Belated Birthday Blatherings
This rant really should have gone up on June 9th, which was my birthday. I had this Slime World all
set to go, a reader sent me the perfect scary pic, and I didn't have anything else to do that day. Unfortunately,
two days before my birthday, a REALLY unpleasant chain of events started to unfold.
First and foremost, my cat died. Granted, he was my oldest, granted, I saw it coming a couple months away, but that's still a very depressing event. Then I found out my aunt was hospitalized with a bizzare neurological condition (which I believe turned out to just be one of the nastier varieties of Lyme Disease) and then of course my birthday itself came around and I had nothing to show for it except a copy of Shadow of the Hegemon (part of a very good series). So, suffice it to say that I was not at all in the mood to post a rant that day.
While I have all you're sympathy I suppose I should mention that yon page full of cheesy merchandise is currently selling the mousepads for $5 off, since you'll be jealous by the time you finish reading this page.
A few days after my birthday, two small white portable objects of electronic goodness were sent my way. My mother, having recently abandoned her jobless status bought me a shiny new iBook, which I immediately dubbed Alisa ]I[ in keeping with my habit of naming all my computers after planets from the Phantasy Star series. Technically however, she only gave me half of it. I still have to pay her back half the cost, which will be quite difficult since I have no means of income and another thou in debts to pay off after my trip to ACen and E3. Oh well, I'll manage. I still feel guilty though that all I've done with it so far is play StarCraft in cooler rooms than this one.
My other small white piece of happiness came from Cyrael, a random reader of my Q&A column who was feeling really really generous. He sent me a Gameboy Advance, asking nothing in return. For the record, the new Castlevania is no where near as hard to see as people say. Most of the time I can see everything just fine, whether I'm sitting by an open window, or in a decently lit room. There are exceptions to this, but they aren't a question of lighting so much as a couple very bad color choices. It's all well and good to have a dark color scheme, but this game goes a little overboard at times. Specifically, there are a couple bosses in black rooms which are roughly this color that fire little bubbles that are roughly this color. Can you read those two "this color"s? The answer is hopefully yes, in a headache inducing fashion. Now imagine having a dozen tiny heat seeking circles that shade of brown chasing after you that you have to either dodge or whip. This is what we call The Wrong Kind of Challenge. It should be said though that the game has plenty of the right kind of challenge too. A character with precious little HP, and pretty limited abilities, fighting huge rooms full of monsters with lots of HP and rather nasty and far reaching attack patterns. It should be also noted that in Castlevania tradition, you fight these monsters with a whip.
Take a good look at the original Castlevania sometime. First of all, think about that name. Castlevania. If you've been playing games your whole life like me, you probably hear that the same way as Megaman or Final Fantasy. It's a famous videogame series. So if you don't mind humoring me, stop and think for a moment that someone sat down, made a game about Dracula, and then rather than call it Transylvania, he replaced the Transyl with Castle. That is a seriously bizzare thing to do. Then of course they created the character who fights Dracula. A guy wearing a leather skirt who fights with a whip. I'm not even going to make the obvious joke here (although I do wonder if Sorceress Hunters was inspired by the series). One still must wonder where this idea came from. I mean, not only are whips not on the list of things that kill vampires (or anything else come to think of it), but there isn't anything in particular that makes it the best choice for the game. The original castlevania just had a simple 2 frame attack animation, no whip spinning, no swinging over pits, quite frankly any weapon that could get longer would work. A sword, a spear, or better yet, a giant wooden stake would all be more practical, AND easier to draw and animate. The only rationalization I can think of is that the entire development staff of Konami is STARK RAVING MAD, and I love'em for it. If that one example isn't enough for you, take a look at the Mystical Ninja series, or the fact that Metal Gear Solid was followed up by MGS: VR Missions. The other thing about the whip is that it has an odd tendancy to make me sing songs from my youth while playing. The orcish marching song from the Rankin Bass version of The Return of the King is OK for fighting undead to I suppose, but Whip It seems somehow against tone.
One more thing before I get to the scary pic. Today while I was looking at all the sites I visit daily (which are pretty much all right there to your right), I was reminded of the main difference between myself and the other various people who rant vaguely about the state of nerdy existance on pages with wretched color schemes. Everyone else has a tendancy to tear their sites down periodically, erasing almost all the content, and starting from scratch. Meanwhile, I leave everything here in all its ancient glory. Sure, a lot of the older content on this page (and let's be honest, a lot of the newer content too) is excessively embarassing drivel which common sense would say I should delete it to prevent people stumbling onto this page's metaphorical baby pictures. I don't however. If I write a rant at 5:30 AM after 2 nights with no sleep with my eyes fairing even worse than my vocabulary that has nothing in it but typos and grocery lists, there it shall stand forever. I won't even go back and proofread it, or fix the glaring and irksome typos. Why not you ask? Perhaps I feel you should have the right to read the good along with the bad. Perhaps I think even if I can't stand something, someone might find it hilarious. Probably though it's just that I have better things to do with my time than obsess over the quality of my mental refuse. This paragraph is the perfect example. Doesn't seem very amusing at all as I write it, but for some strange reason I'm still writing it rather than take the second to delete it and just get on with the scary pic.
and now...
here it comes...
given to me by someone named Zach...
and evidently assembled by sunshine_hatchling...
pretty well done too...
here it is...
Domo Arigato Mr. Legato
