No Distractions

I'm working on something big in my head right now, so no posts until I've got it all settled.

It's YOUNG ADULT, Not OLD KIDS

Sorry about the short post tonight, there have been things going on that have required more of my attention and brainpower than I would have liked. I also apologize in advance for tomorrow, as I will be extremely busy and there is a good chance that I will forget the post entirely.

One thing that has always bugged me is how bookstores and libraries are categorized. You see, most of the books that I enjoy during my leisure time seem to come from the Young Adult section. Now this is not odd, seeing as how I am 21 years of age, a young adult in the full meaning of the word. However, I have been going to the Young Adult section as far back as I can remember. I quickly grew bored of the children's section, and the adult novels seemed to suffer from a lack of originality and a cornucopia of bland writing.

The bookcases of the Young Adult section seem to swell due to the enormity of the differences in maturity and reading levels required in it. On one shelf are the Boxcar Boys, tales I grew tired of in elementary school, yet right beside the boys lies the Titans of Chaos series, which requires an intimate and obscure knowledge of ancient myths, Einsteinian physics, string theory, quantum theory, chemistry, biology, Latin, French, German, Tolkien, The Once and Future King, the list goes on. The series is not one I could have read three years ago and understood, yet it sits humbly in the Young Adult section, ignored by those to embarrassed to be seen reading from the "kids section."

Either we as a society need to eradicate this fear of appearing childish, or we need to separate the Young Adult section into a few more categories.

P.S. I cannot recommend the Titans of Chaos trilogy (John C. Wright) enough, though you may have to do a bit of studying up beforehand, or at least keep a computer with internet access nearby, as there are a lot of obscure references.

He's Back!

First things first.

FRANK KLEPACKI IS WORKING ON THE SOUNDTRACK FOR RED ALERT 3!!!

Frank Klepacki's songs are some of the best in the RTS genre. Hellmarch is a literally embodiment of what Command and Conquer means as a video game. To me, the musical score in a video game is one of the greatest factors in how good a game can be. As such I cannot tell you how happy I am that Klepacki is working on a Command and Conquer title again.

For your enjoyment, I present Frank Klepacki's original Hellmarch (via YouTube).

LAN = Local Area Network

Outside of my close group of friends, I don't know that many gamers, or people with gaming related knowledge. As such, it's always a unique experience describing what a lan party is. While some people do take the time to try and understand, they are, unfortunately, the minority. When I reveal that I am heading to a lan party, or that I'm tired because of one, the conversation usually follows something along these lines:

Me: Man, I'm beat. That lan party was a lot of fun though.

Edward Example: A lan party, what's that?

Me: Well, it's a party where you get together with a bunch of friends and you all bring your computers with you so that you can play games.

E.E.: Wait, why would you get together to do that, can't you play with each other online.

Me: Well yes, but it's a lot more fun when you're all playing in a room together. Plus, since you're on a local network, you can play a game with each other that isn't online, so that way nobody can show up uninvited.

E.E.: If you're just playing games then why are you so tired? It's not like sitting in a chair is exhausting.

Me: There are always weird rules when you hang out with friends, but at most lan parties there's an unwritten rule that you can't go to sleep. If you do fall asleep, your friends will go on your computer and change your background and passwords and stuff. Plus there's all of the social interactions that go on whenever a large group of people get together, so it can be quite tiring, especially since gamers tend to fare on the introverted side of the spectrum.

E.E.: So let me get this straight. You take your computer, get it ready for transport, take it somewhere else, put it back together, play games for 24 or more hours, and then take it back home?

Me: Yes.

E.E.: All to play video games?

Me: Yes.

E.E.: You're crazy.

Me: And sleepy.

When you think about what happens at lan parties, and all of the work that goes into them, they are one of the craziest ideas, but I really suggest giving it a try sometime. Only with close friends, people tend to get a lot more irritable at five in the morning, and only if you're comfortable with it (there's nothing worse than being uncomfortable at a party, especially one this long). Lan parties are a lot of fun, and if you go through your life without going to one you are missing an experience like no other.

P.S. Written at 7:58 A.M. after staying up at a lan party, so forgive the grammar.

Yellowstone Is Awesome

So I just finished FreeFire by C.J. Box, it's a great mystery novel, but it really stands apart in its characterization of Yellowstone National Park. I love Yellowstone, it's my favorite place to visit, and not just because of its beauty or that I enjoy the smell of sulfur. There's one specific reason why I adore Yellowstone:

Yellowstone kills idiots.

It's true. The entire reserve refuses to stand stupid people, and has no compunction about eliminating them from the gene pool. Bears, buffalo, wolves, they all kill people who are stupid enough to try and feed them, but in Yellowstone the land itself takes action.

There are signs in the park that tell you to stay on the path or you will die. This is no joke, and the rangers at the park are not the nice people who urge you to stay on the path, they tell you to stay on that path or you will die, because you will. You see, most of Yellowstone (at least the most widely visited section) is actually a huge lake of boiling water covered in a thin dirt crust. Even experienced rangers fall through this crust regularly, and if you fall into the water they cannot save you in time. Of course, not all of the water is this hot, there are even springs that act as perfect natural hot tubs, but it is extremely difficult to tell the temperature of the water without instruments (most people assume you can tell by the color of the water, which is true, except there are a variety of bacteria found only in Yellowstone that can alter the color).

Yellowstone is a park that will kill you if you do not respect it, and every year it kills at least a dozen more idiots.

God I love Yellowstone.

P.S. There are some people killed by Yellowstone who aren't idiots and I don't mean to imply that they are. Yellowstone is a force of nature, and I love it for that, but I love it especially because it kills idiots with much more regularity. Also saw a human skeleton in Morning Glory Pool (pictured above) on one of my first visits to the park. My family didn't believe me until we got the story out of a park ranger the next year.

Grahahaha, So Tired...

I left my house within half an hour of waking up this morning, and got back at 8:30 P.M. I just finished dinner and nothing groundbreaking in the areas of life that I care about have been announced.

Have a good night everybody!

Slow(ish) Day

Other than a slight dread of going to the dentist tomorrow I have absolutely nothing that I want to say.

Well, okay, that's not entirely the truth. To be perfectly honest, I do have something
that I want to talk about. I spent all day today working on a secret project, but it's a secret project, so I can't talk about here now can I? Trust me though, in a few months time, all this secrecy will be well worth it.

Edit: I had seen previous screenshots and video, but Sonic may actually be back.

I Spent Today Making Monsters

The spore (Will Wright's new game) creature creator demo comes out tomorrow, but some clever little devils on the internet managed to get their hands on it a couple of days ago and released it early. Since the demo is free anyways, and since I fully intend to purchase Spore (the full game)
come September, I felt little guilt as I booted up the demo a day early.

My impression? If I wasn't planning on buying Spore before hand, I certainly would be planning to do so now.

What the Spore team has managed to do with procedural animation (the game engine creating animations on the fly rather than some guy hand-crafting the animation before the game's release) is astounding. While the demo for the creature creator is fairly limited in its parts selection, I have seen a massive variety of creatures, and they all move wonderfully, or creepily, or majestically, etc...

Perhaps the most incredible feat is how creatures are shared between people. Since this isn't the official demo, the servers for the online (and in-game) creature trading system is down, but you can still trade creatures with someone else by saving your creature for transfer (done in-game with a single button click), and then you send the 100KB or so .png image to your friend and he adds it to his creatures folder. Done and done. No hacking, no opening the console, and I don't even have a clue how an image file saves every single detail of your creature, but it does.

With Spore just on the horizon, it's hard to even care about EA's announcement about The Sims 3.

P.S. The Sims opened up gaming to a lot of women, I hope that Spore can act as an even better gateway.

Mon Pere

As I sit down to write tonight I am suddenly reminded of when I was in kindergarten and the teacher asked us to write about our hero. Back then I most likely wrote about Super Shark, an anthropomorphic shark that I made up because I felt like I was the only one who didn't have an imaginary friend. I never talked to him, and he was mainly just a list of things I thought were cool at the time; my family provided more than enough companionship for me, I didn't need to make anyone up.

Nowadays I wish I could go back and change my answer that day, now that I have a bit more experience and wisdom. If I could go back and change that answer, this is what I would write:

Who is your hero: My Dad.

What makes this person your hero: My father is the nicest, most selfless, intelligent man I know. My father spends a lot of time on the road due to his job, so he couldn't be home for a lot of big events, but every time he was home the whole house would change. I would watch my mom get happier (even when she was yelling at him). I would wake up to the sound of great jazz and pancakes, and the rest of the day the whole family would go out and have a blast. My father almost always did all of the cooking and cleaning when he was home (not to put the fantastic job my mother did down), and he is a wonderful cook. When my dad was home he would do every little thing you asked him, even if he was feeling tired, and every night that he could he would read to me and my brother, often after a taxing "airplane" ride for me where I would try my best to cling to the walls in order to stave off bed (which explains why he often fell asleep mid-sentence). And what a storyteller! My dad would make sounds, do voices, really put his whole heart and soul into the reading. I remember hearing a professional storyteller read to our class in middle school, a man whose job was literally to read books to people, and he sounded just like my dad did, even a little worse.

I know my dad worries about how much he was gone when I was younger, and I know what he would give to go back and be there for me and my brother. It hurts him, he feels so bad about it. I've told him many times how little it bothered me, because when he was home, he was there person and soul. When I look back at my childhood it barely feels like he was gone at all.

My dad is the guy who gives a hitchhiker a ride 300 miles out of his way, and makes a new friend at the same time. He's the kind of guy that you could ask for help from when you're having trouble financially and not feel ashamed.

My dad can build a trailer overnight, spend the next day driving, and that night prep a campsite for four people (including a fabulous dinner) without breaking his smile. If there is something I don't know how to do, or make, or find, I ask my dad, because I know that he knows, or will figure out a way.

I had anger issues when I was younger, and it's still an effort to control my temper, but my dad can take grievous slights and not be bothered at all. He is the calmest, kindest person I know, but I know that if he had to fight, he could, and boy could he. My dad defined what a warrior was to me, a man who would fight only as a last resort, but not be afraid to fight. To have fearsome strength, yet only use it when there was no other way.

I could go on and on, but recess is in five minutes, so I'll end it with this:

I love my dad with my whole heart, and when I grow up I only hope that I can be a fifth of the man he is.

My father defined what it meant to be a man, a warrior, a poet, even a cook to me, and to think that he only gets one day a year to celebrate that.


Happy Father's Day Dad!

I Thought You Were Cancelled

Before I say anything else I just wanted to mention that I did not forget yesterday's post. I decided to postpone the post until this morning so that I could finish the Starcraft Ghost novel.

When I saw the Starcraft Ghost novel I was pretty surprised, mainly due to the fact that I thought Starcraft Ghost had gone the way of Duke Nukem Forever (although considering Duke Nukem Forever is supposedly still coming out then perhaps that's not incorrect to say), but there it was. The novel doesn't reveal anything about the game, though there is a nice foreword that mentions that it's still being developed. Instead the book focuses on when Nova (the protagonist) first learns she has the psychic powers necessary for the ghost program. It starts off a little shaky, but the book gets a lot better and the author does a great job of creating Nova as a character, managing to differentiate her from Sarah Kerrigan quite a bit (which is hard when they're both psychic women who lose everything they ever cared about), which bodes very well for the game, assuming it ever comes out. My only concern is that certain events force Nova to forget this great past, and I sincerely hope that they somehow bring it back into play in the video game, because it could be very troubling to just ignore such a nicely prepared background.

Only Slightly Drugged

Started the day feeling sleepy, then went and had three fillings at the dentist, so I've been out of it all day. Anyways, this makes me happy to no end, and I can't get excited enough for the Ghostbuster game.

Nerd Time

I got my copy of the Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition core books today and they look good. I took a pretty long look, and about the only complaint I might have is that the character classes might play a bit too similarly for some people's taste. Personally I like the change, it's simpler, more clearly defined, and there's a lot of good design in the new edition. The thing I like most of all is that it's a lot less complicated for new players, which in my eyes is never a bad thing.

I haven't taken a look at D&D Insider, the online computer stuff that has a free trial right now, but will eventually cost a certain amount each month (I think somewhere around 10-15 dollars). I like the idea of a character creator so that everyone at the table has the same view of your character, and I'm really interested in the online tabletop that should allow people to play D&D when they aren't in the same room, or state as the case is with the group I like to play with. The price seems a little steep to me, but I haven't seen it yet, and if enough of my friends get it, then I definitely will.

By the way, I really want a new Disgaea game, I mean c'mon, who doesn't want a game where you can attack people with the moon?

Fire and Freedom

I know I shouldn't be happy about this, but it seems to me that once you're getting burned at a church gathering you know you've become an important medium. I never really understood the idea behind book burnings (or destruction of any medium really). Supposedly it's to get rid of so it doesn't influence youths, but I feel that you'd get a lot more of an impact if you sat down with the kids and talked about what you were originally planning to burn with them. Discussion tends to do a lot more than just outright banning things, and in this case you're only banning what you've collected to burn, there's still plenty of new media coming in to replace it.

In the same vein, how the hell did Jack Thompson, a man who has tried harder than any other in America to restrict video games, get scheduled to be honored at America's Freedom Festival. The man is literally trying to take away freedoms! Have we forgotten what freedom means? Last I checked America was a country founded on the concept of freedom for all, not just what is appropriate according to one man's particular moral values. If the pastor in that first article wants to burn video games, he's free to do so (as long as he purchases them, don't want to deny one man's freedoms with someone else's).

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go eat watermelon and enjoy the rest of this fine night.

Seperated At Birth?

I watched a friend of mine replay Half-Life 2: Episode 2 this weekend and I noticed that Half-Life 2's female companion, Alyx, reminds me a lot of Beyond Good & Evil's protagonist Jade. Both are slightly asian women who fight in underground organizations, and both have allies who are good with machinery and have a predilection towards using tools as weapons (the crowbar and gravity gun for Gordon, and the wrench, hammer thing for Pey'J). Hell, they even look similar.

However, more important than any of the similarities I have mentioned is the fact that they both feel realistic. Both characters give off this feeling that you could meet them while waiting for a bus. Basically they feel like they're real people, which is something I feel that writers and developers in the game industry should take a closer look at (or the film industry for that matter).

Edit: Well apparently I'm not the only one thinking this.

My Monthly Drug

So yeah I have an addiction. In my defense I have heard nothing but good things about Beyond Good & Evil from some very good sources. It was also ten dollars and on Steam.

Interestingly enough, for the first time I encountered a problem when trying to boot up the game. The game worked, but the audio and video were out of sync, specifically, the video ran at 3-5x speed. It turns out that my computer was just too darned good for the thing. In a stroke of genius I figured out how to make it so that one of my processors ignored the program and then set the other processor to see the game as the lowest of it's priorities, which fixed the problem. It also made me really happy, because really, I'm running a fairly nice PS2 at maximum graphical settings and I have to trick my computer into not absolutely crushing it.

By the way, I'm about fifteen minutes into the game and I already am amazed with the character of Jade. She seems so, human.

What I've Been Up To

I've been thinking a lot about narrative structure lately. How to tell a story has become very interesting to me and as such I've been taking a look at a variety of mediums and what people have done with narrative structure with them. Here's a quick list of some of the titles that I've been looking at and what I find interesting about their narrative structure:

Video Games:

Grand Theft Auto IV - Gives players a lot of personal freedom while simultaneously forcing them down a specific narrative path.

Dragon Quest VIII: Gives little to no freedoms, and story is very structured and quite unsurprising, but feels more like a full world than most RPG's I've played.

Fallout 2: Has a specific narrative, but the player is only required to see the bare bones of it, most of the game is optional and mini-endings are given for every city you visit.

Webcomics:

The Dreamland Chronicles: Simple story with no surprises (yet), but I'm still enchanted by the story. The visuals combine with the fairy tale-esque story to capture my inner child.

The Last Days of FOXHOUND: Starts with extremely crude drawings and similar humor, and doesn't upgrade too much over the course of the series. Despite this it manages to not only remain comically consistent, but is also one of the best synopsis of the Metal Gear series up to MGS4, without showing Solid Snake once. The result is a second look at the enemies that I was able to put down so easily in-game, and now I wish I had been on their side.

Movies:

Iron Man: Simple premise, excellent cast and a lot of good, wry humor. The result is a story that is fun and never makes you feel bad (unlike The Last Days of FOXHOUND, which almost had me in tears).

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: Simple premise, excellent cast (seem familiar), and a perfect treading the line with what could have been a terrible story. Proves that dangerous gambles pay off big (it even made me forgive the monkey scene).

This is just a small selection of what I've been thinking about, but I have noticed one thing in common with all of these, and that is that there is a story being told, one story, and while some may have multiple endings, they are still fairly limited in their scope. I'm curious if it would be possible to create something that has multiple plot threads that run together, but not into a single story, and give each of these threads multiple endings. I think I'm just tired of how multiple endings work in video games at the moment. Multiple endings are usually determined by one painfully-obvious choice, and the choice leads to a "bad" ending and a "good" ending. I wonder what it would take in order to make endings that felt more dynamic, more influenced by your actions over the course of the entire game, and what it would be like to see a game that has multiple "good" endings, letting the player decide what they feel is the best ending.

Maybe I'm just bored. The point is, if you like the Metal Gear and/or Metal Gear Solid series, you should really go read The Last Days of FOXHOUND, it'll give you a whole new experience.

P.S. Everything I mentioned here is good and I recommend seeing/playing/reading it aside from Dragon Quest VIII, which is mediocre at best (has good music and visuals, but a predictable plot and the game is a grind, 59 hours and level 30 of 99, that's just absurd).

Edit: Apparently it's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, woops.

I Need My Next Fix

This article saddens me, especially coming from the stereotypically less-PC Australia. I'm going to say this here and now, boys need aggressive physical activity and they need competition. Giving boys outlets for this need is very important (as it keeps them from acting out elsewhere), but so is allowing their entertainment to contain these qualities (not always of course) as well.

In unrelated news I really want to get a new game and it kind of frightens me. See, it's not like I don't have games to play, and I even have games that I haven't beaten. No, I just really want to buy a new game, for no real reason. Like an addiction. Am I becoming addicted to buying video games?

Or it could just be that I really want to play Mass Effect and Metal Gear Solid 4.

So Much Hate

Apparently I'm still getting used to this being at home thing as I completely forgot a post for yesterday.

Anyways, Leigh Alexander is awesome again by thinking the same exact thing as me when I read this article.

Feministing and I have a unique relationship, or we did. I used to spend a good deal of time poring over the articles that appeared on the blog trying to figure out why I disliked the site. I couldn't figure it out for a long time, I mean, I like what their goal, and I feel in a global context feminism is still relevant (locally is a more complex topic), so why did I dislike them? I figured out that it was the anger that the writers voiced that turned me off. The sheer hate that permeated the articles made me nervous. Having figured this out I decided to lambaste them in one of my posts here, but I had to find an article to poke wholes in.

That's when I ran into a little bit of a snag.

You see, the writers at Feministing.com aren't bad writers, and they aren't bad journalists. While I may have disagreed with their message, everything they did was good work, so I couldn't have anything more than a personal beef with them. Then they slipped up and wrote this article on GTAIV, which the writer had not played. I didn't write the post that I had thought up partially because I have a number of friends who read Feministing and I didn't want to alienate them, but mainly I felt that it was too easy, and while I may foam at the mouth for the bad journalism that their article showed, I was still more worried about the anger and hate that I saw in their words. So for the moment you can consider Feministing and I at peace, the kind of peace where I send spies over at all times, but peace nonetheless.