Continuing the theme of 'so overdue it hurts' two memes. skuldnoshinpu and zarla respectively.

Comment to this entry and I'll pick three of your fandoms. You must then update your journal and answer the following questions:

01: What got you into this fandom in the first place?
02: Do you think you'll stay in this fandom or eventually move on?
03: Favorite episodes/books/movies/etc.?
04: Do you participate in this fandom (fanfiction, graphics, discussions)?
05: Do you think that more people should get into this fandom?

( slash )

and #2

1. Post a picture of your wallpaper.
2. Explain in five sentences why you're using that wallpaper.
3. Don't change your wallpaper before doing this! The point is to see what you had on

( chop )

To celebrate my newly-earned unemployment I spent the whole weekend playing Final Fantasy IV Advance.  The entire whole weekend.  I started it on Friday and cleared the final dungeon this morning.  It's been about ten years since I first played this game on the PS1 and just over five since I've touched any of the main Final Fantasies.  It might be a little embarrassing to think of how addicted I got to such an archaic game with a plot that's as shallow as it is random and wildly erratic difficulty but I think, hidden inside for all those years, there is a part of me that still genuinely, unironically loves this genre.

I didn't actually mean to finish it when I did, that was kind of an accident.  I was running low on healing in the last part of the final dungeon where the enemies just got ridiculous so I decided to run to the last save point ignoring treasure, because I had dealt with a lot of chest monsters up to that point, save and restore there and then backtrack for the treasure before fighting the final boss.  Only there was no save point and I ran straight into the boss instead.  There was no save point anywhere in the final dungeon, which was kind of a shock after years of expecting a save point before the final boss as a right but Final Fantasy IV comes from the tail-end of an era when the genre wasn't really known for user-friendliness (EDIT: there are two save points in the final dungeon, and I missed both of them because I was running straight ahead and not exploring the side paths.  How ironic).

Other modern ideas from the series being added elsewhere probably didn't help my false sense of security.  In FFIV Advance instead of being party-locked to Cecil/Rosa/Kain/Rydia/Edge at the end only Cecil is fixed and the others can be swapped out for any of the surviving PCs (Cid, Yang, Edward or the twins).  I took this opportunity to switch out Kain for Yang when it turned out he was even faster than Edge and had a new Holy-element weapon that wrecked a lot of enemies in the last dungeon.  The changeable party isn't quite as liberating as it sounds on paper though because it seems like I'll have to stick to the Cecil/fighter/fighter/W. Mage/B. Mage template to make a really effective team which makes Edward very awkward to use since he's a mage with no magic.

Meanwhile Card Sagas Wars released a new video and the project continues to be the purest form of gamer nerd porn in existence.  There's a new Zelda stage on display along with the fancy flying tiles at the start and end of each round that all 2D fighters need to have and a marquee that pops up from the bottom announcing attack names which surely raises the potential for references even further.  I like how they've managed to make CSW Link distinct from Smash Link.  There's no two ways about how the bow/bombs/hookshot/spin should work but there's a few more unique attacks on top of those to make him stand out.  One of his moves in particular (you'll know which one when you see it) is so brilliant Nintendo should be ashamed for not using it themselves, even though I'll admit it doesn't fit with the ZELDA IS SRS BSBS LET'S DEBATE THE TIMELINE AGAIN direction that's been forced on the series over the past few years.  Cloud's unique ability is Real-Time Materia Change although I'm still not sure how it affects his moves.

On the other hand seeing CSW use a piece of music straight from an actual game suddenly makes me feel a lot less secure about it's existence.  It feels like the sword of Damocles is hanging over a project that's unofficially used material from so many companies - although I'm mostly worried about Square-Enix here, since they have a record for doing asshole-ish things in this territory.

BANG HAS FALCON PUNCH

AWESOME

This is a new personal record for an overdue post but I already put too much effort into this to just dump it.  This month was very distracting but in all honesty my laziness was still a bigger factor.

( E3 impressions )

You know you must be getting older when the people you remember being huge stars in your childhood start aging and dying off.

I thought it would have affected me more but I can't really think of him as gone.  The man Michael Jackson is dead but the legend is immortal.  The two had become very different entities over the last few years.  I hope much of the mockery dies with him so he can be remembered more fondly.

I broke a controller by throwing it at the weekend.  This isn't the first time, I'm only human after all, but it was the first time I decided to see what I could do about it so I went down to B&Q and got a screwdriver to open it up.  I replaced the shoulder button that popped out on impact with the floor (and the rest of the buttons as well when I turned the pad over by mistake and they all spilt out.  It was very easy to put back together because all the buttons have different tabs sticking out the bottom so they can't settle in the wrong slots.  It's all very idiot-proof) retightened the screws and it works fine.  You'd almost never know it was broken.

Driven by the thrill of success and the masculine urges that had surfaced from tool use I tried my hand at another broken controller I had stored in the cupboard.  With this one a corner broke off the shoulder button so it hangs loose.  It should still work but it's awkward to hold, and while the other one was just an ordinary pad this was a rare transparent controller with coloured buttons and I felt guilty about manhandling it so I kept it (and the broken chip of plastic) for years in case I could get it fixed.  I planned to take the button out, glue the broken piece on and reassemble it but I couldn't get the screws out.  The screwdriver couldn't grip the slots even when I pressed hard and turned, like the screws were in too tight.  Back into storage it goes.  That pad was an old shame of mine so it's more of a letdown that I thought for just a few minutes I finally had the power to fix it.

Meanwhile in gaming news the laws on UK games ratings were changed again.  Now the PEGI (Pan-European Gaming Information) ratings are going to be the only source of rating information, mandatory for all games and legally enforcable.  Being older than 18 and not having children it doesn't affect me but I suspect the news reports about it were trying to play up how much of an advancement this is by a) not mentioning that virtually every game released in the UK over the past six years has voluntarily been rated by PEGI anyway so the information has always been there, and b) the reports only focus on the problems of children playing age-inappropriate games or retailers selling them to children.  The continuing issue of parents who ignore the ratings and buy age-restricted games for their children isn't mentioned.  Fancy that.

If there is one person or more on your friends list who makes your world a better place just because they exist and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the internet, then post this same sentence in your journal.

Said person is probably seeing a lot of this meme.

I took a break from posting for a while because I caught whatever the blogging equivalent of writer's block is.  Everything I tried to type was so awful I decided not to inflict it on other people and went to play games for a few days.  I have a 75% complete post on my picks of E3 that I'll finish sometime this week.  I might have been posting that now but instead I want to post about how I struck gold on Friday night and found a bunch of game soundtracks I've been after for years.  This was most of my most-wanted game OSTs found all at once.

Street Fighter Alpha 2 Gold was the last revision of Street Fighter Alpha 2.  Like any fighting game revision it had a bunch of subtle changes but the most important one to me was the music, which was apparently re-arranged from regular SFA2.  There are at least three version of the OST (arcade mix, with the bass and sound effects turned up loud enough to vibrate you off the floor and so unsuitable for home listening, regular SFA2 and SFA2 Gold) and this is the rarest and hardest to find.  The instrument balance isn't exactly the same as I remember from playing the game on the Saturn years ago but it's close enough.  Most of the characters who started in SF2 and appeared here have some of my favourite official versions of their themes, except Cammy, who lost her SF2 theme and gained an amazing new one instead.  I can't describe how much that theme floored me when I first heard it.  The thought of having it on file has kept me wanting this soundtrack for years.  I never got round to playing SF Alpha 3 but I sampled the music and found it underwhelming compared to SFA2G and only kept a few tracks.

The next one is another Capcom fighter, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure.  The physical OST is apparently super-ultra-rare limited and the unpopularity of the game (or the license in general) has kept it obscure even though it has some really great tracks.  It's not as good as I expected on the whole because it's a little uneven.  It has lots of grandiose but similar-sounding incidental tracks in blaring arcade synth but some amazingly hard rocking themes for the heroes and the villain.  These standout tracks justify the whole soundtrack for me.  The bad thing is the OST is only for the first version of the game so it didn't have the themes for the characters that appeared in the update (Hol Horse, Mariah, Pet Shop, Anubis Polnareff and whoever I'm forgetting).

Castlevania: The New Generation (most people reading this would know it as Bloodlines) is another I've wanted for a while but actually getting it wasn't the thrill I expected.  Castlevania reprises themes a lot and most of the tracks from it had been done better in later games.  The exception is Calling from Heaven which I think I remembered quite fondly and mythologised as the great lost wonder of Castlevania music over the years but after Curse of Darkness and Order of Ecclesia the music of New Generation doesn't rank quite as highly for me.  But Calling from Heaven has never been reprised in another game to my knowledge and I'd still like to see it again sometime.

Sonic Rush Adventure isn't something I've wanted for as long as the others because I only played it last year but that just meant the memories brought up by the music were all fresh.  Still the best Sonic game ever.

I also added the music of SaGa Frontier, which isn't something I've searched after for years but I had some samples in my playlist and I liked them so I took the opportunity to get the whole thing.  I did actually play this game years ago but I found it very confusing and never got very far.

Also last week GameFAQs Best Game Ever 2009 came to an end.  I didn't care that much about it after my bracket made a ton of mistakes from the very beginning and I assumed that meant I would never make it on the leaderboard (and even less after I saw Super Metroid only staying ahead of Super Mario Kart by a margin of about a hundred votes) but whenever I checked my score I was usually around the 80th percentile (i.e. scoring better than 4/5 of the other brackets).  My final score was 455 which scored at the 92.95 percentile but I think it was 96 point something on the day of the finals.  The highest scoring entry was 653.  Very disparate results.  Bring on the safe ol' predictable character contest...

Here's a bit of non-E3 gaming news that might have been obscured by the big event.  Secret of Mana is coming to mobile phones in Japan, although the proportion of straight port to remake isn't obvious yet.  Now while Secret of Mana was, from what I remember, a rough diamond that could benefit from a touched-up release and had co-operative multiplayer that would be perfect for modern wireless handhelds I'd much prefer to see the game on a system that doesn't exclude anyone without one of those famous future-tech super mobiles they have in Japan.  The DS would have been preferred.

Nice art though.  It's my new wallpaper.

Sega looks at the sales figures for Mario Kart and thinks "I want some of that".

The really awkward title ("Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing") highlights a difference between Sega and other companies.  Companies like Nintendo and Capcom have many different franchises with well-known characters but Sega just has one cast-heavy series that all their most famous characters come from, the Sonic series.  In last year's Sega tennis game the non-Sonic parts of the roster were filled out by C- and D-list Sega characters, most of which had been effectively retired for years.  Yes I like Ulala but that's not making her any less unpopular in general.

The real news is I'm told that Richard Jacques is going to score the game.  The last time Richard Jacques made the music for a racing game with Sonic in it the result was amazing.  I await the OST with a hundred times more enthusiasm than the game itself.

I also saw this today via Penny Arcade.  I think it's amusing, many other people don't.  I suspect JRRT himself would actually have been among the latter.  If I remember the documentaries I watched around the time the movies were coming out he didn't like the idea of Lord of the Rings being presented as a comedy or a cartoon.  It was a serious thing to him.  I believe he wasn't fond of the Disney style and made sure Disney could not acquire Lord of the Rings for use as a feature film.  But that's what Aragorn's Quest makes me think of, Tolkien á la Disney.

I hear Square-Enix isn't a really popular company right now.  No discussion of them seems to be complete without a complaint about the overuse of the Final Fantasy brand and the neglect of other series they own.  I don't really care if that's true or not.  I'm not entitled to buy everything they make and they aren't obliged make things I want to buy.  Maybe other people need to see Square-Enix do something really awful before they can appreciate what it really means to be a bad company.  I hope threatening to sue your own fans for what amounts to glorified fanfiction should be enough.

There was at least some logic behind shutting down Chrono Resurrection, as disappointing as that was.  Resurrection was a completely unauthorised remake of the original game and it was on course to make the official DS re-release look downright lazy by comparison.  This, on the other hand, is pure egoism and a contempt for the people that support you.  Square-Enix bringing down the hammer probably gave the hacks more publicity than they would have had normally.

Of all the projects that were affected the one that got the most attention was the fanmade Chrono Trigger sequel Crimson Echoes, which was due for release in less than a month, but I suspect the public will get to play Crimson Echoes eventually because Square-Enix acted far too late to close it down.  The game was apparently complete and in the hands of testers when the letter came.  The developers of the hack may have their hands tied but the testers could keep their copies without anyone knowing and, if one of them knew how, leak it via proxy.  I know that's what most people would do if they could.

Does this mean I have to get a PS3 now?

But if I wasn't so impressed with the trailer I'd start to worry about Team Olympics' games becoming very self-derivative.

I love Japan.

( the new Star Trek went boldly forward because it couldn't find reverse )

If there's one bad thing that came out of this it's the conclusive killing of the old saying about odd-numbered Treks always being inferior to even-numbered ones.  Or if this is going to be kept alive the next one is going to have to be spectacular.

I'm not that familiar with the board called NeoGAF.  I've seen it called a fuming asshole of the internet where intelligence goes to die several times now but I'm not inclined to believe that because it sounds like the claims people used to make about GameFAQs whenever they wanted to emphasise how supposedly terrible it was compared to their board of choice.

But whatever the site is guilty of or what you think of it you need to stop whatever worthless thing you are doing right now and LOOK AT THIS THREAD.  Unless you happen to be at work right now or something, because there is a degree of NSFW.  But in that case the link should be your first priority after getting home.

In today's gaming news was the closure of 3D Realms which might put the lid on Duke Nukem Forever forever.  I'm sure people will miss the jokes but nothing lasts forever, even as much as this felt like it would.  If DNF needed an ultimate fate this is the best way it could have gone out.  Actually releasing a game would have ruined much of the mythos that's been built up around it.  This way the game gets to be distant and inaccessible forever.

I've returned to Order of Ecclesia after a long break.  I burnt myself out before through a combination of the game's difficulty and pushing myself to complete it in a weekend but now I'm back and exhausting everything the game has to offer like I do with every Metroidvania.  Right now I'm two entries away from completing the item encyclopaedia (requiring me to do the Boss Rushes repeatedly to win a bunch of gimmick items) and after that I'll do a hard mode game.  The medals earned for beating bosses without taking damage were much easier than I thought they would be.  It was very cathartic to re-fight bosses that made me sweat blood for a victory before (Gravedorcus, Blackmore and Dracula) and kill them in 10-15 seconds with my twinked-out Shanoa but that was all on a New Game+ where I had the equipment and stats necessary for powergaming.  I don't think I'd want to try the hard mode at all if I wasn't allowed to carry over my equipment and 50 levels from a previous game.

I found out last night the UK release of the Klonoa Wiimake is the end of May.  My reaction was, strangely, not happiness but a sense of crushing inevitability.  I'm going to have to get a Wii now.  I'd gotten used to the lack of pressure in not owning any of the current machines but this is the game that's going to force my hand and do what the new NiGHTS, Smash and Metroid Prime games fell just short of.

My shortlist of Wii games will be; Klonoa, NiGHTS and Brawl are highest priority, followed by the three Metroid Primes (I was looking for an excuse to replay 1 & 2 anyway) the Pikmin remakes (Pikmin 1 if it's cheap, Pikmin 2 for sure since the Gamecube version has become harder to find than Nazi gold in Switzerland) and de Blob.

I'll probably have to look forward to going through this process again when Blazblue comes out.

It's been a while since my last post.  I spent my extended Easter holiday slacking from things I needed to do online.  It was liberating but it just meant a bigger backlog when I came back.  Such is the fate of the modern internet-dweller.

The first round of GameFAQs Best Game Ever 2009 will be half done soon and the performance of my bracket has been rather spotty.  I didn't make any effort to pay attention to what others were saying so the predictions are mostly my own (although I do remember one random person who convinced me to favour Mega Man 3 over Final Fantasy 4 in my bracket - thanks a lot whoever you were) and I don't know if the mistakes I made were obvious ones or not.  The success of Goldeneye was the biggest upset for me because I never expected the game to still have legs like that after more than ten years.  And since Mario RPG and Mario Kart 64 might split the Nintendo vote next round it might get all the way to round three... where it goes up against FF7, Mario 64 and Chrono Trigger.  Ouch.

It took me long enough to see it but this is the best April Fools ever, but only if you're a Metroid fan.  Where a non-fan might just see a lot of work a serious Metroid devotee will see a game they can actually play through in their mind.  I spent over an hour last night tracing the tunnels and collecting the items, even restarting from the middle when I found I'd made a mistake.  The maps may be even simpler than Zero Mission's but there's a fully-functioning Metroid game in here with a collection order and a real understanding of how a Metroid gameworld is designed.  There's a little bit of fudging involved; because there aren't any enemies the Ice Beam doesn't seem to be necessary for progress and it's not clear where the new ability to repair broken computers is made use of either, but those are things that only crazy Metroid fans like me were going to notice in the first place.

To finish this off, I might never play this game but the trailer made sure I'll remember it forever.

If my 2009 so far had a theme it would be 'one thing after another'.  I've barely done any gaming compared to the end of 2008 because just when I've finished something and think I'll have more time to myself I have to start something else.  My most recent labour might actually help me in the long term though.  As of last weekend I've officially joined the 21st century by getting a feeds managing program.  It should, I hope, make it quicker and easier to keep up with many sites and blogs I want to read.  Recently I developed a bad habit of telling myself, well, maybe that site didn't update today or I don't have to go right now because I can read one day's worth of updates in no time, then that one day becomes two, then three, then suddenly two weeks worth of updates to read all at once.  So far it looks like the feeds reader will become one of these 'how on Earth did I live without this?' developments.  The trick now will be catching up on the last few blogs I've been neglecting for months but I should have time to do that over Easter break.

Anyway, GameFAQs Best Game Ever 2009 starts today.  Those of you who had me on their flist last autumn don't have to reach for the cyanide capsules, I'm not covering this one.  It doesn't have quite the, uh, character of the other more famous contest to me.  I'll post if there's something interesting, like a big upset, but other than that I'll leave it alone.

Zelda on a train!  Choo choo!
Hyrule breaking out of it's fantasy comfort zone and reaching the industrial age is the most interesting thing I've seen the series do in a while.  No, I do not find DARK AND SERIOUS EPIC ZELDA interesting.

Also saw this today.  Fascinating.  I'd love to try it.