Bell, Book, and Candle

Today, I had an odd moment of regret. Now that I'm 23, I'm past the age were I can dress like a goth without feeling immature. As a sullen teenager, I was drawn to the complicated, ornamental, fantasy-esque vestments. Not the culture; Clove cigarettes taste like incense, The Cure puts me to sleep, and my disillusionment doesn't dramatize well. But all the black and the layering and the jewelry and the opportunity to wear fingerless arm warmers ... it hits every one of my buttons at once, like a ten year old jerk kid in an elevator. There's something about the ritual, the fetishism of the clothing that appeals to me. I wear a tacky little necklace that I jokingly refer to as my phylactery, but if I went goth I could have an actual phylactery! It's like LARPing every day and getting away with it.

Thing is, when I was an appropriate age to go goth, I was fat. And still, you know, in confused boy mode. Goth is not a look that translates well across the gender divide. You go from looking like this:

to looking like this:

For me, a kid with low self-esteem and body issues, sticking with the T-shirt and jeans was an easier choice, though so much less rewarding. If I could go back now ... well, who cares? I don't want to be a teenager again. Steampunk is the socially acceptable goth-analogue for adult nerds, but I don't really dig it. Maybe, if I lose some weight, I'll go gothic lolita. While writing this, I've started browsing Hot Topic's website.

This blog is eight years old. Dear lord!

Heaven's My Destination

Dream. Goal. Crystal. Wild rose. Puppet. Persevere. Friends.

After playing Dissidia: Final Fantasy, I never want to hear any of these words again. Story in games is a constant struggle. The quality is pretty consistently bad, even for the action-movie milieu most games judge themselves by. If you were hungry, would you rather have a teaspoon of gruel or a bucketful? A line of misspelled conglaturations or hours of voice actors droning out tech-fantasy Mad Libs? Post-Dissidia, I'm leaning toward the Mad Libs.

Luckily, there's a game underneath all that plot. A 3D fighting game made from disparate ingredients. A bit of Power Stone's chases through large arenas (and mad dashes for super move granting baubles.) A taste of Squaresoft's own Bushido Blade (the same attack can do no damage or be an instant kill, depending on the timing.) Maybe a dash of Smash Brothers (an intramural fight where strikes send foes flying.) I spent most of any given fight in the air, dashing around the arena. It's very Dragon Ball Z. The game's broken up into chapters, any order you want, blah blah blah. Fanservice is the game's chief bullet point, so it's prudent to let the player determine which chapters to skip.


It's all fun enough. But. After I started skipping every cutscene, I realized the game was pretty thin. The fighting isn't complex enough that I'm driven to master it, and I have no one to play with via wi-fi (there is, of course, no online multiplayer.) I ended up deleting the game from my PSP when I was 2/3s of the way through. That's unusual for completionist me, but coming away I feel satisfied.

Whenever I read a game review, the primary question I need answered is: Is it worth my money? Not sure if I have an answer for this one. I think it'll be a good game to pick up every other month, play hard for a few days, and put down. It's a cop-out, but your love of the source material is really going to determine how much slack you give Dissidia. Final Fantasy and I fell out around 1996, but I still enjoyed all the parts where nobody was talking.

My Judgement: Temporarily Smashing

An Ape Will Die On Every Page!

I've been playing Torchlight. It's good! But it doesn't really need a review or whatever, because it's Diablo. Really good Diablo. I'm really surprised my computer can run it, actually; the old beast is Frankensteined together from a former techie friend's pile of scraps. Said friend would always give me guff for the flaccidity of my machine, dear Lamiroir, but it suits my needs as someone uninterested in the PC's historic genres. First-persons shooters leave me dry, and real-time strategy games give me a rash. Pre-Torchlight, the last game I played on my PC was Theme Hospital, an apparently forgotten artifact from 1997. That's not a grab for retro-elitist cred - I'm really out of the loop on PC games, so having an old machine reinforces my policy of ignoring most new PC games, and vice-versa.