The End of the Line...For RPGs

I realized something earlier today. It was while I was grinding for levels in Final Fantasy XII, a game that I still have not beaten despite having it in my possession for going on two years now. The realization was simple.

"I don't have time for this shit."

"This shit", specifically, refers to the various console RPGs that require enormous investments of time to make any progress in. I am currently over fifty hours into Final Fantasy XII. I have spent fifty hours of my life that I will never get back on this game. And what am I getting from it? Am I getting epic shit that makes all the effort worthwhile? Are there enormous throwdowns with monstrous beings that warp reality and time and whatever? No. I'm grinding levels in an effort to make it through a fucking cave that is mostly populated with imps. IMPS. And in case you didn't get it that second time, let me re-reiterate:

Imps.

We are talking minor goddamn demons, here. At over fifty hours into a game I should be in a position to punch Beelzebub in the balls, not have to go toe to toe with a frigging gargoyle with a pitchfork and lose half the time.

Investment in the story can only carry me so far. Once upon a time I really wanted to know what shit was going down in Final Fantasy XII. I really did. I knew the names of the kingdoms, I knew the purposes behind the protagonists' actions, I even could recall the backstory of the major characters. Now, returning to it months later, I am simply doing things because the mechanism of the game says it should be so. And doing for the sake of doing is the silliest thing there is.

So I have come to this conclusion: the games I play and enjoy most are brief and to the point. The Sands of Time Trilogy, Devil May Cry, Shadow of the Colossus, these are games that were fucking awesome, and all of which I played to completion (except for DMC, where I'm still stuck on the final boss). And I was able to play them to completion because they maintained my interest enough and were compact enough that I was able and willing to fit them into my daily schedule.

...I think that's enough of a rant from me, for now.

----
"I have two children!"

A Revelation

I have long been pondering on the existence of Flash games--specifically, what particular niche it is they fill that the glut of modern video gaming technology we are surrounded by is unable to touch. I was just moments ago struck with a blinding realization while poking around Armor Games, and I'm still having a little trouble seeing, so let's work forward from the start of things.

First, what manner of interactive entertainment is covered by media outside of Flash? Take for example, gaming consoles and computer gaming software. What do they offer us, as individuals in search of the alleviation of boredom? Most of the time they offer a high-end product, costing anywhere from twenty to sixty dollars depending on the format and the hardware it's supposed to run on. And for that twenty to sixty dollars you can get damn near any experience you care to find. Want to play at being a guitarist in a rock band? Check. Wanna be a mushroom-addicted plumber rescuing a princess from a lizard man? We got that. Want to slay demons as you carve a swath of divine fury through Hell itself? Sure thing. Want to save the world from the forces of darkness? What kinds of dark forces do you want to save it from? We have options. Want to commit deicide, over and over again? Three times yes.

Do you want to play a game of fucking tennis while sitting on your couch? Because we can do that. You can even play it by barely twitching your wrist, if you want to look like a complete tool.

So traditional gaming experiences run the gamut from the simple to the complex and have touched on just about every major mythic arc that exists. Whether it's Street Fighter or Devil May Cry or Ghostbusters, there's something for just about everybody. So where do Flash games fit in to all this? Obviously it would be nigh-on impossible for them to try to compete with professional developers directly, jockeying for consumer attention by producing Flash-based rehashes of RPGs and fighting games and so forth. Major developers pour thousands to millions of dollars into game development and wield cadres of professional, beret-bedecked artists and wild-eyed, unwashed programmers to bring their digital behemoths to life. Which is why I'll choose Starcraft over any goddamn Flash-based tower defense game in the history of forever for the rest of eternity.

Seriously guys, tower defense was new and interesting two years ago. We've gone from beating a dead horse to actively slicing it open and sexually assaulting the resultant holes a la the Marquis de Sade. Let me make this clear: you have become sadists. So let it go. But I digress.

You'll notice, though, that the lack of professional development on a Flash game is a double-edged sword. While it is a format that necessarily limits the length and scope of the games designed for it, it also allows unparalleled freedom for its designer--meaning that the weird, the experimental, and the flat-out surreal are able to make it into the final product without worry, because the game is not being developed to the tune of several million dollars in order to appeal to a commercial market that has the power to bankrupt the game's parent company if said game fails to garner attention.

And that's why you wind up with things like ImmorTall, The Company of Myself, Robot Dinosaurs That Shoot Beams When They Roar, and You Have To Burn The Rope in Flash format--because that's the absolute best use for that particular mode of expression. They can't compete on a point-by-point basis with the other games that can arrest our attention with flashy graphics and big explosions, so they must transcend them by doing things large production companies are simply unable to pull off without major (unwanted) financial risk. The quirky, the unusual, and the off-balance are the calling card of great Flash games, and that is how they will survive in a world dominated by texture-mapped polygons and particle effects.

By being wonderfully, sublimely odd.

----
"We're all mad here."

Sweet Dreams

It occurs to me at this late hour that I really ought to've gotten more product to put in my hair on my way home today. There was the pressing concern of my bladder to take into account, though that will do little to ameliorate the deleterious effects of a bad 'do come tomorrow.

On an unrelated note, I can only assume that snow on the first official day of spring is no more and no less than a harbinger of doom. My brothers and sisters, we are in the icy grip of Fimbulwinter, and it will only end when Loki sets sail in his ship made of the nails of dead men and the twilight of the gods has come to pass. At which point we are, of course, duly fucked. In the light of all that, my hair situation seems considerably less dire.

To blog about blogging is to metablog. So if I were to compose a blog about blogging about blogging, would it become even more meta? Would it increase exponentially in power, its hair turning gold and its muscles bulging as it roared its defiance to the dark gods of the Internet? Or would it push it so far forward that, due to some bizarre Einsteinian quantum nonsense, it would come back around from the other side as simply being another blog post? Perhaps it would burst free of the shackles of definition entirely, and in its Escheresque self-referentiality achieve sentience?

What if the box the corporate brass wants you to think outside of is labeled "Sanity"? How long would it take for terrible, squamous beings from other planes to usurp the company infrastructure and begin reaping a bumper crop of human souls? Worse yet, how long would it take people to notice?

These are the things I wonder about before I go to sleep. It makes life dreadfully interesting.

----
-Me

Rube Goldberg Is Green With Envy

As I type this blog post, each press of a key sends an electrical signal surging along a cable that is linked to, by one detour or another, the central processing unit of the computer, which in turn communicates with the laptop's BIOS, which has a chat with the operating system, which passes word along to Firefox, who eventually turns to the text field on the page and says for it to display the goddamn characters, you lazy twat, or I'll strip you down to your component bits and scatter them in the raging inferno of the Internet, which will be the closest thing to death you will ever have the displeasure of experiencing.

The text field says okay, I heard you, jackass, and updates, and that update is caught on the next timed screen refresh an imperceptibly short amount of time later. An electrical charge is run through a handful of cells of liquid crystal, rendering them into black pixels that create a shape recognizable to the human eye.

The letter "A" appears on my screen.

Does that strike anyone else as completely batshit insane?

----
"Inconceivable!"

Concerning 4chan

I'm sure we all know of 4chan. It is regularly thought of as the cesspool of the Internet--the lawless West of the Web, manifest as a looming tower of undulating porn with horses in, a place infested with memes and assholes where sanity goes to die. In short, not generally a favorite of most people. If you make yourself known there, you're going to be met with mild disinterest at best; at the worst, you'll get the kind of open hostility that can burn the Teflon off a politician's back and send him crying home to his mistress. Complete toss-up. Such are the ways of Anonymous.

Which is why it always surprises me that in 4chan, the land of C-C-C-COMBO BREAKERS, ultimata concerning the prompt exposure of tits, and one of the premiere stomping grounds of some of the world's greatest trolls, every once in a while comes across as so very...humanist.

I present as proof this image, conveying their reactions to various Christian Fundamentalist assertions. I don't generally give a fuck about religion, honestly--so long as folk don't go trying to foist their beliefs on others, I'm fine with them. If a person thinks that the world is only 6,000 years old or that DNA is a confabulation meant to perpetuate the lie of evolution or whatever, but doesn't try to convince me of it and/or call me a blasphemer every few minutes, then I'm okay with that person. Faith is a personal thing. I happen to have more faith in people as a whole than I do in anything else, and that's my own deal. But when your personal beliefs begin impinging upon the rights of other people, that's when we have a problem.

Anyway, this post was mostly meant to be an exercise in...curiosity. 4chan--racist, misogynist, misanthropic, schadenfreudean 4chan--wields surprising principles, considering its bizarre little society.

Food for thought, I suppose.

----

"FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUU-"

Pierce The Heavens With Your Prose!

I've been exercising my capability to write in the epic mode, recently, with varying amounts of success. My endeavors in this direction were prompted by the fanfic Shinji and Warhammer 40k, which chronicles the events of Neon Genesis Evangelion if Shinji had been...more confident, shall we say. It carries us through Shinji's adolescence all the way through the events of The End of Evangelion, and you realize that it has somehow become something undeniably epic when you realize that our hero is facing down an unstoppable Lovecraftian cybernetic monstrosity formed by twelve similarly unstoppable Lovecraftian cybernetic monstrosities that have combined, while piloting a giant cyborg that has had both its arms ripped off, his friends and Enemy Mine fighting alongside him as companions in battle, and you're wondering precisely how they're going to pull victory out of their ass this time. Also, the only people who have gone batshit insane are the bad guys. Which is rather a bit different for Evangelion.

Anyway, the fight scenes in this particular fic...the whole thing, really, when you come right down to it...are incredibly well done. The city that most of the story takes place in actually feels vibrant and functional, and wartime heroics somehow still manage to shine through the unavoidable carnage and debris. And I was hoping to capture that in the project that I'm currently working on. I might be succeeding, because the first honest-to-goodness battle scene that I've written in ages has already shown up and is currently occupying ten full pages of text.

I've basically learned that taking a cinematic approach to writing is Not a Bad Thing, regardless of what creative writing teachers will tell you. It's okay to split a reader's attention among three or four things going on at the same time, so long as those things are clearly delineated to avoid confusion with each other. A few paragraphs of action here, a few paragraphs of action in another location, let's check in on these characters over here, and so on and so forth. If pulled off properly, it gives a sort of sweeping effect to the proceedings, granting an impression of the bloody chaos befalling the characters without having to go into massive, explicit detail concerning the larger picture--though that is nice too, every once in a while.

Also, I've learned that just letting rip can be the best thing to do. I've been so concerned this past year with writing good fiction that I've not really had the presence of mind to write fun fiction. And to me, a story being fun is a lot more important than it being Literature. That was a difficult lesson to learn, and it's even more difficult to put into practice. But I'm getting there.

I would much rather entertain people than crank out yet another American Classic that will be ignored by prisoners of academia for the next three hundred years.

----
"A hero strikes when least expected! The enemy of all that is good, the one who wants to destroy this world that is made of love! And peace! Will never escape from justice! Specially in the moment that he feels safe, he will know! There is nowhere to hide! The name for this! IS DYNAMIC ENTRY!"

On Deconstructions

It's no secret that I'm a big fan of genre deconstructions, especially if it's a genre that I like. I've read Watchmen multiple times over, and I sat through all twenty-six episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion plus The End of Evangelion. Just with Evangelion, we're talking about something like thirteen hours of raw mindfuckery, which I watched directly after the sublime hotblooded heroism of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. The mood whiplash was something akin to going out for a night with the guys, and when you get home your cheery, adorable wife is wearing a black leather corset and crotchless knickers, wielding a riding crop. You're not quite sure what's going on, but you have the sneaking feeling that you're going to like what's to follow.

So anyway, it felt necessary to establish my fondness for them, as I'm about to discuss yet another deconstruction, this time of the traditional anime magical girl: Sailor Nothing, by Stefan Gagne.

Completed in 2001, it is the story of Shoutan Himei, a girl who has the secret identity Sailor Salvation, a bishoujo senshi in the same vein as Sailor Moon and her cohorts. Except, unlike Sailor Moon, Himei has been at the game for five years, and is more than a little bit shellshocked by the bleak, unending labor of her given task. In the first chapter, Salvation flies into a berserkerganger rage and tears apart the Monster of the Week with her bare hands. This leads tangentially to her having her title stripped from her by her guide and mentor, Magnificent Kamen. Except she's stuck with her powers, and she still gets crippling headaches each time a new monster spawns. If she doesn't answer the call, she'll be responsible for dozens of horrific, bloody deaths. If she does, she'll be plunging straight back into the nightmare she tried to escape.

Basically, our heroine starts off suicidal, and it all goes downhill from there.

It sounds brutally depressing and more than a little angsty--the bit of artwork above does the atmosphere justice, even if it's not technically the best--but (like Evangelion), it's the sort of thing that you have to see through to the end if for no other reason than raw curiosity.

My initial response to most of the twists and turns the plot took was...not overwhelming. I realized along the way that, if you view/read enough deconstructions, and if you are familiar with the genre, you're pretty much going to see all the author's tricks well in advance. Just imagine, "What could make this psychologically-scarring and full of squick?" And that held true for me up until the last chapter, which was pretty much chock full of "holy shit" moments. The best, it seems, was saved for those last thirty-some pages. Pages that are proof that, through all experience, even a jaded consumer of culture such as I can be surprised.

Anyway, if you're looking for a good read and are particularly stout of psyche, I'd recommend giving Sailor Nothing a chance. Though I would suggest copying it off of the website and into a plain text document or something similar--teeny white type on a black background spread across the full width of your web browser can be murder on your eyes.

...Perhaps that was the point.

----
"My name is Shoutan Himei. I'm sixteen years old, and I'm very tired."

Concerning Television Programmes

So here I am, back again after yet another unpalatable interval. Felt the urge to call up the old blog and have a go at it, though I'm not sure what about just at the moment. Guess things will come to me as they will.

I've decided that I really must own Neon Genesis Evangelion. I'm not content having simply viewed it through once. I feel as though I need to go through it again, seeing if I can spot hints of the what-the-fuck to come in earlier episodes. And perhaps make a bit more sense out of the what-the-fuck that I know of already. Because it really isn't enough to only hear once about a guy who's pressed into service piloting a Lovecraftian abomination clad in the most advanced armor that the planet can offer by his emotionally-distant father and is then joined in battle by one young woman who is a single iteration in a long line of clones and another young woman who has serious mommy issues and attaches all her self-worth to her skill piloting a horrific alien cyborg engine of destruction, and how they all three spiral into self-destruction and the annihilation of life on Earth as we know it.

That about sums up the show, even though I neglected to touch on the emotionally-crippled adult cast and the mind-raping creatures spawned from a cosmic horror hell-bent on scourging the Earth of all beings to make way for its own brand of existence. It's all good times. Really.

On a much lighter note, I've been watching The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne, a show that apparently did so poorly that it is only available for further viewing by way of illicit piratical dealings on the Interblag. Which is a terrible shame, because it features steampunk cyborgs, airships, and vampires with jetpacks.

Did you get that last part? Vampires with jetpacks. If that doesn't sell you on a story, then you have no adventure in your soul whatsoever. You just sort of need to ignore the fact that the titular character is a whingeing, gullible idealist and pay attention to the Foggs, Phileas and Rebecca, who kick so much ass and take so many names that they run out of paper in the process.

Now you'll have to excuse me, as I must investigate the strange keening, ululating noise outside my house. If I don't return, call Miskatonic University. They'll know what to do.

----
"Screw the rules, I have money!"

Holy Shit, A New Year!

What do you know.

Now that I've owned up to precisely how long it's been since I've written anything of value (hell, anything period) here, I guess I can move along to other things. Thing is, I'm not entirely sure what to move on to. I suppose that's what comes of having a newspost to occupy with your thoughts three times a week. There become scant few thoughts to occupy other places (like, say, a blog). Or even, dare I say it, my head.

This is probably for the best, as ideas that hang around in my head for too long have a tendency to become deranged and manic. I'd post some of the things I've written in the weird fiction/horror vein, but I'd rather like for the public at large to continue thinking of me as a rational, healthy-minded person, so I shan't. Let it simply be said that a few of them are...disturbing.

I should probably have some set of goals or another for the year ahead, but I've always been full aware that I'd never be able to maintain Resolutions, so why even bother making them? I have a difficult enough time getting from day to day without having to worry about little things like "saving money" or "managing my time wisely" or "not killing people".

I'm a little stunned that Fancy That is still going strong after almost a year. We've certainly had our hiccups and missed updates and the like, but the fact that we're still here and doing it after all this time speaks volumes. It's perhaps the longest that I've maintained a project (aside from the novel that took me three years of my high school career to write and in the end turned out to be generic and foul), which is something I feel proud of. Our eightieth actual strip just went up, which is a milestone in and of itself.

Ubuntu has continued to serve me well as my operating system of choice. It is sleek, efficient, easy on my aging laptop's faculties, and doesn't tie me down to either of the major OS magnates out there. The only reasons I've had to boot into Windows since I did a permanent install of Ubuntu on my hard drive is to sync my iPod with my music library and to scan the comic (because Lexmark is staffed by bitches who refuse to play nice with Linux). Other than that, I work exclusively in Ubuntu.

If you want to see a website whose design coding was done by yours truly, you can skip on over to http://www.oktagagency.com and have a gander. They've fiddled with my code, so it's actually less pretty than it originally was, but the basic structure is still intact. So far as I'm concerned, they paid me $300 to do the code, so they can do whatever they like with it. It simply isn't my problem anymore.

And so...on with the new year!

----
"You know why I joined this cult? All the unprotected sects. Heyooo!"