Moving

I moved to a new site: A Curious Tale.

Mission Success

After four years of hard work, relentless fun, and a fair amount of procrastination I graduated from University of Puget Sound today with a B.A. in English with an emphasis on Creative Writing.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to start this post, but it seems I can't come up with anything better than this, which does nothing to convey the amount of accomplishment I feel as I look at who I am today compared to the shy, introverted, wimp of a kid. During the last four years I've made more friends than the other 18 combined, asked a girl out on my first date, and nearly died. It has been a tremendous experience that has shaped me into a person far greater than I once was. I hope to continue this trend for the rest of my life, but today I'm taking a break from self-improvement to enjoy what I have become.

Posts will be sporadic for the next week or two as I pack-up and get re-settled, but after that expect me to far more prolific than I ever was before.

I Swear I'm Not A Zombie

Just wanted to say that I'm not dead, just super busy lately (Saturday was the first time I got to play a video game in two weeks).

The Final!

You've tracked down the princess, solved all the villagers minor squabbles and are ready to end it once and for all. It's time to fight the Final Boss.

Final Bosses are the culmination of everything you have accomplished in your time with the game. All that you have learned gets put on the test in this final exam. Final Boss' are the developers most important weapon; it is in the final boss fight where players set their impression of a game in stone, and a weak final boss can ruin what is an otherwise astounding game. Just like a fireworks display, we feel disappointed if the final bang doesn't give the biggest boom. Unlike a fireworks display, the Final Boss must tie together all of the narrative points, gameplay experiences, art aesthetics, and musical themes for a single moment of connectedness. The Final Boss is the time when you want your audience to finally understand everything that the game has been trying to say. From the tireless perseverance of Mario's search for the missing Princess Toadstool in Super Mario Bros., to the crushing fate of death in Persona 3, it must all be encapsulated in this final climactic scene.

Final Bosses come in all shapes and sizes. They can be multiform monstrosities that eventually shapeshift into building size blobs of flesh, or they can be a normal human being. For the most part, however, Final Boss' tend to sit in two categories: human-esque opponents and what I define as the more monstrous encounters. The following videos present a view of these two categories:

Human Type - Final Fight with Ganondorf from Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess:
-(note there are three fights before this one)


Monster Type - Mother Brain from Super Metroid:
-skip to


I will say that both of these are considered examples of extremely good Final Boss fights, with the Mother Brain fight from Super Metroid known as one of the best boss fights in video gaming (how much of this is rose-tinted glasses is unclear as I am most certainly wearing mine). Bad Final Boss fights are a dime a dozen, and most games tend to end quite weakly, and usually on the wrong chord. One reason for this neglect, of what I consider to be the most important part of a video game, is that unlike movies or books, which most people finish eventually, video games rarely get finished. I myself had this problem, and only in the past four years or so have I really tried to get to the end of video games (time constraints coupled with most games averaging in at 50-60 play time to complete made me only invest in beating the games I really, really liked). Developers are aware of this, and so they spend the majority of their development time working on the beginning of their game, in order to hook players into investing their time (and more importantly money) into the rest of the game. Since the least amount of people will see the end of the game, why should they spend the most effort on it?

Still, I feel that a fantastic Final Boss can take even a mediocre game to the stars, and some games have been entirely defined to me (and my peers) by their final encounter. Perhaps the most haunting of all of these is the final boss of Earthbound (what the image up top is depicting).

Warning! These two videos will make very little sense to you without the context of the entire game. Try not to understand the plot, but instead focus on the way the music works together with the shifting background to convey a sense of hopelessness and dread.

Maverick

I was going to talk about Final Boss encounters today, and the I saw this, Top Gun. That link will take you to a forty-minute video talking about Brandon Crisp, a young man who died last November after running away from home because his parents took his XBox360 away from him. The video talks about Brandon's death, his obsession with video games that led to his running away, video game addiction, and professional gaming.

Let me preface everything I am about to write by saying that Brandon's death was a tragic accident and I would never wish for this to happen to anyone.

This video perfectly demonstrates how those in video game culture (or the industry) see those who aren't, as well as how those outside of the culture see those who are in it. The scenes between the professional gaming team and the interviewer I feel are the most pronounced in this aspect. Here we have a woman who has almost no knowledge of video games, asking weighted questions to a group that in order to exist has to legitimize gaming in the eyes of people like her. My favorite moment is when the interviewer presses the group on the fact that they are killing people in these games, as she makes a legitimate statement, but you can see in the gamers' expressions that they can't make her understand with just words, as she'll just keep going back to that single point. The group does a very good job of keeping their cool, as I'm sure that if I were in that situation I would either burst out saying, "it's just a game!" (thus countering my own attempts to legitimize my career) or going off on a long tirade about how when you really kill people they release their bowls and can't come back to life in fifteen seconds.

The most heartbreaking scenes in this video are those with the parents. It's just so sad to see them, that even after this tragedy, they don't understand their kid well enough to know why he ran away after they took his XBox. The father talks nonchalantly about having to go in and rip the cords out of the wall sometimes (did he never learn that this could damage the system?). The saddest to me is how they begin to learn that their son wanted to be a professional gamer, but decide to create a scholarship in his name that promotes "real" sports, completely neglecting the fact that their son began to game in the first place after he got kicked out of Hockey because he was too small to be a goalie. It's like watching them spit on their own son's grave. It just seems to me that Brandon would have preferred that they try and make a scholarship that would help someone break into professional gaming (not an easy task considering you won't see any monetary rewards until you are among the top 100 or so gamers amongst several million rivals, all while your practice is looked down upon because you're just playing games).

The video is an interesting look into both of these worlds, and even though it does some things that make my blood boil (ignore the fact that he got kicked out of hockey for his size and putting the burden of parenting on game companies) it is still a very interesting video to watch.

As a final note, most professional gamers make roughly $30-$40k a year, and this is not including those who can't support themselves by gaming alone (the vast majority). This is most likely why the professional gamers refused to answer how much they make, which is a very personal question anyways.

Slight Delay

You can blame midterms turning me into a foggy brained monster, or roommates being so hard to ignore for the lack of the promised post. I would love to write one now, but I simply cannot write the post I want to in fourteen minutes tonight. Even if I had to hours until it was tomorrow, my brain is not working at the speed I need it to in order to even keep my eyes open, so post is delayed until I get up for breakfast tomorrow.

Medius Dies

I just wanted to say that the lack of posts is not because I've died, or stopped writing again. I have midterms tomorrow and decided that it would be better if I spent all my time reviewing my Latin rather than distracting myself with discussions about boss fights in video games. Expect to see a post tomorrow talking about Final Boss'.