Personal

Helloooooo, everyone. I hope life has treated you well. Mine continues to be overly stagnant for my taste, but I’m grateful for what I have. As for what I have not…

Is my Aliens: Infestation review. I gave an estimation that it would be out by now, but it’s turning out longer than I had expected. I have a lot to criticize about the game’s design, and the review is up to 4,433 words with an expected 22-minute read time. In terms of sheer scope, I think I’m closing in on what I need to talk about, but I’m expecting the editing portion to be a pain. It’s difficult to structure dense reviews, because you want to establish context for intersecting design elements, but also you want to stay on-topic.

For an example, imagine you want to begin by talking about the story and narrative, but at one point you want to discuss how game mechanics contribute to that even though you have yet to describe them. You could go on a tangent and explain only the relevant part, but then you have to reestablish that information when you get to the dedicated gameplay section. Conflicts like this can result in a meandering final product that isn’t an ideal way to convey information for someone unfamiliar with a piece of media, and I always include those people in my audience. One of the final stages of editing consists of chopping sections up and reorganizing them in a more logical fashion, and that can be very difficult when your work is larger and features many moving parts.

Moaning aside, progress is being made — the review is significantly longer than my last blog post. As long as I do regular work on it, it shall be done. There’s a comfort in that, though I do feel bad for those hoping to read it. These blog posts are my attempt to give those of you some consistent content to chew on. Also, it has always been my intention to move towards adding screenshots and other media to my reviews. There’s an obstacle there in that I generally play games on their original hardware, which isn’t conducive to taking my own screenshots. I can find others on the internet, but these vary greatly in aspect ratio, resolution, and relevance. At times, it may have to do. I’m inexperienced with writing around visual aids, but I recognize it can decrease text density due to not having to describe things. Accessibility is a concern, but that should be solvable with meta text. So yeah, things are being done, and things are being thought about.

In other gaming news, I’m nearing the end of another game, Shaman King: Master of Spirits. This probably seems utterly left field, but I have been wanting to finish this duology of games since emulating them over a decade ago. For those unware, these were developed by Konami and feature much of the same team as those who worked on Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. That phenomenal game has some of its DNA visible in Spirits, with the game’s mechanic of obtaining spirits with various powers being directly lifted from Aria. There is also a somewhat non-linear map structure and optional power-ups to find. It’s not at the quality of Aria or even Harmony of Dissonance, but it’s competent enough to provide an enjoyable experience for those in love with their formula such as myself. I intend to write a review for these games as well.

My girlfriend and I have been playing through random games in the official NSO emulators. While running through the Sega Genesis library, we spent a lot of time on an old favorite of mine, Comix Zone. This beat-em-up featured a completely unique comic book style that informed much of its game design, and accompanying it are detailed, animated sprites as well as platform-defining excellent sound design. Unfortunately, it features that trademark Genesis brutality. A ton of mechanics are esoteric and require memorization or experimentation that’s rewarded with an uncharitable continue system that places you at the start of every level. It’s always taken more patience than I had to finish to game, and the lack of saving does not help matters. Using save states to circumvent the more bullshit design, I managed to get to level 3, which is further than I’ve ever been. I’m reminded of how rewarding it was to cheat in Ecco the Dolphin just to be able to see the most interesting parts of the game. I should exercise this privilege more with some other classics I’ve never finished. I can always go back and beat them legitimately, and experiencing them through these means is better than not experiencing them at all, frankly. My time is limited, and something has to give sometimes.

Other than that, not much going on. I mentioned a general article about gaming being in the pipes, and I have started on that, though my focus has remained on Infestation. Just letting everyone know that article hasn’t been forgotten. I finished the Water / Wind event in Master Duel using my beloved Ice Barrier, and it was a pretty clear sweep. I’ll be slowly laddering with them next and will likely also use them in the upcoming Duelist Cup. I guess I’ll share that I’ve been playing Master of Spirits as a Virtual Console inject on my 3DS, and I’ve begun putting a lot of other GBA games on there as well. I’m not spreading myself too thin yet, but I might find myself unwilling to wait for the Yu-Gi-Oh Early Years collection and playing some of the likely contenders for that anthology. In particular, I’d like to finally 100% World Championship 2006 by using a patch that fixes the infamous glitch with Huge Revolution. More on that next week, should it happen.

Oh shit, I almost forgot. Stevie and I began playing Custom Robo GX. If this series has a black sheep, this is it. Presumably due to the GBA’s limitations, GX opted for a 2D battle plane where the combatants could fly uninterrupted in any direction to shoot at the opponent or place traps. It’s downright bizarre for reasons too complex to get into here, but I’m compelled to write a review for it just for how idiosyncratic an experiment it is. It will be relatively doable since the game is quite short and I can’t comment on the story elements, given that they’re all still in Japanese. It would serve as more of an information dump for those wondering how this bizarre entry works.

Professional

Again… not too much to say. I was about to take a test to be allowed to rate the accuracy of map query results, but upon attempting the practice test, I encountered extensively broken English that made their already unclear standards even more impossible to parse. Whatever the cause, their explanations for correct answers routinely contradicted other questions with identical contexts, and both would typically employ vague language that failed to demonstrate any possible differences between the samples. Realizing that this would likely be a constant problem in a job that, if obtained, would pay me roughly minimum wage was enough for me to believe my time was better spent pursuing other opportunities. I’m not against the work itself, but if I can’t understand what you’re asking me because you don’t prioritize clear communication, then neither of us are going to get what we need from that exchange.

Public

Hey, my first major cosmetic changes! The front page has been rewritten and reformatted to be much cleaner. The game changer here was the addition of buttons in place of a list of hyperlinks. Not only does this allow for more horizontal organization, but I was able to amend these buttons to the header, which enables constant access to all writing directories. Site navigation should be much smoother now. I also experimented with adding radial background gradients. I initially didn’t intend to keep the color currently sitting there, but my girlfriend liked it, so I’m keeping it for the time being. Everyone else, let me know what you think. I don’t have much of a color theme established site-wide yet, obviously.

My current struggle is how to present these blog posts on my site. For whatever reason, WordPress seems to want the blog post template to be an immovable piece of site architecture that inexplicably functions differently from a normal page. I seem to be unable to create a completely separate page archive from the preview on the front page. All I want is for a small feed of my most recent posts on my front page, and the ability to click a header to access an archive of all of my posts. Somehow, this is hard to do, even though I find it to be a very basic standard of site design. In many ways, WordPress isn’t actually designed to host content, but rather give the appearance of a living corporation landing page, and in this regard, functionality gives way to form. Only I don’t even necessarily think the form looks good, either. I’ll figure some shit out.

Keep on keepin’ on. Boundless love to my girlfriend, who ought to be reading this later.