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.