In The Black

Role-playing

2012-01-27T05:48:00.003-05:00

Sometimes you'll play one of those long and epic RPGs with stories so grand and customizations so detailed, that it's easy to spend a hundred hours on the first playthrough, and I say first playthrough because the virtually endless options and choices give the game plenty of re-playability.

Your character will gain such strengthened levels that he/she has become very powerful, and his/her story has come along so far that you feel like it must have been years ago when their journey began.

But sometimes no matter how much fun you're having, no matter how curious you've become about the what-ifs and what-might-have-happeneds had you made different choices, joined different in-game factions, saved different lives, killed others, it's too difficult to start at the beginning again. It's much too hard to lay down all the progress you've made with your current character's storyline and start at the beginning again with a new character whose sword strikes are back to doing only one hitpoint of damage, especially when you're main character has been dealing 9999hp with each strike.

With all this progress you start thinking "Yeah that was fun, but I'm getting bored with this character and want to start a new one, but throwing all this power and progress away will kinda suck, especially after putting so many nights and hours into this one character."

Yeah... sometimes you just get bored of your job no matter how much you love it, and you just start considering other employment possibilities. You wanna see what other characters and job classes you can play as. Mage-thief. Warrior-priest. Pilot-tech.

But do you really wanna start at the bottom again with a new boss, new system, new method, possibly lower exp ratings, and what if the overall difficulty is higher than you're used to and you just end up getting pwnd...?

You hit cancel at the "Create new character" screen, and go back to load game. Then you resume your current character, but instead of continuing his/her path you start to change things up a bit. The whole time they've been a neutral-good, but since you backed out of starting a new character, you decide your current character will start taking on characteristics of a new character. From now on, you start making your character lean towards the darker side. Save the king? Nah. Slay the king and take over the throne.

Wanna - Games Edition

2011-12-09T20:04:00.004-05:00

So many good games coming soon!

REALLY WANNA:
Borderlands 2
Bioshock Infinite
Mass Effect 3 Collector's Edition
Final Fantasy 13-2
DOTA 2 on Steam/PC
And also both Uncharted: Golden Abyss and BioShock for the new PS VITA, which will probably have to wait due to its priceyness. But whatever, I'm still excited. The first half of this next year so far looks to be full of awesome. I also want Uncharted 3, which is already out, but I'm still playing the second one at the moment.

Wanna, but not as urgent:
Catherine
LA Noire
Infamous
Silent Hill HD Collection and Silent Hill: Downpour
Resident Evil: Revelations on 3DS
Final Fantasy Type 0 on PSP

Wanna - Watch Movies

2011-11-05T14:27:00.004-04:00

Melancholia
Another Earth
All Good Things

I must have lived a thousand times

2011-11-02T12:44:00.005-04:00

*Minor spoilers about the beginning of the game*

To The Moon by Freebird Games was released for download yesterday. I've been looking forward to it since reading about it in that article. Eternal Sunshine was one of my most favourite movies for a long time, and a game that has storytelling likened to it is going to intrigue me.

What I love about indie games is that they're cheap, and good and fresh, unlike many recycled big-name hits that come out with a new iteration every year. I had a big "OH WOW" moment last night when I was playing in the dark. I began To The Moon wondering how it was going to be like Eternal Sunshine. Would it copy the story, because that'd be lame. Would it just be similar in theme?

It starts out with two scientists arriving at the home of an old dying man. His live-in caretaker and doctor are there. While walking around his home you learn he had a good life, and a wife that he loved but had passed away. He had good memories. His caretaker tells the scientists what his last wish is. "He wants to go to the Moon. Can you do it?" The scientists say yes.

I was so confused, but intrigued. Would they brainwash him and make him think he was on the Moon during the final hours of his life? Would they come up with some sort of metaphorical Moon for the old man? Surely they couldn't actually just send him to the Moon.

Setting up their little computer by his table, the scientists peer into the old man's memory as he lies unconscious. They speak to his memory from one week prior, in which they tell him their plan on how to get him to the Moon. We are going step-by-step further back into your memories, they say, all the way to your childhood, and we are going to influence you in your childhood, give you the desire to become an astronaut so later in life you will go to the Moon.
Oh wow. What about his good memories? His good life? His wife? Will those memories disappear? This is going to be good.

First Playthrough

2011-10-29T00:20:00.013-04:00

Randomly buy a 3DS because of one game. Achievement Unlocked!
Purposefully buy a PSP six years after its release. Achievement Unlocked!
Move to a new city. Achievement Unlocked!
Get thrown out of the new city. Locked
Live successfully in the new city. Achievement Unlocked!
Look into Elijah Wood's eyes as he orders burritos at your restaurant. Achievement Unlocked!
Fall in love. Achievement Unlocked!
Get arrested stalking celebrities in NYC. Locked
One year with amazing girlfriend. Achievement Unlocked!
Catch a mouse. Locked
Trap mosquitoes with you in your bedroom. Achievement Unlocked!
Wear a witch hat to work for the entire month of October. Achievement Unlocked!
Two years with amazing girlfriend. Achievement Unlocked!
Get lost in the subways. Achievement Unlocked!
Have sex with the Williamsburg Bridge in the background. Achievement Unlocked!
Have sex in a moving subway train. Locked

Ride a cab. Achievement Unlocked!
Ride the skylift to Roosevelt Island. Achievement Unlocked!
Ride the Staten Island Ferry. Achievement Unlocked!
Fall off of the Staten Island Ferry. Locked
Find good Southern fried chicken in the city. Achievement Unlocked!
Assist the police in the capture of a criminal. Locked
Three years with amazing girlfriend. Achievement Unlocked!

I aim to misbehave

2011-08-22T04:26:00.006-04:00

I began Mass Effect 2 recently. Having only played fifteen hours of the first one (yes, only. the scope of it goes for dozens of hours more), I hadn't yet become attached to the game or its characters even though I was enjoying it well enough, as well as Jennifer Hale's performance. But I wasn't being drawn in. I think because the first game was slow to start in its story. Or maybe I was too busy trying to figure out the controls. Whatever it was, after fifteen hours of the RPG (over a period of a couple of months), I decided to take a break and move on to Mass Effect 2.

I'm glad I did. In a way, the second game is a stand alone adventure. There is of course an over-arching story about Commander Shepard and her crew aboard the Normandy, but this second tale is just that - a whole 'nother tale which happens to captivate you right at the beginning during the cold open, which manages to capture everything crucial in the telling of any dramatic tale involving humanity in a wide universe by putting you in the shoes of one woman at the helm of her ship and crew, then having her ship sunk, her crew gone in escape shuttles, and then meeting her own death. There will never be another Malcolm Reynolds, but when you captain your own ship, you are most likely going to be inspired to by Capt. Reynolds, and you know, do captainy things.

This was all in the first ten minutes, and everything leading up to her death made me feel all the warm and fuzzy feelings I felt on the Galactica and also aboard Serenity. The camera work was familiar and the slight use of zooms were brilliant. The beautiful score playing when the camera pans over the Normandy brought a goosebumpy feeling of nostalgia that made me want to re-watch Firefly and Battlestar Galactica. But, I wanted to continue Sora Shepard's tale even more. And that's where I'll be for the next couple of weeks: sailing aboard the Normandy, dealing with the Alliance, and Miranda, and spooling up the FTL drive while avoiding being attacked by sentient AI robots.

Smile real wide for the camera lenses

2011-07-20T03:19:00.004-04:00

I have a new camera. It's beautiful, and it takes beautiful pictures.

It's funny how my shopping process works. Months ago I began shopping online for a modern digital camcorder camera, because, you know, I wanted to capture "all those moments." Somehow, in a weird twisted way throughout the months, my clicking lead me more and more towards old style film photography and away from the modern digital ones.

Searching and researching, I learned about the Diana+ and the Diana F+. I got the latter, which is a modern exact copy of the former which is vintage. It is plastic and light, and has no slot for batteries or memory cards. It takes film, and while it can potentially become an expensive hobby, it doesn't have to be.

The purpose of these cameras is to capture "those random moments." As opposed to modern digital cameras, with which we are supposed to snap anything and everything, and delete the ones we don't like later on, lomography and the Diana seem to be a little more careful, and at the same time thoughtless. True, we are generally supposed to snap anything and everything, but not like with digital cameras. Rather than seeing a beautiful flower and taking its picture from all angles possible in order to pick out the perfect angle from our computers, we would instead see that beautiful flower, snap a picture, and move on.

Surprise.

You'll see what you snapped after development.

That's what I did with my first roll, using the default 120mm film. I used the 16-shot format, and spent two days with my new camera. The third day, I took it to get developed. The fourth day, I got the pictures. I loved the results.

A couple of them were kinda dark and black, but they were the first shots, taken from the inside of my apartment, so it was expected. Out in the light however, things looked better.

Remember AOL Chatrooms?

2011-07-18T19:58:00.003-04:00

The problem with a new social network launching every few years is the same as that of dvd players and video game consoles.

They want you to start everything from scratch, even releasing old movies in the new format so you'll want to buy the new blu-ray version of LOTR, which you'll likely have to repurchase in another ten years when the new version is released on the superhdd-laser-violet-disc format. And they don't always offering backwards compatibility, and you'll also have to choose which company's media player you'll go with because they can't play each other's, until one loses and the other wins the "next generation" war, but it still doesn't matter, because you still can't play VHS cassettes on there, so you still have that really old VCR that you haven't quite discarded yet, because there are still a few movies in the format that you want to keep in touch with every now and then.

I mean wtf. Just release ONE thing and do patch-updates to those devices, and let people mingle between networks so they don't have to restart everything every few years. I mean who ever says "Oh, I don't really talk to some of my friends anymore, because they go exclusively to Starbucks and I like Seattle's Best. But sometimes, I go to that cafe at Books-A-Million because I have some photos there that for some reason people are still commenting on.

Remember all the football games in high school? I don't. I played video games with my friends

2011-04-29T13:44:00.009-04:00

In Leigh Alexander's wonderful article on Kotaku, Life Keeps Reminding Me Of Video Games, she relates to the effects of games influencing how she sees other art forms, and vice versa. She says, "Although the influence of gaming on our lives may be subliminal or subversive, it's impossible to ignore. I've got tons of friends who own game soundtracks and put on the music when it's time to work, exercise, or cry. That spiritual feeling we get when we play something we love is portable. In all kinds of ways, it shapes how we see the world."

Whenever I hear Ani DiFranco's song Fuel I think of Final Fantasy 12, images of Rabanastre flashing through my head, because whenever I was level grinding I would put some music on, and that song was one of my favourites at the time, and always on my playlist. And vice versa. When I play any game at all, the feel of controlling a character onscreen makes me think of the song.

Even further back to the late 90s, any mention or pictures or music from Final Fantasy 8 remind me of high school, driving my car with the windows down, changing the radio station whenever that Smash Mouth song would play, or turning the volume up on Len's "Steal My Sunshine" (wow, i miss that song). All the experiences of that period in my life are intertwined in my memories even though the memories were not directly related to FF8. They were all a part of my life, and each memory reminds me of the other.

Everytime I saw the Guitar Center in Union Square I always flashback to playing hooky my senior year when me and my friends drove an hour to Atlanta to go to the Guitar Center there - the previous night, I had stayed up the entire night playing, and Squall had just saved Rinoa from floating away into space. On the drive to Atlanta in my friend's van, even though we were blasting Jimi Hendrix the entire way, in my head I kept hearing "Eyes on Me."

To this day the image of Squall and Rinoa together surrounded by the black is one that I always associate with the "best years" of life, when we were still children and in school, yet felt free and stupid and could do whatever we wanted, because 1999 is ending, graduation is looming, and we're unsure as hell about what to do next.

Dragon Fantasy Age VIII

2011-02-23T02:16:00.003-05:00

Hawke and Squall were twins separated at birth, I'm positive.