I've been meaning to do this for a bit now; a list of the more interesting, funny, or just plain likable posts I've made (in my opinion) since getting a LiveJournal back in 2001. Maybe it's a bit conceited of me, but if you've only been reading this journal occasionally or recently, it could be helpful/interesting/amusing.

Note: This has only public posts; anything behind a friends lock has been omitted.

( The List )

I'm going to post-date this so it stays at the top of my journal page.

I kind of wrote about this on Goodreads already, but it was past 1am and I was too tired to actually write something more meaningful and I suppose I owe you all a real review.

Otaku Spaces
by Patrick Galbraith (photos by Androniki Christodoulou)

The design of this book just kind of screams "puff piece" from the outset: large pages with large color photographs, a three-column layout for the text, lots of graphics in the margins, maybe an introductory paragraph that tries to contextualize the photographs and make it seem more intellectual than just "ooh pretty pictures." In short, it looks like a coffee table book, something you flip through when bored and show off to your friends rather than actually straight-up read.

That would be a wrong assumption. This book not only has a lot of text, it has footnotes. It talks about public vs. private space, the media gaze, and a bunch of other things I haven't heard uttered since I got my communications degree. Of course, that ultimately means I enjoyed those parts greatly, even if other people might have been lost.

The bulk of the book was interviews with various otaku, preceded by a color portrait. The interviews were all different, though some of the same general questions were asked:

"When did you become an otaku?"
"What do you collect, if anything?"
"How do people react to your hobbies?"
"What do you think an otaku is?"
"Are otaku and collectors different or the same?"

This lends a uniformity to the book, tying people with varying interests together and allowing the essays that begin and end the book to act as introduction and conclusion, even if the book is not structured as a "proper" essay. Ideas overlap and reinforce each other, implying a conclusion even when it's not obviously stated.

Each interview is conducted respectfully, and they seem to draw a lot of good responses from the interviewees. They don't just say they like something, they try to explain the mechanics of why they like it. They're more than willing to say whether they are an otaku, and they are very cognisant of what others may think. We've definitely come a long way from "weird Japan" here.

The book centers on Japan, with brief and occasional mentions of otaku overseas, which is fine since it is trying to examine the historical factors that led to the creation of otaku and otaku culture (and the spaces in which it exists). But it got me thinking about my own experiences, as a geek/nerd/otaku. I used to relish the whole "culture" and anyone who knew me back then remembers how much I loved to analyze and study geek culture. Now... I guess I'm still a geek, but I've distanced myself somewhat from the idea of having to immerse myself in it. I barely even watch anime anymore, and it's not that I don't like it, it's just that there's so much out there to consume. I don't think of myself as an anime or manga fan, I'm an animation and comics fan. Which to me, is a more "pure" fandom since it doesn't discriminate. But I don't think I'm right, just different.

Anyway, the book got me thinking about how I used to be, and when I used to more into cons and anime, and how things have changed since then, in terms of the product and not me. In going with the questions posed in the book, it seems to me that being an otaku and collecting used to go hand-in-hand, that in order to watch or read something you had to collect it first. But in the last decade we've made huge strides toward divorcing consumption of media from the collection of it. Basically, you no longer need to own something to watch/read/play it, mainly because of the Internet. You can watch your favorite shows on Netflix or Hulu or CrunchyRoll or whatever. You can stream music on services like Pandora and Spotify. I even stopped buying a lot of American comics and manga, not because I can get it on the 'net (because you really can't, not as easily as other types of media) but because I can get it from the library for free. Books too. In the past if the library didn't have it, they didn't have it and I went to the store instead. Now I can order any book they have in their system and have it delivered to a branch nearby. I've read so many different books this way.

So essentially there's no need to own something to enjoy it. If you own it, it means you really like it. Ownership becomes a much larger act of devotion. There are people out there who scoff at the idea of owning things, since they could get it for free, but more and more I've been feeling, "then you're not really the big fans you claim to be." Buying something proves you actually like it, because you didn't have to spend that money, you made a choice.

I guess that's my answer to the question of "Are otaku and collectors the same, or different?"

I hope it would also answer the question of whether I liked the book. In short, I did. I appreciated how it treated its subjects respectfully, and I enjoyed the diversity of subjects. The essays were a bit dense, but not terribly so, just a bit beyond what a normal person might expect of a book of this design and format. The section about otaku areas/neighborhoods could have been a bit more filled out, perhaps with more photographs of the exact things they were talking about (maybe more specific storefronts) and maps. It did make me want to revisit Japan again, though, as I haven't been there in over five years. The part talking about the changes in Akihabara after the stabbing was a bit distressing to me, and I'm glad I visited before the incident.

The design had some oddities in it; there was a lot of white space, including entire blank pages which could have had more photographs on them and the little pictographs in each interview were about 50/50 with their usefulness, making them feel like space-fillers rather than as presenting any kind of information. I also disliked how they didn't necessarily correspond with the text on the page; it's distracting when a magazine uses a pull quote in an interview that actually appears on another page, and this wasn't any different. I also found the book somewhat hard to hold, but that's really a minor gripe considering the trade-off is that the size and shape is there to display the photographs better.

Overall, I thought this was an interesting read, a good overview of how the otaku scene has changed over the past decade, and a respectful look at its otaku subjects.

Wild speculation:
( No spoilers really, though some people don't even like ideas planted in their head. )

Even wilder speculation:
It's all a VR simulation played by an Avatar even further in the future to... okay, I got nothing past that, I didn't think this out, I told you it was wild.

Snotty Saves the Day: The History of Arcadia
by Tod Davies

The phrase "fairy tale" gets bandied about a lot in this book, which I suppose is why I requested it from LibraryThing Early Reviewers in the first place. The problem is, that when you purposefully try to create a fairy tale, to join the canon created by the Brothers Grimm all the way to L. Frank Baum and C.S. Lewis, you're more than likely to fail. In fact, the approach here is so obvious and cynical to me, in how it took parts of Oz and Wonderland and Narnia and Phantom Tollbooth, and overlaying a (possibly original) meta story on top of it. There's nothing in the book I found to be unique to the world, and nothing sparked my imagination. Despite it being only 200 pages, I found it hard to get through. And it's not that it's badly written, it's just rather lifeless and uninspiring.

It probably doesn't help that the book constantly tells us that Snotty is a horrible person, a terrible hero... but I don't really believe that. Snotty doesn't ever do anything that's really that bad, unless you think being a drug dealer automatically makes someone a terrible, awful person. Snotty's not likable, but no one in this book is, because no one gets any real development. You can't tell me Snotty betraying a "friend" is a big deal when the two know each other for less than 20 pages and barely interact in that time.

The length of this book works against character building in so many ways. Snotty's transformation is quick and really just adds to the disbelief that Snotty was a bad person in the first place. We move quickly from situation to situation and ultimately all the big transitions have to be magically induced rather than have the book engage in actual character development.

What does the book engage in? Footnotes and editor's notes and a bibliography and ads and the creation of a another world on top of the central story. It's cute, and the footnote concept can be done well, but in this case it doesn't add much to the Snotty story, only hinting at a different, possibly more interesting story which may or may not be told in a sequel/companion volume.

Overall I found this book frustraing, because the writing wasn't bad and the writer clearly has imagination, but they couldn't make it interesting, probably because it was a pastiche of other, greater fairy tales.

If you were on the Internet at all in the past two days, you've probably seen this video:

Caine's Arcade from Nirvan Mullick on Vimeo.

If you haven't seen it, go ahead, watch it, we'll wait.

What separates this from most "neat Internet things" that go around is how quickly this particular one exploded, appearing almost everywhere at once and in places where honestly, it had no business being (really Galleycat, really?). There's nothing particularly wrong with that, people love cute kid stories and this one struck a particular chord with people, between the creativity of the kid and the kindness of the filmmaker and reddit. Sometimes things just catch on. Amusingly enough, a lot of commenters are like, "I did something similar when I was 9" which is really just code for saying, "Why not me?" That's luck for you. If only we had online video when we were kids, and random filmmakers had walked into our dad's auto parts store one day.

What's most interesting to me about the whole story is the definition of arcade at play here. No doubt, Caine's interpretation of an arcade is entirely correct. But what went through my head when I heard "9-year-old builds cardboard arcade" was very different from the reality. I had imagined a series of cardboard arcade cabinets, cargo-cult replicas of various video games. Which while cool, is not admittedly as cool as what Caine did.

Caine created replicas of classic fairway games, like a basketball toss and a claw machine, and they work, at least as well as something made by a 9-year-old out of cardboard and packing tape. And the attention to detail is amazing, like the "FunPass verification system" and the ticket dispenser.

But there still exists a cognitive divide. Why was my interpretation of a "cardboard arcade" different from Caine's?

I suspect a generational divide to some extent. I grew up in the 1980s, when coin-op video game cabinets were king for a few years, and were still somewhat common even years later. I saw arcade cabinets at the pizza place, at the bowling alley, at the movie theater. Arcades were synonymous with "video games" in my mind, and games like the basketball toss, skeeball, and claw machines were only found in places like the Coney Island Boardwalk and Chuck E. Cheese.

With the improvements in gaming technology home consoles eventually rivaled arcades in terms of performance and graphics, so there was no reason to go out to an arcade and pump quarters into a machine. Playing at home was more convenient and cheaper, and now it's even social with online gaming. So the video games moved out of arcades.

But despite losing that "identity" many arcades remained open, and they either went back to, or never left their roots in fairway games. So once again, arcades are where you go to find skeeball and basketball toss and air hockey and claw machines and many other "physical" experiences that can't really be replicated at home (okay, you could buy a basketball hoop if you had a backyard or driveway). And that's what arcades are right now. In Coney Island, and Chuck E. Cheese, and Dave and Buster's, and all sorts of places. While video games still live in some "classic" arcades, it's probably more common to find what is also called a "family fun center." But we know what it's really supposed to be called, and so does Caine.

So the real charm for me, in a way, in Caine's Arcade, isn't just in its imagination, ingenuity, or in his perseverance, but in its adherence to an idea. What is an arcade? And what will it look like for the next generation? Judging from Caine's interpretation of it, we might already have our answers.

"She is Natty Bumppo, Diana the chaste huntress of classical myth, and also the synthesis of Harry Potter and Bella Swan — the Boy Who Lived and the Girl Who Must Choose."

- A.O. Scott on Katniss Everdeen

Got home from PAX East at 3am last night, which makes you think I'd be extra dead today but that hasn't been true. Feeling pretty good, actually, but I'm sure it's going to catch up with me tomorrow. It always catches up on Tuesday. That is what Tuesdays are for.

It was a good weekend, a strong weekend, full of life and vigor and the scent of many unwashed bodies. Well, not that bad, but there was a moment we crossed the bridge over the PC area and caught a whiff through the glass.

Every year I come home and swear I will play more games, like some New PAX's Resolution. We will see how that goes. I started up two new portable games while we were there. I also finished reading the Hunger Games Trilogy. I was enjoying the books well enough through the first two, but it was the third that really sold me and I think it's going to stick in my head for a while. If you want to talk about it, feel free to message me.

I bought two t-shirts and a card game expansion (not the Penny Arcade expansion, sadly enough). And a scarf.

It's so weird to go to a con and not know most of the people there. But then again, that actually leaves me time to actually, you know, enjoy the con.

Oh yeah, got to play Johann Sebastian Joust. Best part of the weekend. I am a ninja.

PlayStation 2

Final Fantasy XII
Just sucked it up and pushed through the ending. Only died once or so too. Man, what a great game that was, I'd love to play more like it. I already have Revenant Wings in my DS, but I haven't started it yet.

PlayStation 3

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Finished the game as Knives. The final battle with Gideon is pretty insane, though relatively straight-forward.

Catherine
Man, everyone in this game is repulsive. But that makes it easier for me to make decisions that go against everything I believe in pursuit of the multiple endings. I beat the game to end up with Katherine, now I'm aiming for Catherine. Which honestly, is a lot more fun. On my second play-through I can also skip a lot of the less-important cut-scenes (I know some change based on the decisions I make). When you don't have to watch all the talking, the game goes so much faster.

Nintendo DS

Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth
Finished it. It's certainly not my favorite in the series, but I don't mind playing as Edgeworth, and I do wish they'd bring over the second game.

Facebook

Marvel: Avengers Assemble
If you don't have a lot of friends playing this you're pretty screwed, but other than the frustration of not having enough SHIELD and Command Points this is pretty fun. I wish they had more hero characters to choose from, and I'm curious to see what the next Marvel game will be like. I am really excited by the idea of Facebook games that connect together gameplay- and story-wise.

Words With Friends
Yeah, I joined the crowd. I like being able to play not-Scrabble, but I feel like the board design is flawed and the word selection is limited. Also, I think my brother was cheating. But I beat him anyway, so it doesn't really matter much.

Android

Game Dev Story
This is really, really, really fun and addictive. However, I don't like that it's not completely open-ended, and I think it could really benefit from social features like letting you collaborate on projects with friends and compete against them in the marketplace.

World of Goo
Bought this in the Android Market/Google Play when they were selling a bunch of stuff for $0.50 (also got Dead Space and Osmos but haven't really played them yet). I'm really not very good at the Goo. But I like playing it on a touch screen, and I haven't quite given up yet.

Draw Something
God dammit Mom, it's called Draw Something, not Write Something.

I think this year is off to a good start.

Tags: video games

Tonight is Oscar Night. I am... incredibly not excited by this. I'm not really pulling for any of the films, and Billy Crystal is a terrible host. His shtick was funny when I was 10, but I also thought poop was funny. Um, okay, I still think poop is funny. Especially to say. Poop! But Billy Crystal? Not funny. Not even to say. Unless you say it like "Cristal" and pretend that rappers like to have him in clubs.

I'm pulling for The Descendants even though I haven't seen it because I found The Artist too gimmicky to be a lasting entry into the Best Picture canon, and the movies I really like, Moneyball and Midnight in Paris, aren't considered serious contenders for the title. The Artist had good performances and was beautifully shot, but the story was weak. Maybe that's a consequence of being a silent film; dialog tends to do a lot of the heavy lifting in conveying complex ideas to the audience, so without it, they have to limit it to what you can tell with facial expressions, body language, and music.

All of the nominated movies seem to have ties to each other in some way. Four of the the movies are set in France. One is a French movie, though not set in France. Only two movies have a contemporary setting and one of those spends more time in the '20s. Another two movies are set (or partially set in) 1931. Two more movies are set in 2002. Two of the films deal with the early history of film and another has a screenwriter as a main character. Brad Pitt was in two of the nominated films. So was John Goodman. And Jessica Chastain.

Also, two Gwen Stacys were in The Help. As well as two cast members from True Blood. What the hell.

I also thought it was funny that Hugo and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close shared very similar plots (SPOILERS): a kid spends all his free time investigating something his dead dad left behind (involving a key in some way), convinced that there's some kind of message for him, only to find out that it means a lot more to someone else and in fact, had nothing to do with him AT ALL.

By the way, Tom Hanks did not pee in the movie. I was disappointed.

I just realized I've been remiss in posting links to online Valentines like I usually do. So I'm just collect whatever I can find in a hurry, to be updated throughout the day.

Game of Thrones

If Guys Wrote Valentine's Day Cards

DC Valentines (thanks, tricianna)

Historical figure Valentines (via tribblewing)

And of course, you can check out my previous list.

Tags: greeting cards, holidays

I feel like lately there's been a lot of warring (specifically in my group of friends) between lovers of paper books and fans of e-readers. Maybe I'm only noticing/caring about it now because I have an e-reader finally. Regardless, it always seems to come down to the same points repeated over and over again.

Books are a pain to carry around

The files on your e-reader can be lost/deleted at any time

People say these two things over and over again, as if there's something horribly wrong with them, when in reality, this is exactly how it's supposed to be.

In the history of communications, there is an inverse relationship between durability and portability. A stone tablet will last the ages but you can't take it anywhere. A clay tablet is a little lighter, but it's easier to break. Papyrus can be carried easier than a clay tablet, but it decomposes eventually. And so on and so on, from parchment to paper to ones and zeros.

Basically, yes, electronic files are fragile. Files may get corrupted, deleted, or just become obsolete. But you can carry many books for the same weight and size as a physical book, and you can send the files all over the Internet with a few clicks of a mouse. You have traded durability for portability.

Now, I have nothing against books and happen to enjoy the physical object very much. But next time you want to say that you only enjoy "real" books, think about those that came before. The guys with the stone tablets were probably all like, "I like the feel of cold, smooth stone beneath my fingers when I read my proclamations" while the guys with the clay tablets danced around them singing "nonny nonny these clay tablets are awesome for doing my sums nonny nonny." (You know, because they could in fact, dance around with them, since they weren't giant-ass stone tablets.)

Tags: books

When I played the first Phoenix Wright/Ace Attorney/Gyakuten Saiban game, it can be said that Miles Edgeworth made an impression to me. The gray hair. The purple coat. The wag of his finger. The cocky and condescending way he holds out his hands and shakes his head when poor Phoenix has gotten something wrong. But by the end of the game it became clear that his actions weren't malicious, he wasn't a villain, merely the antagonist for those first few cases. He was an ally, if not a friend.

So I was excited when I heard about Gyakuten Kenji, which some fans were calling it (at the time), "Miles Edgeworth: Perfect Prosecutor." It seemed like such a "perfect" name at the time, except that it doesn't brand the game very well, and as I've learned from playing the game, you don't do very much prosecuting.

Hence the English title, Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth. Edgeworth isn't an attorney, and I suppose they thought it would be odd to have a game where your objective was to lock people up instead of setting them free, so instead we have a game where all the action takes place outside a courtroom. So Edgeworth is still a prosecutor, yet the game can still maintain the series core tenet of defending the innocent from the injustices of the legal system. He becomes some sort of Jessica Fletcher here, where dead bodies are just popping up wherever he goes and he finds himself involved, either as a suspect or some other type of collateral damage (for example, the first murder takes place in his office and also involves a robbery). The man just can't take a vacation.

The key difference between the gameplay in the main series and this spinoff is that instead of switching between screens and selecting items with the stylus, in Investigations you do a lot of actual walking around, either using the d-pad or the stylus. It makes each area less of an illustration and more an actual place that you inhabit. Certain items will zoom in for you, presenting you with the traditional illustration-type screen that you can then examine further.

It's a nice change, when you consider that the vast majority of the gameplay is pretty much the same as the main series. You look around for clues to add to your inventory, you talk to witnesses to gather more information, and at certain times you enter a courtroom mode where you basically get to interrogate a person and "press" further on their statements and "present" evidence to contradict them, losing life on a power bar if you make a mistake. If all you and I wanted was just another entry in the core series, this isn't too far off the mark.

The other main addition is the "Logic" system, where questions are compiled on a separate screen, which can then he linked to make deductions. When examining crime scenes, you can then "deduce" contradictions using the items in your inventory. I found this actually quite enjoyable, except that I often found myself jumping ahead two or three steps, knowing where certain lines of questioning and examination were going long before the evidence or witnesses were available. It's not as if the Ace Attorney games were ever unpredictable, but designing gameplay out of your ability to make these intuitive leaps and then not letting you do anything about it until the game scenario decides it's plot-appropriate is frustrating.

While this is a new feature, it's also old in that it's really not that different from the magatama in the Phoenix Wright games (starting with the second) or what Apollo Justice did with his bracelet. It's a way to endow a special talent onto the main character and spice up the gameplay.

With such little differences between this spinoff and the main series, questions about the main series start to arise. Where is Phoenix? What's he up to (according to the timeline, he hasn't been disbarred yet)? Where's Maya? Where's Pearl? Doesn't anyone have an actual job to do rather than standing around looking at dead bodies and grandfather clocks all day?

The more I thought about the main series of Ace Attorney the more the objective of the Investigations series started to seem a bit... silly. Each case involves Edgeworth desperate to prove a suspect's innocence so that they aren't carted off to jail for trial. As in, the trials that are the centerpiece of gameplay for the main series. It really takes the edge off when you realize that should you fail in proving their innocence, all it means is that they hire an ace attorney who tries to prove their innocence in three days by gathering evidence and pointing out contradictions in a court of law... in short, they get to play an Ace Attorney game, and you do not.

Basically, it's lovely to visit old friends, the in-jokes a references to past installments are a treat, and the plot is... typical Ace Attorney fare, where a series of loosely connected cases present a bigger picture that comes to a head in the final case. But in the end, I'm really glad they announced Gyakuten Saiban 5, because spinoffs can't and shouldn't move the series forward.

Today Penny Arcade announced that Ben Kuchera is now going to be doing game news for them.

Of course, everyone heard about Vox Media building a super-group to launch their gaming vertical.

I'm one of the people who donated to the Kickstarter for Brandon Boyer's (late of Offworld, a subset of BoingBoing) new video game site, Venus Patrol.

How many new video game sites do we need—specifically, how many video game news sites do we need?

I think Tycho pretty much said it in his post:

News is pretty much busted at the moment; you may be shocked to hear it, but deadlines every twenty minutes put you on the wrong side of quality versus quantity.

I guess that's why I stopped reading video game news as fervently as I used to. Well, that and the fact that I just didn't feel like I had time to keep up. But it shouldn't be a deluge, we really do have a dearth of quality features sometimes. That's partly why I liked Offworld, because I feel like it presented a different perspective, and I'm hoping that Venus Patrol (or whatever it ends up being called) continues that. I look forward to seeing what the team from Vox does as well (I also wonder who else they'll absorb into their katamari).

It's a little crazy to be launching new blogs and news sites now, but I think it's exciting too.

I (originally) forgot to include Glitch to my list of games played in 2011, so now it gets an entire post to itself. Because it deserves it.

Now, I have nothing against MMORPGs. I happen to enjoy MMORPGs a lot, when I do play them. There was a period when I was addicted to World of Warcraft and would play it everyday, and all weekend. My addiction wasn't as bad as some people's, but I was certainly invested in it. What I am not invested in is the concept of paying $16 or what-have-you every month for the privilege of playing, especially after paying for the software to begin with, and paying for something I may not necessary play all the time. It's the same problem I have with Netflix: sometimes I'm just paying for the privilege of having an account. At least with instant streaming the odds of getting my money's worth out of it per month have gone up. With WoW I pretty much stopped playing the game cold turkey after going on a business trip, and I just never got back into it. Eventually I realized I was never going back, so I cancelled my account and sometimes I get "please come back" emails from Blizzard. Ha ha ha, I'm more likely to try Star Wars: The Old Republic. And I'm serious about that; it looks and sounds really good.

Anyway, we're talking about Glitch here, which is a free-to-play browser game, so we've already cleared one hurdle. They do have some money-making mechanisms, where you purchase teleportation tokens (to get around the world quicker), credits (to buy new outfits), and subscriptions, which give you a stipend of teleportation tokens and credits but also allow you access to things like voting on game features. I haven't bought anything yet, but the fact that they haven't pushed me once toward spending money, and the fact that nothing seems to depend on having money or friends, make me want to spend money. I want to give them money because they've been so nice to me. It's refreshing, and I hope it's working out for them.

The game itself is weird, true. You're a small little midgety thing called a "glitch" that was born out of a giant's imagination. And now you wander around this world gathering and mining and farming and occasionally paying tribute to the giants with donations. It's really a big simulation game with some added exploration elements. There are different regions, all with different graphical designs and different types of natural resources. Different trees grow in different areas, some areas have more dirt piles or rocks, other areas have specific items that can't be found anywhere else, like barnacles. So there's plenty of incentive to travel all around, if you want to complete as many quests and earn the most badges. There's no pressure to do anything in particular, but chances are you'll want to try everything.

The only roadblock to trying everything is that you have to learn skills, and this is probably the one major annoyance. To gather some resources, like if you want to mine, you need to learn the appropriate skills. Skills take time to learn. At first the periods of time are short, but once you reach particular thresholds the period of time to learn skills increases. I've reached the point where some things will take me a week! There's a way to delete skills so you can learn others faster, but it's a flawed system: it takes time to unlearn a skill, and you have to learn to unlearn first. The time savings might actually be wiped out by those delays. However, by the time you reach the point where it's going to take a week to learn something, chances are you know how to do all the important stuff already anyway, so it's not that big a deal. Still, the whole system could use some improvements.

I bought a house in the game; this is kind of important to achieving certain tasks, especially the gardening ones, since though there are community gardens, those are like a laundry room: people can and will take your stuff if you're not careful. My house does not have an herb garden, which means I might have to sell this house and buy a different one, which from what I can tell can be as big a pain in the ass as moving in the real world. I wish there was a way to "rent" a garden, just so I can finish up these quests. Or maybe they could just let people own more than one house, or rent a house, or something.

Houses are also important for holding your stuff, as you'll accumulate more stuff than you can possibly carry, even if you expand your storage. They don't really offer optimal storage options; I pretty much just throw stuff on the floor of my house since the cabinet is too small.

I really do enjoy gathering materials and combining them; you can cook food using raw ingredients you grow yourself and then eat it for energy. I love how things chain together like that. Very few things are superfluous; there's a handful of collectibles but the majority of items can and will be used. And anything you don't want, you can sell in the auction house, which is accessed outside of the game, you don't have to visit a central location, you just go to the page for it and check off items. The amount of things they let you do without actually logging in to the game is quite refreshing, because it's really a waste to have to load up the full game just to change your hat.

The game is not resource intensive; it seems to run on some kind of Flash but my fan never starts whirring away like it would with most Facebook games. Sometimes it's a bit jumpy on my netbook, but most of the activity is pretty sedate so poor system performance won't hurt your overall game.

There is a deeper story within the game, where you supposedly fend off attacks from evil giant birds, but I haven't encountered any of these yet, possibly because they put the game back in beta while they retool. I love the introduction to this feature though; you visit a museum and listen/look at exhibits about the "rooks."

Overall, it's a nice little simulation game; anyone who enjoys Animal Crossing or Harvest Moon will probably love this.

No, really, what happened? You can tell me that they declined because home systems became more powerful and people prefer to play games at home, but and you wouldn't be wrong, but you'd also be ignoring what made arcades so popular in the first place. Arcades had games you couldn't get at home. Arcades had games you couldn't afford to have at home. Arcades had better technology then what you would get at home. All-in-all, the point of an arcade was to deliver a different experience that you would get at home. And somehow we lost sight of that. Companies delivered arcade-perfect conversions and continued to make it so home machines could compete with arcades, but they forgot to keep the arcades competitive.

The last time... the only time I ever went to E3, I remember people waiting on line for 3 hours to play a demo of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. The fact that people waited this long to play a scant few minutes of a game that would eventually be released to the public anyway... well, it made me think that there were still high-demand experiences to be had in the gaming world, things that people would venture out of their house to see. I wondered what would happen if they had charged people $1 to play the demo. A lot of them would have stuck around, I bet.

Arcades should be about the things we cannot get at home. That used to mean better graphics, but sadly it seems that at the rate we're progressing, arcades won't be able to stay ahead (they could do 3D, though; not everyone is in the rush to buy a 3D TV but I'm sure they wouldn't mind a light diversion when they're out-and-about). It used to mean Dance Dance Revolution but I think Just Dance and Kinect killed that. It used to mean guns and instruments and steering wheels, but we've brought those home... for a price. It used to mean big elaborate setups with seats and hydraulics and enclosed cabins... well, it could still mean those things, if that's what people want. I don't know if they do. They should, if only because those things are neat.

I just feel like the arcade industry gave up too soon, relying on what is now a 40-year-old business model. I read that arcades continue to thrive in Japan because they offer what many Japanese cannot have, living in small, cramped apartments: elaborate video game setups of instruments and other accessories. Trying to take that model and apply it to the US is just as much of a mistake as using the old business model. I wish someone would figure out what American gamers need, what will keep people coming to arcades, because I love arcades. I miss arcades.

Inspired by this list, but I wouldn't make a list of only games I finished, because then it wouldn't be a very long list. Such is my lot. Also, commentary.

PlayStation 2

Final Fantasy XII

Started in 2010, and mostly completed in 2011 except for the final end boss. I've been mostly futzing around the world completing side-quests, I really should just sit down and play through the ending already.

PlayStation 3

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World

We just bought the PS3 last week, so haven't made a lot of progress on this. It's tough, even when it's easy. I find the controls to be a bit funky at times, like it doesn't react as quickly as I like and the characters are slow to move. I don't like the way you have to snap the joystick to get them to run. What I do enjoy is the flexibility it gives you to bounce in and out of boards. It amuses me that this isn't a game of the movie, but it's not a game of the comic either. I could easily see them doing a sequel, since it's not really dependent on a story, just the world and characters.

Nintendo DS

Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume

This has three endings; I've completed the "bad" and "not so bad but still not good" endings, but I've found myself stymied by the final boss for the "good" ending. The problem with being at the end boss is that I really have to put aside a good chunk of time and concentration to try and tackle the problem, so this "portable" game isn't very portable anymore. I mean to get back to it soon.

Pokémon Black

I was really trying to avoid playing this but it's hard to resist the juggernaut. I completed the main story and some of the post-game stuff but then I just kind of stopped. I also mean to get back to this one eventually, so I can catch all the Pokémon and transfer over my previous collections and just generally forget about it until Grey or whatever they're going to call it comes out.

Professor Layton and the Unwound Future

Finished it, though I don't recall if I finished every single puzzle. The first game had a perfectly valid in-plot reason why you had to solve puzzles to do anything, but the second and third installments, not so much. I also have the movie now on DVD, so I'll have to check that out soon, and I wonder how they've incorporated puzzles into that.

Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth

Started this last month and am still working on it. There's a movie coming out soon, yet we've heard nothing about a new game in the main series, or translating the second installment of this game, or anything except that silly crossover with Professor Layton that I'll end up buying anyway.

Facebook

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

I used to love the Carmen Sandiego games as a kid, so I was really excited by the Facebook version. And it's fun, until you start repeating cities, and clues, and having to wait for harder cases takes a while. The game wasn't really designed to hold my interest in the long run, after all, even the original game was finite. It's a shame this was shut down, though.

The Oregon Trail

I made it to Oregon at least once with each of the job classes you don't have to pay money for, so I haven't really played it since then. The trail doesn't change, so you pretty much know what you're in store for if you replay. Still, it's a shame it was shut down.

CivWorld

I've played through a lot of sessions but I have yet to be in a winning nation, but that's fine, it's kind of not the point of playing the game. Or is it? The problem I had is that progress is slow and each game ends before I really manage to pick up any traction.

iOS

ASYNC Corp.

Downloaded this because Steven Totilo recommended it. It took me a while to figure out how to play each mode, and I still haven't been able to crack ASYNC mode. I mostly just play this to relax/when I'm bored.

Angry Birds

I started this over since Ian had played through it a bunch on my iPod before getting his own. I like the game, but I'm not obsessed with it. Eventually I'm just going to break down and ask for help on certain boards.

Google+

Flood-It!

I tried out a bunch of games on G+ but this is the only one that stuck with me. Unfortunately, I play it as much as I use G+, and I barely use G+ right now as-is. I love that they have a dedicated tab for games. As for the game, I like it, I find it satisfying.

LiveJournal

Sim Hospital

I was hoping for something similar to Theme Hospital and that's what I got, until I bumped up against all the typical limitations of flash-based social network games. The waiting. The need to spend real money to get anything done. Also, the English is laughably bad at times.

Browser

Glitch

Cute MMORPG that I really can't stop playing. It's very laid back, and I've leveled up past level 20 at this point, and I still have a few more skills to learn and many badges to earn. Will I keep playing once I earn them? We shall see.

Tags: facebook, video games

I haven't made any New Year's Resolutions, but I've been feeling I should write a little more, and I'm not in any mood or condition to write some fiction or a blog post right now, so here's just a little short post from the flip side of 2012.

Caucuses/primaries are coming. So exciting! Gonna be busy with work for a few weeks. Not so exciting.

I think I'm gonna work on trying to play/finish more games, because as much as I claim to love video gaming, I just don't play enough. We have the PS3 now, too. I should do something about that.

God, I am tired. Time to sleep?

So Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows. If you didn't like the first one, you sure as hell aren't going to like the sequel, which is generally more of the same—martial arts, explosions, snark, and homoerotic subtext. So don't bother seeing it just to complain about how it missed the "spirit" or "point" of the Holmes stories, because you're just wasting everyone's time.

Now that's over with, to talk about the film. And that's just it—I was actually impressed by how it was a better film than the original. Plot-wise it's much more straight-forward, where events progress in a somewhat linear fashion and generally everything feels like it belongs. It's a very tidy movie. There really isn't much of a mystery, and that's a bit of a drawback, but it makes up for it in the fact that it doesn't pull plot details out of its ass. I've seen way too many movies where the clues were these little things that have no significance and make no sense together outside of the screenwriter's mind, who arranges them into something resembling a solution as if to say, "Look how clever I am!" Well screw it, in Game of Shadows everything feels like it belongs, the mental exercise is in figuring out what it all means.

Style-wise, Guy Ritchie definitely felt more free to insert his quick-cut, gritty style in there. There's a lot more of those moments where we go inside Holmes' mind during a fight and he breaks everything down, which was fun and a good way to break up what could be "yet another" action sequence. After seeing the commercials over-and-over again, I mentioned that the shots of them running through a forest while cannons are being fired was probably the centerpiece of the film, and it was. Visually the scene is pretty spectacular, though a bit cluttered. But the whole movie is pretty frenetic, and it holds together mostly because of the witty banter and snark between the two leads. Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law are hella fun to watch, and perhaps the best reason to watch these films.

Oh, and how much do I love Noomi Rapace in this film? Soooo much. Much more watchable than Rachel McAdams, who grated on me for reasons I cannot quite place. She was just the right amount of competent, which is to say she wasn't screaming helplessly nor was she some unrealistic superwoman. I like my girl power, but sometimes it crosses the point from empowering to precocious and annoying. Even Watson's wife was pretty great, because even though she was a total NPC, she didn't stand in a corner and scream, she made her rolls and then exited the story.

Overall it was a fun romp, sold mostly through Robert Downey Jr.'s quirkiness, which seems to be his shtick now (pretty much the entire reason to watch Iron Man), but hey, I don't think my time was wasted.

I finished A Dance With Dragons last week and I am not thrilled about it, mostly because I don't have more books to read and it will be years until the next installment, which is awful considering the number of cliffhangers in it. I don't feel like the previous books left this much hanging, but I'm not sure if that's because I was able to pick up the next installment right away, or because the loose threads weren't so incomplete. I have this impression that in previous books, a lot of plots came to natural breaks, where they weren't finished but they settled enough to hold you until the next book.

( Some thoughts, behind a SPOILER cut )

You know, I really don't like The Princess Bride? The movie, that is. I happen to really like the book, and when I finally saw the movie it was just a disappointment. Everyone talks about how amazing the movie is, and I saw it, and I guess they hyped it up too much, because I watched it and it was like, "That's it? That was so... corny. And it lacks the charm and deftness of the original text!" I could see how some people could like it, but I don't really think it's all that. I'm thinking I need to re-watch it, it's been almost 10 years since I saw it, so maybe time will temper my disappointment. Or re-affirm my beliefs that it's not all that and y'all are crazy.