences in your stats compared to the last time you encountered it. All of a sudden an explosion goes off behind you and now you're randomly engulfed in flame thanks to the two red phantom Pyromancers that spawned in the arena. It's actually one of the cool holdovers from Demon's Souls that are sprinkled through the game for those in the know (for you guys, imagine playing all the way through the game with a neutral World Tendency and then playing through it again in an unchangeable Pure Black WT. Totally different game). For those hunting trophies and achievements, the now super hard NG+ is a necessary pursuit since certain weapons and spells can only be found there, and fairly deep into it as well so you can't just play nuggets of it to get what you want. I haven't made my way to NG++ (or beyond) quite yet, but I'm a little terrified.

To compound this, you as a character will never overpower your enemies as in previous games. Though the Estus Flask can gain additional uses up to 12, and you can strengthen the amount of HP recovered to a level of +5, no way so far has been found to grow it past these 12 powerful gulps. That means that a thorough player can max it out in their first playthrough, making NG+ and beyond a much more daunting task. While the flask would also cap out in the last game, it was much higher and to a stronger degree, and something that couldn't be completed in one run of the game regardless, making NG+ easier on you (at least, incrementally).

Let's briefly discuss the death penalty, too. I haven't done a lot of research on this, but the idea of losing a portion of your total HP from one demise to the next seems to have been met with a fair amount of community consternation. At first, I thought this was an awesome callback to Demon's Souls, but in that game, going from Human form to Soul form gave other, subtler bonuses to a player even though they had fewer total hit points (specifically you would move almost silently and hit enemies harder, but I can't remember the exact percentage off the top of my head). These don't seem to exist in DS2, at least not that I've seen so far. More research is necessary.

I'll leave this to another time, but this taking of fan expectations and throwing it in their face is all part of the meta narrative established by the old Fire Keepers at the beginning of the game (they won't let you forget how often you're going to die and lose those souls). I expected nothing less, and wonky tech issues aside, makes Dark Souls 2 a very, very good game overall. Again, it's early, and the community still has plenty of mysteries to solve regarding what's really going on with some of the moving parts, but this is an exciting time to be a part of the game, so if you get a chance, find a wiki that you like and get involved.

Extinction Agenda

In playing through the dying world of Lightning Returns, you are constantly reminded that the population is on the fast train to doom town. Guards in one of the cities are always telling you how many people have been killed on any particular day, and most of the dialog serves to remind you that A: no new life has been born for half a millennium, and B: you're not going to save everybody, because you ain't got that kind of time. It's like a peak inside Sean Penn's soul; everything is coming from a dark, tortured place of pain and inner torment. The twist? It's also happening to the monsters.

And this is awesome.

In just about every RPG that's RPGed enough to RPG, there is an unlimited supply of bad guys for you to kill. Generally, this happens at random moments when you're not in one of the handful of safe locations of any given game. Sometimes you can turn this mechanic off, as in the still-superb-so-far Bravely Default. Most of the time, though, it's one random battle after the next in a death march from one boss battle to another (and I say that because I care).

Lightning Returns, though, is in a world where death is a real thing, and it's gonna happen soon. How can there be an infinite amount of floating evil flowers when nothing is being born? Answer, there isn't. Creatures can go extinct if you kill enough of them, ending with a climactic battle with a super powered neon pink omega beast that will make you remember its kin upon shedding that mortal coil. Of course it's all very video game-y in that it can all be tied to a late game quest and that killing these last-of-their-name foes yields high rewards, but man, what a cool concept. It's not only a nice touch that ties in this cockeyed world a little better, but it's one of the most elegantly unique game features I've seen in a game like this in a long, long time.

If only the rest of the game was so thoughtful. We'll come back to that, though. For now, I have to endanger some cyclops.

Let's just look past the fact that I've been absent for the past several days. This seems to be a month full of contradictions, broken promises, and as far as this past weekend has proven, high levels of idiocy.

But it's because of this idiocy that I've gotten the opportunity to essentially bum rush through Lightning Returns. While I'm not quite finished with it, I've found myself with four days left of the game's two week countdown to, essentially, chill out and watch paint dry. Sure, I'll be mopping up any errant side quests and such within that time, but because I'm a sinner and have read a little ahead of what's going on (which we can thank GameFAQs for), I've found that I've stumbled into a commendable amount efficiency. When I started playing it last Wednesday, this was not at all the case.

See, Lightning Returns is one of those games that makes a bad first impression. Aside from being narratively tied to what I can only call the worst (numbered) Final Fantasy, it's built on an engine that was never intentioned for open-world exploration, and it runs poorly. This makes the act of playing it sometimes cumbersome and other times straight up irritating, especially when your mashing a button and watching nothing happen on screen. The worst part for me, though, is that until you get several hours into the game, you just feel like you're playing it wrong; the daily countdown is intimidating and stressful, and the combat --as good as it is-- isn't really the easiest thing to grasp. The latter beef is made a little worse by the crazy amount of customization you're afforded by changing outfits. By day 3, I felt like I was drowning, and had even considered starting over on Easy mode so I could be a little smarter about my travel and work plans.

Turns out, that wasn't really necessary. When I finally finished off my first boss in the evening of day 3, the pieces had fit together in my subconscious just enough that I could better view the big picture of the game, and that gave me both a renewed sense of purpose and a battle plan for tackling the myriad tasks that LR set in front of me. That isn't to say that it's been easy going, though. One of the boss battles was stupidly hard, and even certain "normal" enemies are better avoided altogether because of how resource-intensive they tend to be.

But, now that I'm basically doing busy work to kill time to the end of the game, I have to say that I'm really enjoying it. Yes, for as much as I rag on FFXIII and XIII-2, I can't help but have a good time with LR in spite of myself. Maybe this is Stockholm Syndrome finally setting in, but taken on its own terms while shutting your brain off for most of the story stuff, it's a wacky game, but a wacky game that can be a fun in the right mindset. This makes me wish that it wasn't just the B-tier game that Square Enix had lying around with FFXIII characters shoehorned in that it obviously is, and that they had taken the time to develop it independent of that and not beholden to a (or any) franchise. But that would be too 1990s of Square, and those ultra lucrative days are in their rear view mirror (Bravely Default aside, I guess). 

Does my optimism for a glorious new Square Enix still hold? Last week, in the throws of those first strange hours of Lightning Returns, I might have said no. I was actually having a bit of buyer's remorse by Thursday night. At this point, though, I'm going to come back around and say yes. Is this the game to "save Final Fantasy?" Not by a long shot. It's something different, though, and it's something fun. For now, I'll take that.

Wah Waaah

Yesterday was another blip, but I suppose these things happen.

Last night was a real scene, though, man. I suppose that's a goofy thing to say now that I'm telling you how I went to my first voice acting class.

Yes.

Here's a brief version of how I wound up there: A really good friend of mine is a freelance writer in the Toronto area. When he recently lost a big client, he decided that, you know, he's always wanted to try voice acting for games, and he better do it now while still financially stable enough to take a swing at it. He had convinced me to do the same.

I know that this is short, and kind of a robbery coupled with yesterday's absence, but all I can tell you after my brief flirtation with voice acting is that I can probably sell the shit out of a BMW.

I'm still not sure if that was a compliment or not.

Today, I Became an Internet Villain

...if only for a minute.

It seems now that Lightning Returns is out in the wild (and getting some pretty mixed reviews), USGamer.net saw fit to run an article that claimed that, hey, Final Fantasy XIII was really a good game after all, and all of us whom criticize it are just plain 'ol mistaken. Silly us!

Because I'm an idiot, I wrote knee jerk reaction in the comments detailing why I disagree while making a few key points as to why the game is, in fact, bad. This did not sit well with some of their readers. I guess someone had to play the bad guy and get that ball rolling. Today, that someone was me.

Sigh.

Unsung Story

I swear I'm going to get off of my RPG soapbox eventually, but today, I'm doing this as something of a cry for help.

In three days, the Kickstarter for Playdek's Unsung Story: Tale of the Guardians will close, and as of this writing, they're still about $100k short of their goal. This is concerning to me. Most of the time, I see high-profile crowd funding projects and sort of silently turn around and walk away. This isn't because they're bad ideas or that I have some beef with crowd funding, I just never really take the time to properly research what I'm potentially spending my money on, and to be completely honest, very few games I've seen on Kickstarter or Indigogo spoke to me so much that I felt compelled to help with them.

As it stands, I have contributed to three projects: the Retronauts Revival, a (so far) good retro old school gaming magazine called Retro, and this game. Why, then, in the wake of Double Fine's adventure, Mighty Number 9, and other high profile stuff is this the first toe dipped into actually giving money to game development? Answer: Yasumi Matsuno.

Now I'm sure if you pay attention to this stuff, you know all about Matsuno, or his pedigree, or the fact that he's the big name attached to this project. For those that don't, here's the nickel version of why this is important:

Matsuno is divisive as a game designer. As the man responsible for Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre, Vagrant Story, and much of Final Fantasy XII (which is a personal favorite), he has a tendency to gravitate to mechanics that can feel impenetrably complex. You can call that kind of thing a matter of taste, but what it boils down to is that playing one of his games is just as much about doing your homework as it is mastering minutiae. I'm in to that to a certain extent, but I don't really have a ton of time on my hands anymore to devote to that sort of thing, so this means less and less to me as I get older.

What really sets him apart from his contemporaries, though, is his writing. RPGs from Japan have evolved over time from simplistic Dungeons & Dragons facsimiles (like Dragon Quest) to incoherent narrative sewers (like the Kingdome Hearts games, Lost Odyssey, every Tales game, Final Fantasy XIII and it's sequels, close to everything released after 2002). Like his construction of mechanics, you could say that the stories he writes are also on the dense side, but they are filled with characters and situations that you normally wouldn't find cut out of either shitty anime or a children's book. Adults tend to act and speak like adults. Characters don't repeat dialog just for something to say ("We need to get to the mountain!" "What, the mountain?" "Yeah! Let's get to the mountain!"). His best feature, though, is that he builds worlds that feel old. Not "lived-in" like maybe the Star Wars universe is sometimes attributed, but ancient; built, destroyed, and rebuilt with all of the history surrounding it. For fantasy storytelling, this is much harder to pull off than people think, and mostly because every fantasy universe is trying to do it one way or another. One of the reasons he does it well seems to be a past academic background in history. I've heard he's done thesis work on the Balkans and its various real world conflicts, and this has informed a lot of the Ogre series.

To me personally, Final Fantasy XII basically ruined me for RPGs of any kind for years and years, and especially ones that tend to be developed in East Asia. While I still find them fun to play, it's hard to partition a role playing game's story from its actual gameplay for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it's the only genre of video game out there that begs for context for all of the button pressing (or else you'd just be looking at menus for 35 hours). I can't really say that Matsuno's stories speak to me on a spiritual level or anything, but they're coherent, if a little bleak. We need more games like this from guys like that.

Plus, the $20 you could spend on this basically pre-orders you a game on the device you want. Turns out, that's pretty important these days.

See you tomorrow.

Here's To You, Blacksmith

It has recently come to my attention that I'm about 10 pounds lighter than what I was about a month and a half ago. I call that an exciting and satisfying turn of events. Want to know how I did it? I bet you do, discerning internet browser. In lieu of a not-very-detailed procedural, though, I'd like to briefly mention general health for a bit.

It should be abundantly clear that I play a lot (a lot) of video games. Some of you may have a falsified vision of me in your noggin that I am either the part of the basement dwelling stereotype that most gamers get saddled with, or am Joaquin Phoenix in Her. To that, I'd like you to briefly consider that neither of these examples represent any large demographic, and certainly one that spends hundreds of millions of dollars every Fall on discs with the words "Call of Duty" printed on them. While it can certainly be true that most mainstream media outlets find someone with, we shall say, a nonathletic physique to be a one-time commenter when things in nerddom are front and center in the news, I argue that this does not, in any way, represent a group as a whole. I also believe that all of that should have gone without saying, but there's nothing wrong with being clear here. And just to punch this horse cadaver a little more, do you think everybody that's really into the NFL are 6'2'' mountains of goatee-d machismo? My wife and a few of her lady friends will disagree.

Now, having said all of that, it's important to note that while you don't need to be in the (probably) small demographic of Shadow Hearts cosplayers that can bench 325 lbs., being healthy is an achievable and worthwhile goal for anybody. While, yes, I have the ultimate trump card in this argument in the fact that I had cancer and that because I regularly work out it made the whole saga a little better on me than it could have been, that doesn't mean you need a traumatic experience to reaffirm the idea that a body in good working order is its own reward.

Personally, I've been lifting on the regular since just before high school. I had a tough guy older brother that imparted me with little nuggets of wisdom until the day I left for college. Not all of it, you might imagine, was solid gold, but getting me into a routine of keeping my body in check has informed a lot of my habits going forward. I'm in my mid 30s now, married with no kids, and I make it a point to do something between 5-6 days out of the week. That may be a lot for some of you reading this. That might be just enough. For me, I've found that it's what works, and a large part of that isn't just the sweat and fatigue that comes with it, but the act of doing it itself; the routine of being healthy. I'm a firm believer that it's good for more than the body, and the piles of further research that you can dig up across the known universe can back me up. But we might get back to that at a different point. Today, it's all bout losing weight and gaining inner peace.

For the really curious among you, here's what my week tends to look like: On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday after work, I go straight to the gym and lift two muscle groups, usually alternating between them doing 3-5 exercises for each muscle. Since the New Year, I've been forcing myself to do at least some kind of short ab workout during this time, too (I hate doing abs). In a relatively crowd-averse gym, I can do a lot in just under an hour, and this includes the time it takes to change into my workout duds. I have a wife, a dinner to eat, and a very demanding stable of consoles that I'd like to spend some time with, so I've always been a very firm believer in keeping gym time short. But I kill it while I'm there. The first exercise of whatever muscle I'm working that day will be to, essentially, brutalize my workout, and subsequent exercises will straddle the line between further strength and endurance. Even though I don't like the idea of hanging out in the gym every night to get huge, I want the time that I do spend to be valuable and meaningful. That may make my gym demeanor a little on the odd side, but that's probably a conversation for a different day.

Mondays it's back and shoulders, which is probably my favorite muscle day of the week. Since my diet on the weekends basically blows out all of the hard-won ground I've gained during the work week (which goes from ingesting nothing but peanut butter, whole grains, chia seeds, and meat to beer and chicken wings almost exclusively) I use Monday as part blank slate, part punishment. The side effect to this is a pair of bum shoulders, but that's on me, I suppose. Wednesday is chest and leg day. This combination elicits an awful lot of hairy eyeballs from the gym regulars, and for good reason. Both your chest and your legs are muscle groups that define your entire physique, and form the basis of a vast majority of your baseline strength. Most people, even people like me that double up on muscle groups, split these up because of how much they take out of you on a per-exercise basis (squats alone muck with your center of gravity almost as much as playing handball in zero-G). On Wednesdays, then, I usually pick one and go heavy while taking it easy on the other one. Because I'm child and I dislike them so much, I almost never go heavy with my legs, and my back thanks me. Fridays are beach muscle day, and that means biceps and triceps. This is going to sound plenty stupid, but I've read my fair share of Cosmopolitans. You know those infantile surveys that they ask their readers to answer about what types of muscles ladies find the sexiest? Surprise, it's your shoulders, John Wayne, not your arms that are always at the top of the list. It's not for this reason alone that I leave arms as something of an afterthought; so much that if I can't make it to lift three days a week that I give up arms day. Every time you push something, though, you're using your triceps. Every time you pull, it's the stuff on the other side. Unless you do nothing but legs, your arms are constantly in motion, so Friday, to me anyway, is desert. I luck out in that I get to dip out of work at 4:00 on Fridays and this affords me extra time for a preacher curl cobbler, but it doesn't change the fact that your guns are swell, but not so much as other parts of your body.

In between lifting days is filled with about 30 minutes of cardio. Weather permitting, I wake up about 45 minutes earlier on Tuesdays and Thursdays and jog three miles in my neighborhood. This is a personal preference; I hate running as it is (and by "running" I mean that I could probably read a novel at the pace I plod along at), and if I can con myself into getting it finished first thing, well, that's just one less thing to worry about. Plus there's nobody else on the road that early in the morning, making crossing streets pretty handy. Lately, Saturdays are filled with 30 minutes on a treadmill and then 10 or so minutes on other machines like an elliptical or stationary bike. I'm usually pretty cooked by the end of the week, so I need those extra machines in case I wimp out and don't make the run a full half hour.

I'm getting older. Soon, I'll be buying houses and making babies. Will all of this continue? Hard to say, I guess, but I'm fine with a "probably not" for now. But that gives me time to be consistent, and to make sure that I don't have a stroke for another few decades.

Do you have to follow this? Not a chance. But something, anything, is better than hoping that you're just going to be healthy enough to live a long, full life. It's the one thing I like to be proactive about, and it works for me.

Warframe

Kablam. You're getting a twofer.

I've been meaning to write about this for a while and just haven't gotten to it yet. In an effort to make up for yesterday, then, I present you with a review for Warframe that nobody asked nor paid me to write. How lucky for you that you're here to read it!

Having no PC with the appropriate guts for a game like Warframe, which is fairly impressive-looking, I was blessed with its presence in the PlayStation store the night I drunkenly came home with my brand new PS4 (something that I pre-ordered, don'cha know). A free-to-play (FtP) third person shooter, it has turned into the PS4 game I play the most because, erm, there aren't any really good PS4 games out there yet. Not to worry! It turns that Warframe, when given enough time to worm its way into your consciousness, winds up being a hell of a freebie. 

I say this knowing that many in the nerd realm have turned its nose up at the FtP model, and for good reason. Most games are not handled in what we'll call a polite way when it comes to the consumer, and while you can certainly download something, the odds of you wanting to play it for nothing turns out to be a total lie (here is some damning evidence). Warframe, then, stands as the least cynical game to carry this business plan. 

Here's the setup: you are a sort of space ninja packing a machine gun, a pistol, and a sword. You and three other space ninjas go on missions that range from killing all of the foolish enemies of space ninja-dom to simply surviving for a long time (with a fair amount of other stuff in between). Strewn about the environment, and as a reward for doing space ninja stuff, are various materials for constructing various things like new weapons or new ninja suits, and the cash it takes to build them. You can play missions as much and as often as you want, and repeat them if it tickles you to grind for said materials. As you dispatch your foes, your weapons and suit gain experience that can be used as a sort of currency to attach various modifications to them. All of these have a level cap, though, so eventually, you're going to want to trade up when it comes to your gear.

That winds up being sort of the point; constant mission-going, component looting, a little bit of R&D, and then repeat. Missions by themselves can a mixed bag of entertainment. The levels that require you to exterminate your enemies for the sake of just that are just kind of mediocre, while the defense missions that charge you with putting up with endless waives of bad guys can be fun in small doses with the right team. The modification farming and building of new gear can get pretty addictive, though, and that forms the basis for whatever mileage you can probably glean from Warframe.

Thankfully, everything functions pretty well, too. There never seems to be a ton of people playing at any given time, which can make unlocking certain missions without a dedicated team a little bit of a hassle. The combat, though, is fluid and speedy. Players can basically parkour around the environments, but in a more controlled, simplistic way than in an Assassin's Creed sort of way. Weapons have a pretty wide variety, and feel weighty when wielded, especially the melee stuff when you're close enough to use them. The levels are procedurally built, so the layout of them will never repeat, though sections of them certainly do and get a little same-y. Eventually, you're going to get a little tired of seeing that same stair well no matter what it's connected to.

Let's get back to the FtP thing, then, which, strangely, is Warframe's best feature. Think back to when spoke about Tekken Revolution, a very good fighting game that makes money --as most FtP games do-- banking against your patience and force of will. You get only so many fights before you have to wait it out or pony up some dough. Not Warframe. You can run and repeat missions as often as you like, and the game will never stop you to open your wallet or force you to wait 30 minutes while your space ninja "rests" or something. While developer Digital Extremes certainly wants to make money from you playing it, the real world currency in the game is only used if you don't want to wait for weapons to finish being built in the foundry, or just want to shell out for new gear in the market. Since the point of the game is to, essentially, farm the materials and blueprints to forge them yourself, it's basically like paying them to take some of the fun away from the game. This is great for you and me, but totally baffling from a business standpoint. Whatever.

If you're the typical PS4 owner --which I, evidently, am not-- you're probably served just as well by playing Resogun, Don't Starve, or any of the shoulder shrug-inducing retail games on the market at the moment, and have perhaps waited for moments in your busy schedule to screw around with Warframe while biding your time until something else comes along. That's probably the best that it can hope for, really. While a good game and a hell of a bargain, it's hard to be compelled to play Warframe for long stretches after finishing whatever specialty missions Digital Extremes release for any given month. The game can feel a bit redundant over time, and can even be a grind at higher levels when it's just a matter of getting a few more materials or cash to build a new helmet or something.

Still, as a between game filler, you could do a lot worse, and getting involved with a competent team can make some missions pretty thrilling (especially when it means scoring rare mods for your stuff). Since most reviews usually have an underlying subtext of "should you pay for this game or not," it's tough not to recommend that you play Warframe if you have some time to kill before, say, Infamous: Second Son or any of the spectacular releases coming out in the next two months for PS3 and 360. Faint praise, sure, but praise all the same.

Yeah Woops

I suppose I should apologize for yesterday's absence. I'd like to tell you that I was sitting inside and playing Bravely Default all day, but that didn't happen. Honestly, I just didn't find the time. Yes, I know the point of a blog a day is to make time, and I guess I could hide behind the weekend ("by blog a day, I mean blog a week day, dummy"), but that's really just a cop out. Won't happen again.

So let's actually talk about why I'm not playing Bravely Default, then, and touch upon an ill of the gaming industry that's mercifully fading away: the pre-order racket.

In the 8-, 16-, and most of the 32-bit era, the idea of pre-ordering a video game so you could be assured that your retailer of choice would have a copy for you wasn't a thing. You would save up your meager shekels and drive to whomever was willing to sell you what you wanted, and that would be that. Of course, in the early days of the home video game business, games didn't have specific release dates, and would just sort of happen upon a retailer almost as if by invoiced sorcery. As time went on, and Madden games became annualized, the record store model of pre-ordering large releases became the de facto way of doing things. Inherently, this isn't bad, really. I don't really see anything wrong with wanting a guarantee when it comes to your entertainment.

But that's not how things have turned out. Large, gaming-centric retailers like GameStop survive on two business models: selling you used video games (at higher costs than I think they're worth, but that's me), and getting you to look ahead at what's coming out so you can throw your $5 down to pre-order it. They certainly don't make as many millions selling brand new material than used, but let's hypothesize that for every 10 people that pre-order something a few months ago, one of them will either not care any more, completely forget, or have any other reason not to go pick the thing up. That's a free five clams in GameStop's pocket. Nothing really wrong with that either, really. Like I said, large record store chains were doing the same business for decades before the music industry went belly up.

The problem is that GameStops are, by and large, small, and they while it looks like it's wall-to-wall video game goodness in there, they are surprisingly under stocked. The vast majority of it is pre-owned (if the GamesStop overlords had it their way, it would all be used games because that makes them the most money), too. The industry is such that a lot of games come out during certain times of the year, but not all the time, and those store managers don't want to deal with piles of product that's not moving. This is where the pre-ordering thing really rears its ugly head. For large, AAA releases, they will always overstock the place with them because the average schmuck will probably wander in there and grab it for either themselves or as gifts for someone. But this is only AAA stuff. Again, because of the size of these places, and the fact that new stuff makes them less money, it's highly unlikely that they'll have a good supply of mid-tier or niche releases unless one of them rolls in their used, especially the brand new stuff. This stock controlling practice basically boils down to this: if you didn't per-order, say, Bravely Default, you're shit out of luck. The one or two extra copies that they ordered for display already sold that morning. Do you want us to ship it to your door for an extra fee?

I don't have to tell you how aggravating that is, and how absurd, but that's the way the large, retail games business evolved itself into living over the past ten years. Bravely Default, though, is a curious example in this scenario, though. Here's why:

I have a Wal-Mart gift card that I received for Christmas. Now, Wal-Mart being the largest retailer of just about anything, it seemed fairly reasonable that they would stock a brand new game developed by a large company (Square Enix) and published by a much larger one (Nintendo, for God's sake). Since I live in an apartment building with some shifty-eyed neighbors, I wasn't really down for having it shipped to me, so I thought I'd do the next best thing and just pick it up in-store. For some reason, WM's website didn't allow for a pre-order of any kind, now a piece integral for this whole proceeding to work, so after just waiting it out last week, I detected no change from the site, other than assuring me that I could freely buy it on Friday when it was released. Fine, then, I'll just call the store. Nope, they told me. Even though they were keenly aware that it had come out that day, they didn't have it. Strange. So yesterday, I took it upon myself to meander into a different Wal-Mart. Nope again. Gift card be damned, I head over to a GameStop on the way home. The cock-eyed look of the girl across the counter told me before she even opened her mouth what my fate would be. She even did some checking for me, the princess, and found that no other GameStop in town had it, either. Should have pre-ordered it, man!

I find it alarmingly stupid that I can visit a large retail chain and not find a brand new game distributed by Nintendo, but I can nab a copy of something like Glory of Heracles --one of their flops-- that, for whatever reason, is still easily obtainable through distribution channels (seriously, who the eff- is buying that game still?).

So I have not played Bravely Default yet, but it's ok. Even though this whole scenario had me pretty irritated yesterday, I take solace in the fact that, when it's finished downloading, I won't have to worry about this anymore.

Bravely Going

Today marks the NA release of Square Enix's Bravely Default, the deliriously goofy name for what appears to be the best new Final Fantasy in almost a decade. Everybody and their brother says so. I have to be honest, I am awfully excited to go play it.

The reasons, though, are firmly set in that I'm ready for a good RPG, and not because I just love old school Final Fantasy games. I mean, I do, but if I were to only want to play something new just because it feels like something old I would sit around and download bullshitty tablet game all day long as that seems to be the market for recycled content you can overpay for. Less cynically, though, I like the optimism and good will, however tenuous it is at the moment, that Bravely Default and this Tuesday's Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII is bringing back the struggling Square Enix. In the most simple terms, that company really needs a win, and even if it comes from the court of public opinion and not sales figures, it would go a long way toward rebuilding the publisher into the creative powerhouse that it was in years' past.

But that's still just cleaning off our rose-tinted glasses. It's been a pretty tumultuous decade for Square both financially and figuratively. Major releases have tanked and at the cost of tens of millions of dollars (plus incalculable time wasted in development). More than perhaps any major Japanese publisher other than Konami, HD development really caught Square with its pants down. This is ironic considering that the company's games were such a champion of new and emerging audio/visual technology in older console generations; the advent of higher resolutions and consistent frame rates have led them to fumble around trying to figure out exactly how to move their major franchises forward. The problem, as Final Fantasy XIII has shown us, was that they did it on their terms, and not their audience. So much time and money wasted on making a stiflingly linear game that still seemed half-baked upon release was a clear enough indicator that the emperor had no clothes, and that proletariat gamer could only look at them in baffled amusement.

You could probably say that the divisiveness over Final Fantasy games, and much of Square's output, began during one of the earlier PlayStation generations, but the 2008 release of XIII represents a clear partition in their existence. Certainly before XIII came out, the hardest of the hardcore fans of the series would piss and moan that things Just Weren't Like They Used to Be (as evident by the first guy to buy FF XII in Japan telling CEO Yoichi Wada that they should remake VII during a live press event), but this was during a period that games from the franchise --and the company as a whole-- were still coming out at a steady clip and of high quality. While, yes, you could complain that X or XII wasn't your cup of tea, but you couldn't argue against the fact that all of that production went into making as solid a product as could be made for its time. Visually impressive, finely balanced, and (for the most part) coherently written were things that you could expect from a new Final Fantasy game whether you liked it as much as their Super NES predecessors or not. But then XIII came out, and all of a sudden, all of your doomsday scenarios about a company falling apart seemed frightfully on-target.

For as subjective as video game reviews really are, the overall consensus was that we were seeing quantifiable evidence that they Just Weren't Like the Used to Be. While there is certainly a small cadre of XIII apologists out there, the years since its release has lead to much head shaking and shoulder shrugging over its design. So much, in fact, that it took Square to cobble together two more games in the XIII "series" to make good by the fans. The fact that they even did this proves that the old guys were right all along, and a general perception that if Square Enix, the shepherds of the once titanic genre, couldn't figure it out than the RPGs of yesteryear were doomed to fade away.

This is defeatist thinking.

This morning, I read this exemplary article about the shooing of Jay Leno. Part of the story was about how smug a villain Leno had become over his 22 year tenure as host of the decaying Tonight Show, but much more of it was how sad the world will be without Leno in it to punish with our "hipper," "edgier" scorn. This really struck a chord with me, especially today with Bravely Default's release. While the opposite may be true in that I did it because I care and not because I have empirical evidence of their idiocy, but I have been ragging on Square for years now, and their paleolithic design sensibilities and business practices need to bow out for the younger, sexier, more in-touch Jimmy Fallons of the game design world. When I sat back and really reflected on it, though, this is not at all what I want.

No, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that the JRPG isn't mounting a comeback (it's been here for years), nor am I going to pontificate that the publisher has finally gotten its head out of its ass (we still need to be cautious about Final Fantasy XV, after all). We need to stop being so pious toward past successes, and less embittered to recent failings. I know that this sounds a little counter intuitive because I began by telling you how excited I am for a decidedly retro RPG, and I just said a second ago that it's hard to be totally optimistic about what the company is pushing out over the next few years, but really, optimism is something Square desperately needs, and Bravely Default and Lightning Returns, while diametrically different games, clearly show that the company can push their creativity when they need to. That's good for everybody. Some companies --Nintendo, for example-- really turn up the gas when they're backed into a corner, and it looks like that's what's finally happened to Square. While the reviews aren't finished being tallied for BD, and haven't even hit yet for LR:FFXIII, it's hard to disagree that this could be the start of a return to form in the post- XIII-Weren't-Like-They-Used-to-Be era. If we didn't at least hope for the fact that companies will make better games than their previous output, nobody would play anything new at all, and we need to move past that. It's time for us to be excited again. I hope that you feel the same way.

See you tomorrow.

Sticks, Stones

A few years ago, my brother and I decided that we wanted to try building our own arcade sticks to play Street Fighter online with each other. I went so far as to get a stick and buttons, and shipped these things to him so he could cannibalize some old PlayStation controllers for use. Then, well, stuff just got in the way; he moved his family to South Carolina, I wound up buying a couple of sticks on my own, he went pro-Nintendo with a Wii and Wii U and, well, I didn't.

My brother, though, is a serial hobbyist; the kind of guy that gets into something full steam and then slowly forgets about it for his next big adventure. I envy people like this sometimes, actually. I get the impression that they constantly feel like the world has something to offer them while guys like me are waiting for their own hobbies to wow them again like they used to. Anyway, the joystick thing was something he never really had an opportunity to get into like he normally would, so he recently decided to modify a Madcatz SE stick that I gave him for Christmas a few years ago, and asked for some art.

Now, I'm not a spectacular artist by any stretch (we've known this for a long time), but this was something small enough in scale that I didn't mind lending a hand. It also gave me the opportunity to try out some digital coloring, which is something I've always wanted to mess with.

The process was pretty painless. I downloaded a template for the SE stick pretty easily found all over the internet. He told me that he had some colors in mind because he was planning on painting the stick casing. The buttons and joystick that I sent him all those years ago were red, and he wanted to make them match the illustration, too.

From there, and after some doodling to get my hand back into sketching shape, I printed a small stack of them and drew the image right on the template. This turned out to be really hard, actually. Since you're dealing with whole chunks of the right side of the image being obscured by the stick and buttons, managing the composition was a lot more challenging than I thought. Once I get used to that, though, I settled on one that I thought was fine:

Knowing that I was going to color it digitally, I left the background blank planning on adding text and color later. I inked it traditionally with pens and a brush, and scanned it.

That's when I went a little crazy. I couldn't stop making these. I had three more sketched out, and two more inked, so I scanned one of those, too:

I wasn't totally thrilled with having a joystick where his nose would normally be (but now that I think about it, I can totally do a holiday image and make that red ball-top stick Santa's button nose. The possibilities!), but the prospect of coloring without traditional media meant that larger objects like the bicep and the forearm might be easier to practice with than what I had planned for the "kick" image above. Same thing with the inking- paintbrush and some pens.

I met some cool folks a few weeks ago whom gave me some advice into the digital process. Upon their recommendation, I scanned it them at 600 dpi as a tiff image, which I eventually exported to a bitmap. This set me up for the next big challenge: the actual coloring.

I used Gimp and scoured the internet for tutorials on how to color using a mouse. Since I don't have the setup that most people that do this seriously have, I needed to find a decent tool to use that I could navigate without dropping some money into actual hardware. Gimp is a really great free product, though. With my limited understanding of Photoshop (which has all faded away in the 10 years since I've actually used it) I didn't need anything with extensive bells and whistles, and the tutorials I found on the internet made it pretty clear that Gimp is an amazing facsimile for the price of admission (which, again, is the low, low cost of absolutely nothing).

Here's how things went:

I wound up coloring this one first because I thought it would be easier for some reason. I went a little overboard with the layers of gray in the gi (I think there are four altogether), so I scaled it back for the skin, gloves, and headband. I'm actually happy with the way it turned out, and it was a nice confidence boost for the second one, too. Here's how that one turned out:

This one I'm on the fence about. The colors that I was given were gray, black, white (natch), red, and yellow. That's two warm colors with one cool one, which I didn't find that easy to translate without ditching one or the other. We can chalk that up to my lousy use of color theory, I guess. For this one, I wanted originally to make it look like an old poster with some text, but that didn't wind up working so well. The text is in Japanese and came from Google Translate, so if any of you speak it fluently and catch mistakes you can go ahead and give the internet the old stink eye, not me. The bottom reads "Devote yourself to your training," which is something I lifted off of some old Street Fighter III promo art. The top reads "punish their mistakes," which is a reference to the use of this mule kick move in the SFIII games, which is primarily to make people pay for whiffing big moves.

I have a couple more unscanned images that I might mess with just for fun, but they need some work first. Still, not bad for a first attempt.

Book Update

I know that I mentioned this months and months ago, but the tome that I'm writing that's dedicated to parsing through two of the wackiest years of my life + video games is still a going concern. The original time table that I sort of laid out for myself is, of course, blown to hell, but that's just the way it is when you're doing creative work on your own schedule.

But that's the problem; since I didn't have a set deadline, I let it slip away from me for...reasons. But we're back at it now, so here is a quick update with how things have gone and where it's all going in convenient back-of-the-box bullet points:

• Now that my obligations in the Fall are all but a very strange memory, it's been really hard to get my writing mojo back. I'm guessing everybody that writes will tell you this, but putting words together on (virtual) paper is a muscle that must be exercised or it will atrophy (a phrase that I'm sure I heard in a workshop someplace). The work that I've been doing on the current chapters is total garbage, and I'm not saying that because everyone's their own worst critic. I know that it's going to take some bootstrap-pulling to get back to a level I'm comfortable with, but I see now that a lot of what's been coming out in the weeks since the New Year are going to be slavishly rebuilt, and then probably thrown the fuck out altogether. I keep telling myself it's better this way, and it is, but I'm at the point now that when I look at work I did a year ago, it seems that I had a supply of liquid genius flowing through my body that I've been slowly urinating out and now I'm just a dude with too much gin in his system. I need to get those levels back in check.
• That was really gross.
• Before I took the break in the Fall, I compiled what I had in a single document (unformatted), and I feel like I'm at roughly 60% what I want from a content perspective. At the time when things stopped, I had hit a point in the narrative where things take a drastic turn, but I knew for a fact that the tone of the chapters was going to change and they would probably wind up being shorter, so the 60% number feels accurate for now. That said, there is a lot of stuff to fix and change in what's already there (as you can imagine), but I'm thinking that there is now more to add than I originally thought to make certain things make sense, and a few sections that are going to be edited out and rejiggered into the second section of the book. Sure, this should all come through during the editing process, but it's still worth pointing out.
• The working title is A Clever Adversary. I'm sure this won't last
• I've been debating whether or not to place a sample working chapter online. I know other writers have done this to sort of drum up interest, but since this blog isn't exactly an airport, I'm guessing that's not a good enough reason to place something like that here. I'm going to continue thinking this over.

So that's that.

See you tomorrow.

A Blog A Day

...might keep readers away...maybe.

When 1Up.com (may it rest in peace) was still a thing, the large, passionate community would take it upon themselves to elect February as the month where you would write one blog per day. A lot of good stuff was cranked out by those cats, but it all came to a halt last Feb. when the site's corporate Nether Lords decided to shut the place down. Drag.

So, in an effort to pay tribute to what was a very good idea on a very good website, I'm going to do my best to keep the tradition going this year. How am I going to start? Well, by being a few days late, obviously (much like the 1Up days, now that I think about it).

We'll keep this light and flow-y by making today brief, but if you want a personal recommendation that will take you much longer to read, go check out Matt Loene's off-the-chart-amazing oral history of Street Fighter II over at Polygon. It hits kind of close to home for me because of how much I loves me some Street Fighter, but the amount of work that went into this is really staggering, and it's a fascinating read even if you don't dig the Dragon Punch.

See you tomorrow.

The Last in Line

You may be wondering (though probably not) about why there hasn't been another episode of our trip through the Last of Us. Well, part of that is that my wife and I just haven't had a lot of joint time to sit down and play it. The larger reason, though, has to do with one Sony Computer Entertainment.

Just after Christmas, I switched on my PS3 to see what was new on the putridly run PlayStation store for that week. Even though it was late and I had a few beers in me, I noticed a certain lack of hum from my little black supercomputer. After the requisite 45 years that it takes to boot the system up and log into the store, the PS3 gives me one of it's kindly warning messages that, hey, your system's about to cook itself, and it's shutting off now. Sorry for the trouble. This has happened before, so I was only mildly alarmed. It shut down, I waited a few minutes, and flipped it back on to make sure that everything was on the up and up. Not even five minutes in and it was back to overheating. My cooling fan, friends, has slipped its mortal coil, and lo, My PlayStation 3 is inoperable.

And this is the third time.

No, I'm not saying that this particular PS3 has ceased to bestow enjoyment upon me three times. I'm saying that this is the third effing PS3 that's died on me in the last several years. My first was a 60gig launch model (the kind that was fully backward compatible), and I loved it like a son. I don't get rid of anything anymore, and even though I don't play PSOne or PS2 games on the regular, I will pull a couple out a few times a year. The loss of this machine was a serious hit to my perverse need to make sure I can do whatever I want, whenever I want (which, I suppose, is a problem). So, I called Sony, and $150 later they swap one with me; another 60gig fat bastard of a PlayStation sent right to my door. That love didn't last, either. We were living on borrowed time, this backward compatible PS3 and I, and so I called them again when that one died, too. "That'll be another 150 clams," they said, much to my protest. I'm a very loyal Sony customer, and had even sent back a PS2 on the fritz about ten years ago. Can't you guys help me out with this? Mitigate the cost at all? Stupid, stupid broken-video-game-console-owner. We're Sony. We don't do that shit. I wasn't willing to spend another stack of money on a console that they basically assured me over the phone they'll never replace. The PS3 Fat is dead, and my one-fiddy would only be buying a refurbished Slim. Nuts to that. I convinced myself to get a brand new Super Slim, which was just about to launch the next week.

So, you can probably imagine my fury when all of this was going down a few weeks ago. If you've done a little research and a little math, you've determined that this PS3 Super Slim is only a year old, but just over a year, so the warranty is expired (of course). After waiting for their customer service staff to come back from whatever year-end break they were on, I called them yet again to complain about the fact that this thing they built don't work good or nuthin.' The guy on the phone did what he could, but it had to be sent back to them for repairs, and that was going to cost me $100. He begins his rote spiel about how this is quality service from Sony's own staff and that they'll replace the system if it can't be fixed and ahhhhhh BULLSHIT. Stop right there, friend; this is my third freaking PS3, and you need to help me with this, I tell him. What happens next is truly baffling.

"Yes, I absolutely get it," he says. "Let me connect you to one of the accounts people, but let me tell them what's going on with you, first." Fine. This happened during the end of the Second Era, but it was just an operator "asking her manager" if it was ok to help me with the repair fee. That didn't work then, so I had to prepare my response carefully for when it wasn't going to work now. About five minutes later, I find that I actually am talking to another person on the phone, a very sweet-natured woman whom wanted me to go through the whole thing again. As calmly as I could, I lay it out for her, and ask her if she would kindly help mitigate the cost of fixing this thing.

"Sure," she says without even letting me stop. "As a one-time show of good faith, we'll waive the cost of repairs for you. We're shipping you a box tomorrow." What happened after that was about 15 seconds of shock-fueled silence to the point that she thought that I accidentally hung up on her. I am back to being a happy Sony customer.

So what did we learn here? If you buy more than one stupidly expensive piece of entertainment hardware, the third one can be fixed for free. Less cynical than that, I guess, is that sometimes, the little guy gets his way. So there.

Your homework today is to check out Kat Bailey's preview of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2, a game that's dropping in about a month or so. Now, I do this with reservation for a few reasons, but mostly because this is the only preview of the game that I've seen that points out a key situation from the demo that she played and how unsettling it is for all of the wrong reasons, something nobody else seems to mention across the internet. The comments that follow the piece are some of the worst that the internet has to offer, but it's a unique perspective and calls to mind other debates that gaming has to start paying closer attention to from now on. Read the article with interest and the comments with caution.

So This is the New Year

Look, I knew for years that we were never going to have jet packs by now, but dammit, 2014 being here makes me feel that we should be further along or something. Just look at this, for God's sake. Where's my bio suit and seedy intergalactic watering holes? Where's my instant wall climbing wall-breaking laser blasts? Science is bullshit.

So it's been a while, right? Yes, internet, it has. Dry your eyes, though; a new year means new beginnings and other spastic lies that I'm prone to breaking. Still, now that certain months-long obligations are taken care of, it's time to get back to my fighting weight writing-wise. That was an absurd and stupid thing to say. Resolution 2: we'll keep that jive to a minimum.

So let's use this precious time that we have together at the moment for a bit of catch up. The last few weeks have been a typhoon of lousy weather, vacations from work, on and off illness, and mmmyes a few holidays. Now that my family has finally figured out that video games aren't something I'm going to eventually outgrow, they've succumbed to years of reminding that it's perfectly fine to bestow nerdy gifts for Christmas as opposed to a Christmas tree and nativity scene, monitor cables, and place mats.*

Since the whole month of December is typically written off as a gluttonous mess not unlike whatever goes down at Pizza the Hut's place, and I just mentioned that I wasn't exactly feeling tip top the whole time, gym hopping was kept to a minimum over the past several weeks. Typically, that drives me a little nuts, but you can't fight Mother Nature when she says, "you know, you should be throwing up right now. Go do that." Naturally, this left plenty of time for the interactive digital entertainments. A few of them were wacky or fun or stupid or smarmy enough that I wanted to write about them individually, but I thought I'd save you some eye strain and just run them down as a list.

Behold, then, what I've been doing for the past three weeks:

Batman: Arkham Origins
Full disclosure: I love Batman perhaps more than I love my parents (and they know). But, you know, I'm just not in to the open world Batman games. Akrham Assylum was totally my thing, though. It did the whole "metroidvania" schtick better than recent Castlevania games had done at that point, and it just felt like playing as Batman, which pretty much no other game starring the character had ever pulled off at that point since most of them were either platformers or brawlers. Arkham City was still a good game, but the explorability of the city seemed to step on what made the first game so good; the focus. So I wasn't really super psyched to play Arkham Origins, especially after some kind of middling reviews.

Annnnnd....I was kind of right. Still a good game, but I found that I was only interested in the story missions, which was basically a series of indoor levels that you simply had to traverse a large city to find. I suppose it's fine to have Gotham as a large backdrop for things to do between plot-driven adventures, but everything that I was given to do was just busy work. Blow up 40 of these. Find sixty of those. Beat up some guys and then disarm a bomb. Now do it over there and over there and over there. Snore.

The stuff that I wanted out of it was really good, though. The Joker stuff was great, and the inclusion of a couple of other irregular DC characters in the world of video games was handled pretty well (I'm talking specifically about Deathstroke). It was a fine looking game, too. The facial models were kind of lousy, but since pretty much everybody whose anybody wears masks in Gotham City, it wasn't really that distracting. There was a few things that pissed me off, though, but that's mostly due to common problems with free-running games and the unreliable combat.

Batman: Arkham Origins: Blackgate
The overuse of colons in the title should alarm you. Eff it, I'll just answer the question running around your head for you: Yes, Blackgate actually came from a man's colon. Ostensibly a more "true" metroidvania game, Blackgate did its best to cram all of the controls of it's console sibling into a 2.5D environment, which means that the player must have the finger dexterity of a concert pianist to play smoothly. Or it would, if anything actually worked according to plan. The control and button inputs were about as responsive as screaming at a deaf person at a Mastadon concert, and Batman would routinely take bullshit damage from randomly-placed strips of spikes in the ground when he should have rolled over them. The Dark Knight would recover his health after a second, though, so it was all good. Why were the spikes on the ground at all, then? You're not seeing this, but I'm shrugging my shoulders and making obscene hand gestures right now.

Structurally, the game was a total mess. Boss fights were less of a visceral feeling of accomplishment and more a series of trial and error stumbles until I figured out whatever puzzle-like nature the game all of a sudden decided to throw at me. Some of them were timing-based, so the lack of reliable control was sort of a thing. Others were riffs on previous environments and encounters so left field that if they weren't handled with surgical precision than it would spell instant Bat-cadaver. Let's not even talk about the least intuitive map in video game history, either. Jeeeeeebus.

Ni No Kuni
People that I like hate this game. People I don't like love it. If I didn't get it for a song, I would never had formed an opinion either way. As it stands it was actually alright. Pretty, but really kind of shallow, it was as close as I'll probably come to playing a Pokemon game since it's big draw was the monster taming and training (which I thought was handled weakly). It had been so long since I've played a console JRPG, though, that everything just felt comforting; the grinding, the dialog, the tiny mental benchmarks you make for when you know it's time to put it down and go to bed. It felt good to be immersed in something like that, even though most JRPGs make me feel totally detached anymore. If you had met me ten years ago, that last sentence would be kind of a shock.

Probably what helped me keep up with it to the end was the plot, though. Now, let's be clear here in that it in no way is good, but Ni No Kuni's biggest strength was it's noticeable lack of anime stupidity. You can probably hand that to developer Level 5's partnership with Studio Ghibli, but this could have fallen apart under a lot of weight, and it really didn't. To be honest, I'll never, ever play this game again. But for a modern console semi-real time menu-based RPG, I was as satisfied with it as almost any game in my PS2 library. That's a compliment, right?

Guacamelee!
People, you should be playing Guacamelee! Then you should finish it and play it again. Luchardors out to save El Presidente's daughter from the undead in an interconnected metroidvania game makes sense. Hell, even just simply that sentence just feels right. If there was an official winter jam, it would be Guacamelee! So let it be written.

Bravely Default demo
If Ni No Kuni was comforting, the now week-old Bravely Default demo for 3DS was warm post coital cuddling. I get that Square Enix, in it's weird Square Enix way, didn't want to name it a Final Fantasy game (but I'm a little baffled that it's not picking up the label now that it's coming West), but that's exactly what it is: job systems, Firaga, phoenix downs, the whole bit. If that tickles you the same way it does for me, than you've probably already played the demo or need to start paying better attention to release dates.

I played through the demo to its most ludicrous extent. All of my characters maxed their job levels, the social town-building mechanic had no place left to build, and no single creature in the game was any kind of threat when I finally closed the book on it. I don't really dig the fact that I had to wait hours (days, actually) for me to build a quasi-village to get strong enough gear to take on the demo's final boss, and I use that in the present tense because I'm hoping against hope that this doesn't surface in the full version of the game outside of optional boss fights. In no way does mean that I'm taking a pass on the game when it hits in February, but if there had to be a criticism, that would be it.

Street Fighter III: Third Strike
I'm playing this all the time. No, I'm not in front of it. You and are squaring off right now in my head. You just lost.

*All actual gifts. For real.