A Million New Colors

My expectations have gotten the better of me lately.

The translation patch for Mother 3 dropped last week. Earthbound (a.k.a. Mother 2, its prequel) shaped my aesthetic sense in my formative teenage years, so I'd been thirsty for new content in the series. The translation project's feed was a constant presence in my newsreader, reminding me of Mother 3's absence.

All of that is moot now. Having played it, I hate this fucking game, which is incredibly surprising to me. I find the characters uninteresting, the plot poorly paced and overly melodramatic. After forcing myself to trudge through a few hours of the game, I just gave up in frustration, exhausted from trying so hard to like it. Earthbound did what it did so well by front-loading the game with humor, and then introducing drama slowly once the player was drawn in to the experience. Mother 3 starts with an overblown tragedy, centered around the death of a character who'd spoken about five lines before s/he kicked off. In Earthbound, a similar situation (Buzz-Buzz dying) is played for laughs, but in Mother 3, you're meant to find a hoary RPG cliche heart-wrenching.

When I talked to a friend (who'd never really liked Earthbound) about the experience of Mother 3, he brought up a good point: Earthbound, fire of my loins it may be, was essentially a boring little dungeon crawl game if you weren't charmed by its quirky setting and tone. Essentially, it was a bare-bones Dragon Quest. That's my problem with Mother 3: once my attention is drawn away from its polished veneer, I'm compelled to stare at its mediocre guts.

Next in Thwarted Expectations Week, I take a look at Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia.

Loving Daisies

Lord. On a whim, I rented Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. It earned mostly poor reviews, which warded me off from buying it. Maybe that was for the best.

No, it was definitely for the best. Lucasarts was executing murderous cuts in its development staff while TFU was being made, and after playing it, I think I understand the exact chronology of this game's genesis:

Developer #1: ... and then you can electrify your lightsaber!
Developer #2: And throw it at a wookiee!
Developer #3: I gotta say, guys, sounds like this is gonna be pret-ty awesome. Let's get started on it right-
[Executive bursts through the door, smelling strongly of cough syrup, his mouth flanked by 6 inches of Fruit By The Foot and an unlit cigar.]
Executive: Due to changing market blah blah, Developer 1, Developer 2? You're so fired. Alright, Developer 3, time to bang this one out. Chop chop!
Developer 3: *whimper*

This is a game that was laid out by people who were in love with the concept they had fashioned, and put together by a very spent, very unhappy group, trying to take their last revenge on a monolithic employer by phoning it in. The final, muttered curse of the short-timer. A shame that it sold over a million copies in its first month (just counting the 360, PS3, and Wii versions.)

The whole thing feels like it was programmed in Java and then ported to BASIC. Targeting is a nightmare. The camera is sluggish and inattentive, except in boss battles, where you're forced into viewing the battle from a disorienting fixed perspective. There are instant-death pits littering stages. You will be knocked into them by enemy fire. You will misstep and fall to your death. You will use a lightsaber combo on an enemy that will carry you over the edge and into a loading screen, so you can repeat the cycle. I died constantly, for various reasons, and rarely did I feel that I had died because of my own failure. It's not often that I yell at a game, but it's even rarer that I plead with a game. "Why?" I asked, in my most imploring tone available.

There are loading screens everywhere. Between sections of a stage, the game loads. When you go to the pause menu, you get a good 5 second load. In between the submenus of said screen, you will load. After a while, the load screens morphed from a sneering annoyance to a graceful respite from the vile taste of that Unleashing the Force leaves.

I've only played the first stage and a bit of the second, so I'm unwilling to classify this as anything like a review. However, I will say without reservation that this game deserves scorn. I have no reason to continue playing it, other than the masochistic pursuit of Achievements.

My Judgement: Unfortunately Unpleasant

Now, look: I don't want to become Tim Rogers. I am going to try my best, in the future, not to conform to his standard of alternating between repetetively damning prose and overly embellished praise. This post resembles my review of Mercenaries 2 a bit too much, but horrible games inspire me to write more than passable ones do. I'll try to vary my tone here, hopefully with a long-delayed review of Tales of Vesperia.

I'm trying to write something right now, and I'm so stuck. It's fiction, and I feel I've lost what talent I had for spinning a world, or even modifying an existing one. I can't decide where to start. A character, a situation, an idea? Am I going into the whole thing with failure in mind if I'm writing just to write? I like this little blog because honesty requires so little inspiration.

I'm coming up on my one year anniversary with sobriety. It's weird. I want to celebrate, to commemorate it in some way, but at the same time I feel like it would invite disaster. It's not a thing to trumpet, but one to solemnly remember: the time when I was a little less human.

More than my attempt at modesty, I feel fake. I hit maybe one Anonymous meeting per season and I have no sponsor. I've done well enough so far, I guess, but I still eat a lot to compensate for the loss of my other vices. It's a better spot, but I'm definitely still in the woods.

The whole thing can be encapsulated by an encounter I had a couple hours ago. While riding my bike, I met up with one of my old buddies, a former and current user. I didn't give him my whole In Recovery spiel when he offered me a blunt, and I gave him my phone number. My rationalization is that I was in an awkward situation and wanted to get out of it quickly and with minimum fuss, but I fear leaving that back door open for myself. There are phone numbers from that period of my life that I want to forget, just so I won't be able to call them in a moment of weakness.

I'm posting this without editing, in an attempt to prevent redacting uncomfortable truths. I'll give it the ol' readability sweep in a couple days, I guess.

You'll Never Be Alone Again

I re-met an old grammar school friend today. She recognized me, yelled my name, and I had a moment of minor panic. For five seconds, I had the distinct unease of being recognized without recognizing. I'm happy; I've been thinking about her on and off since we last met ~5 years back. She was my second crush, and the first who'd reciprocated some element of my feelings. She's with someone, and I can't say that I'm still into her, but I guess it stirred up some weird feelings. Otherwise I wouldn't be writing this right now.

I want to see her, but I'm crowded by a slowly inflating anxiety. I don't know what it is, but just the memory of her, sparing her presence, makes me feel uncomfortable. We've got a history I don't want to go into here, and I don't even know if that's it. I'm just tied up in knots over it and I don't have a damn person with which to talk about it. Internet Diary, today you are my best friend.

All of my friends (including this lady) have significant others, so now I'm actually feeling pressured to find one myself. Not out of loneliness or desire, but peer pressure and social lubrication. Three's a crowd and all that. It's kind of fucked up, because I don't yearn for physical intimacy anymore. What I need is a good friend, hopefully a best friend. I'm not sure if I'll try to work on that.