FFVIII A look Back... is on hold for now.

With all the PS Vita hype going around I don't think I can do a blog post about FF VIII justice right now. Even though I'm not getting a Vita until August (sad face), I'm too wrapped up in the hype to even play FF VIII. I'll have to get back in the mood to play the game (maybe in a few days) so the next blog post will be a bit delayed. It's still coming, I have the pictures I'm gonna put in the post on my computer's desktop, but I'm not half ass-ing this.

Game Endings: Evermore.

[This is reposted from my Community blog at Destructoid. Seen here.]

  I was a science and history geek in elementary school and while Chrono Trigger tugged at my love for time travel stories, Secret of Evermore tugged at my love for history infused stories. I raved so much about this game, that even my older brother picked it up, though he didn't really play it much. This gave me licence to play it for a long time and actually finish it, which is something I rarely did back in the NES/SNES days, especially cause most games I played back then were rented from Movies At Home and (later) Blockbuster.

So onto the topic at hand, the ending. You travel all throughout the different themed areas of Evermore meeting cool people and fighting monsters only to find yourself back in the space station Omnitopia. You explore the area and finally have a showdown with the butler that cast you down to the surface, oh and he's a robot, which kinda figures. After the robot boss fight, Carltron (the robutler) comes out and threatens you like a Scooby Doo villain before the good scientist you meet in the beginning comes from behind and shuts him down.

 Right now, you might be thinking.. "why is this guy writing about this game, this end sucks so far". True, but the part that makes this one my favorite game endings is coming up.

After you meet back up with scientist that looks suspiciously like Dr Light in Mega Man, he tells you that because the evil was banished from Evermore, the world is tearing itself apart because of the imbalance. Your character and his dog must use the shuttle to rescue all the scientist's friends that you met and befriended yourself in your travels. After rounding everyone up you go through the portal back to the real world and save Evermore. It then shows the boy and his dog outside the Bijou theater. During the Credits it goes back to the people that were created with Evermore taking control of their lands and kingdoms. Afterwards, it shows the scientist talking to a reactivated robutler about being good, then after the scientist walks off it rubs it's hands together suspiciously.

 The end was wrapped up with all the people responsible either taken to task or learned of their mistakes and the boy and his dog taken back home with a bit of foreshadowing in the end that sadly, never came to fruition. It's one of those games where there's enough closure to be satisfactory, but it leaves it open enough so if they were to make another, it wouldn't retcon the end of the first game. In a time where a lot of SNES titles were crappy movie and TV show games (a few notable exceptions aside), seeing all of these classic storytelling tropes in one game makes it even better, especially for the first and last of Squaresoft's American studio. That's why I think Secret of Evermore's ending is one of the greats, even though it's an underdog of sorts.


Oh, and Part two of my FFVIII retrospective should be up tomorrow sometime.

FFVIII Disc 1, a look back.

 Recently, a topic came up on Bitmob discussing Final Fantasy VIII, which is an RPG I have fond memories of. After commenting a couple of times, I felt the tug of nostalgia and it wasn't too long before I dug out my black label (akin to a first printing) complete copy of the game and put in Disc 1. After that I got an idea, to do a 4 part blog post about how well my first (and still my favorite) Final Fantasy experience holds up. Gaming has changed so much in 5 years time, let alone the 13 years since Final Fantasy VIII came out. I thought it'd be fun to go back and talk about the game on a disc by disc basis, this is part one.

The game starts off with some amazing (for the time) cutscenes that despite being 100% prerendered, they still look good. When it finally cuts to actual gameplay it's jarring, hell it was jarring back when it came out, but it still looked better than the Popeye polygon character models from the previous game, FFVII (7). Despite having a lengthy intro cutscene, the game throws you into the action quite fast. After a few introductory tutorials on the Magic and summons (known as Guardian Force, or GFs) Junction system, it throws you out into the world to go after a GF before the game kicks off officially. I always liked that, explain it on the way, which is why the first several hours of FFXIII (13) didn't bother me.

 So anyway, after all that intro stuff, you're thrust off to repel a rival country's army away from this beach-side town named Dollet. Well before too long you run them out, then get ran out yourself by a big spider like mech, which totally gets torn a new asshole by your Instructor, who's on the gunship you're trying to get to.

Fuck yeah, Quistis.

After that, the game takes you back to the small Island where you started and lets you.. er gives you the opportunity to level up, which you should, cause this game doesn't ease up if you haven't been level grinding a bit. So anyway, after that you're sent off to help a resistance group in this train hub of a town called Timber. While on the train to Timber, your whole party passes out and you assume control of a new bunch of people, soldiers in the Galbadian army, it's apparently a dream world that your three (original) characters share, the soldiers skip their duties to go listen to a girl play piano and the leader is a shy schmuck. After that boring sequence, you original three characters wake up on the train and realize they all shared the dream.

 You get to Timber, and the resistance want you to help them hijack the President of Galbadia's train car. You do your job and the mission ends with a confrontation with the President who ends up being a dummy that turns into an undead monster (naturally). This is almost exactly the same scene in Resident Evil : Zero where Rebecca confronts this old guy on the abandoned (yet moving) train only to find he's made out of some mutant leech monster. 10 years of having both games in my collection and I never ONCE put that together. After an ordeal of accidentally revealing yourselves to be from Garden, shit gets real and you're sent out to kill the Sorceress that is pretty much being presented the key to the main city in Galbadia, Deling City. You make you way to Galbadia Garden, link up with a cowboy looking sniper (Oh Japan) then you're shuffled off to kill her at her own welcome parade.


You get to town, split everyone up into two teams, one team is the Sniper Team, the other the Gate Team. The plan was get her float under the structure in the middle of the city that looks suspiciously like the Arc de Triomphe in France, then lower the portcullis gates on both sides, trap her in, then have Irvine shoot her. Not a good plan when your target is a sorceress. When Irvine's bullet stops right in front of her, Squall (the main character, who I sould've  mentioned earlier) has to go confront her. At the end of the fight she creates and throws an icicles (spell, thing, whatever) at him and impales him in the shoulder (pansy) Then it ends, only to be picked up on Disc Two.

 From the perspective of someone who loved the game when it came out and put in just over 60 hours into the first playthrough (up to the end fight anyway), the gameplay holds up reasonably well, the graphics are serviceable, the music is (even in it's MIDI form) still amazing and catchy, and the story still holds as good as day one. For the remaining blog posts I'll go over what happens in each disc, skimming over the boring parts and bring up funny anecdotes and other things while playing the game seriously for the first time in over a decade.

Part Two will be later than Part One was, cause I started it yesterday. Expect it in about a weeks time, give or take a few days. Expect more shenanigans with Laguna, a floating Garden, flashbacks, and more. For now though, I'm out.

Final Fantasy VIII, a look back.

I'm sitting down and replaying Final Fantasy VIII, and for each disc I get through, I'll post my thoughts on the game now that it's been 14 years since it's release and since and I played it originally. This'll be a retrospective of sorts.

A bit of backstory.. I bought FFVIII with birthday money back in 2000 right after I got my brand new Dual Shock PS-One. I had never bought or played a Final Fantasy game before that because I thought they were all connected and I would've been hopelessly lost on what's going on. At the time there was FFVII, VIII, and FF: Anthology (FFV and VI) in the stores and after looking at all of them, I realized that none of them were at all connected. Well, aside from the series regulars (Chocobos, airships, and a character named Cid). So anyway, I bought it on the spot and loved it.

Next time, I'll cover up to the Sorceress Edea parade fight. I finished Disc 1 a little while ago and will have the first of four posts up in about a day or so. Until then, peace out.

Gaming and I, how it began.

[This is reposted from my Community blog at Destructoid. Seen here.]

I should really title it "how my brothers got me into an expensive ass hobby", but shorter is sweeter I suppose. My fascination with games started sometime in the mid Eighties, before we moved to where we are now back in 1987. My earliest memory about videogames was wanting to play Atari with my two older brothers and being shuffled off to bed by my mother. Then with my parent's divorce in 87 and us moving and me starting school in a harsh neighborhood, I needed something to help take my mind off things.

 For my 5th Birthday in August that year, my brother Scott gave me his NES, the very one I had been drooling over a year prior. He didn't play it much and had only 4 games (Mario/Duck Hunt,OG Zelda, Metroid, and Marble Madness). He gave me the NES and Mario/Duck Hunt but kept the others, it was enough, I was hooked.

 I only managed to get about 11 games during my stint with the NES (including all three Mario games, TMNT, Ikari Warriors and some others), but my new hobby was set in stone. In the following years my dad got a SNES before I did, mom got me one for Christmas in 91, I started reading copies of EGM at the grocery store (starting with the May 1993 issue), and I started paying attention to the gaming press.

My first EGM

 Since then I've gotten all of the Nintendo consoles (excluding the GBA Micro), all of the Sony consoles, an Xbox 360, and almost 400 games across all platforms. My hobby started off as a means to help deal with being bullied and the stress of erroneously thinking that my parent's divorce was my fault, but in trying to block all that out, I found myself engrossed in a new type of exciting media that was only getting bigger from there, and I was loving it.

Because Videogames.

A console gamer's love of and history with Valve Software.

As a strictly console based gamer, I'll admit I've missed out on some cool ass games on PC. However PCs were expensive and even more expensive to game on, so I stuck to consoles. At the turn of the millennium. I was still gaming on my PS1, N-64, and salivating over rumors of a new, more powerful PlayStation. I wasn't even remotely interested in PC games, until one day I skipped school (in early 2000). I had gone over to my friend Daniel's house and hung out, he had a bad ass computer filled with kick ass music and several games. One of which made my jaw drop when I saw it. I was all...

Are you bashing crates and little crab things with a crowbar?! That's fucking AWESOME!

 The game of course was Half-Life. I watched him trounce through a science facility with his crowbar and guns and destroy shit, then it was time to go home, and was kinda depressed/bored, I wanted to play it. I thought I'd never get the chance to play the game, and didn't have a clue that I'd get a chance so soon.

 The following year (late 2001), I was out helping round up crap at some store (K-Mart I think) and I saw two games that caught my eye.. Final Fantasy X and Half-Life for PS2. I was in partial shock, I grabbed it and threw it in the cart and thought, "yep, I'm getting this". Since I was with my mom at the time, I told her that she could give it to me for Christmas of she wanted or I could buy it. She let me get it, but it felt like Christmas anyway. I was playing a game where I played as a theoretical physicist kicking alien and military ass with guns and a crowbar, I was hooked, Valve had me.

 For 10, well 11 years now I've bought every Valve console game that came out, except for Counter Strike on the original Xbox, since ya know, I hate VS multiplayer games (and I hate trash talking little shits). Even though a couple of the games were not as good as the original PC versions (aside from the PS2 vers of HL1 and obviously later games) they at least came out and were damn faithful. There's a brief history of me and Valve games, now have some pics, because it's my blog.

Spines, these games have them.

Covers.. obviously.

The rare early PS2 Blue CD ROM format, Half Life 1 used it.

So that's it, Valve games are awesome. I'm out for now, laters.

It is done.

I have finally gotten all of the PS3 Trophies in Skyrim.

From Left to Right.. Platinum Trophy (for getting all other trophies), Thu'um Master (learn 20 shouts), Oblivion Walker (collect 15 Daedric artifacts), Master (reach level 50),.

The ones I had left that I needed were the one for reaching level 50, the one for collecting all of the Daedric Artifacts (which was a pain in the ass), and the one for learning ALL of the dragon shouts (which requires you to finish the main story cause 3 are locked away for the end), and. Then it gave me the Platinum for getting all the others. So it is done, Skyrim is finished, for now. :) More laters.

Est parum est serius.

 So Nintendo has put out the news in a quarterly financial report that they are creating a unified Network to work with the Wii U and the 3DS called the Nintendo Network. It includes infrastructures for online gaming, DLC, downloads of full retail games, and server side accounts.

 Basically Everything that Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network has been doing for half of a decade. Anyone who grew up with the current environment of online connectivity would say, "well it's about time" or call them copycats. As someone who grew up with Nintendo, It would seem that they're just now figuring this "tricky" online thing out. As a Japanese company that doesn't look at other companies for inspiration or to straight up steal ideas, they're like the dumb kid in class who looked at a cheat sheet to see what the answer is after a test. But I'd wager there's more to it than that.

 Surely they peeked at Xbox Live and PSN to see what they're competitors have been doing, but no, they will say they're not competing with the 360 and PS3. If you offer a gaming console with similar services, you are in the same retail space, competing with the other two systems whether you admit it or not. I'm not buying that excuse, they're doing this because the sheen of the Wii is wearing off and they're scared of tanking financially. For core gamers, the ones that pretty much made Nintendo a household name in the 80s have been turned away by the Wii and it's target demographic of non-gamers. As for the non-gamers, Nintendo knows the parents and grandparents won't buy another version of the Wii because they already have their "Wii Sports machine", I've heard this first hand. Nintendo is stuck between a rock and a hard place, and are looking back at the hard place to see if it's softer than the rock by pandering to the core gamers once again. They pulled this tactic as recently as when they announced 3DS games that core gamers want back at E3, but failed to bring the goods. Those core games are just now starting to trickle in by the way, 10 months after the system launched. Now, they're doing it again by announcing a bundle of online features that the rest of the gaming world is using and is familiar with.

 From what I've seen in the past 6 years, it seems Nintendo is solely profiting on those who don't know games (from their asshole), and the kids who were born in the mid 90's to the early 2000's ("Millennials") that think Nintendo has been this way forever and is either inadvertently or reactively being an apologist for the dumb shit the company has been doing. Clearly when the Wii U comes out, I'm not getting one. I was already burned by the Wii. It's the only game system in my 25 years of gaming history where I've bought just 5 retail disc games for it. All first party games too (Mario Galaxy, Zelda: Twilight Princess, Super Parer Mario, Metroid Prime Trilogy, and Metroid: Other M). I'll keep my Wii, just for those 5 games and my 20 or so Virtual Console games, after that if they keep this up, I'm done with them. I don't have time or money to waste on a company that doesn't even appear to value me as a consumer and a life long supporter of their wares. Too little too late, Nintendo. I'm out for now. Laters.

Too much media in my media.

 Back in the golden days of gaming (SNES era) we turned on our gaming consoles to do one thing, play games. In this day and age we turn our gaming consoles to do everything BUT play games. I can turn on my Xbox 360 at any time and see applications for movies and music and advertisments for things not related to the xbox (beef jerky ads, World of Warcraft, etc). If the Nintendo Wii had an infrastructure overlaid User Interface "Home menu" like the xbox, I'd expect to see things related to sports and fitness "games" and everything that includes motion controls. Even the PlayStation 3 has it's fair share of extraneous media apps and even has it's own version of the Wii motion remote and "nunchuk".

 What happened? I mean it seems that some have lost sight of the basics that's made gaming as a medium what it was. For a prime example, look at the 360's new "dashboard" menu that's based off the Windows Phone and the upcoming Windows 8 "Metro" design. You have to scroll past other media to get to the games section, and then on the home page, the window that boots up what's in the disc drive is smaller than the advertisements that's on that page, and I'm paying for this? If I'd told myself all of this years ago my response would be.. "You're fucking kidding me?" Don't get me wrong, social connections to friends and to the Game's Marketplace is fantastic, but everything else is not needed and is clogging up what would otherwise be a great service.

Games are the 5th one down, they should be first and foremost

The Wii and PlayStation 3 are lesser examples of the media congestion of this generation. The saving grace are that Nintendo doesn't get what internet based interconnectivity is and confines itself and it's users to just a game marketplace and the game trailers "Nintendo Channel". The PS3.. While it has the Netflix and MLB features, it doesn't clutter the "XMB" ("Xross Media Bar" or home menu) with ads and other needless crap that keep people from getting what they want from their console. If anything, the PS3 is the one doing it right, It's there, yeah, but it's out of the way and let's you use your system the way you want to.

On another, but related note.. after lengthy consideration I've made up my mind on whether or not I'm going to renew my Xbox Live Gold subscription this year. I'm not. I don't use the "premium" features like Twitter and Facebook (which I can do better on my iPod Touch for free), nor do I use the content streaming features like Netflix, Hulu, or Last FM (I have Crackle and Pandora Radio at my disposal, that's also free). I only use my 360 for chatting with friends and playing an occasional co-op game, which I can get for free using Private Chat and taking advantage of the Free Xbox Live Gold Weekends that pop up all the time. I'm paying $60 a year for nothing, no longer.

That's nice isn't is?

With all that hoopla and the fact I've been playing my PS3 a LOT since.. well since Skyrim came out I'm falling back into my love for Sony products despite all the dumb and fanboyish rage at Sony lately. As I've mentioned before in a blog post, my love for PlayStation wavered back in 2006 which prompted me to get an Xbox 360, which was the cheapest alternative for gaming at the time. BUT, It seems that team PlayStation has their stuff together once again with the PS3 and the upcoming PS-Vita, but I'll save that and my history with the PlayStation brand for another time. I've rambled on long enough, I'll post more in the coming days. See you guys on the flip side of the anti SOPA blackout.

Quicky, post Christmas blog.

 Christmas has come and gone and we never got any snow, nor has it dropped below freezing unless it was during the night.. sometimes. BUT despite that and concerns of dwindling money, we said fuck it we need to have some distracting things and/or holiday cheer, or something to make it feel like Christmas. The currency of past Christmases has been gift cards. Either the "Vanila Visa" universal (use anywhere) debit gift cards or gift cards from Best Buy. This Year, I got a mix of Best Buy gift cards and stuff I picked out that mom threw in the cart and told me I couldn't get it until Christmas.

 After my aunt Lora died last year, the bottom fell out of Christmas, and this year was a bit better, still hard to be "cheery", but it was better. She'd want us all to live big and all that, that's the way she lived, so we pressed on getting each other stuff and enjoying what we had and not what we've lost. We would've made her proud this year. we got stuff.


Here's a run down of what I got. I picked out all of it and/or bought it using gift cards.

• Star Wars Complete Saga Blu-Ray set (all 6 movies)
• Star Wars: Clone Wars season 3 Blu-Ray
• Heavy Rain (PS3)
• Batman: Year One Blu-Ray
• Batman: Arkham City (PS3)
• Lord of the Rings: Extended Edition Blu-Ray trilogy (for 50 fucking bucks, yeah! $50!!)
• Metal Gear Solid HD Collection (PS3) - As of now, still hasn't been delivered.
• Goldeneye 007: Reloaded (PS3) As of now, still hasn't been delivered.
• $15 iTunes Store credit.

On top of that, I still have almost $60 in Best Buy gift card. I may save it for a PlayStation Vita for when it comes out in February and my birthday rolls around next August. I don't know, is 6 months enough time for them to work out bugs in the handheld's launch? I hope so. I'm getting one in August.

So yeah, I got a good amount of stuff. Stuff that'll keep me occupied for a bit, until my birthday, where I can splurge on stuff with gift cards again. Okay, gotta go, it's 7AM, and I haven't been to bed yet. Laters people.