posted 2009/07/04 at 20:46
When I said that I wanted the Red Wings to exit the playoffs early, I should have known that the universe would take that as a sign to get the Wings all the way to game seven of the Stanley Cup Finals, and then to have them lose in a real heartbreaker. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at it, the universe threw a whole bunch of bad stuff at me right before then, so the Wings' loss really didn't affect me that much. That being said, between the way the NHL is going as a whole, and the Red Wings are going in particular, my enthusiasm for the Red Wings is just diminishing more and more. There was a time when I could craft my schedule around Red Wings games (and Hockey Night in Canada), but it feels like that time has passed now. My interest in sports has been diminshing a lot these past few years, but now I can barely be bothered to glance at the previous night's Tigers score.
This isn't true with just sports, either. Over the past couple of weeks I downloaded a lot of games to my Wii using the Wii Points I got for my birthday earlier this year, and I just can't seem to be bothered to play them much at all. Even the sequel to Final Fantasy IV -- which remained my favourite game ever even after I played Final Fantasy VII for a while, and the first video game to ever make me cry -- has gone mostly unplayed for several days, even though I've had next to no responsibilities over this holiday weekend, and plenty of time to play video games. The number of video games I've bought but never even put in my systems to test out is growing to truly appalling levels, and I've even gone so far as to buy games for systems I don't own yet. It feels like my buying habits have yet to catch up with the changes in my life that have seen things like sports and video games -- and yes, as much as I hate to say it, this blog -- to the wayside.
Unfortunately I can't talk too much about the changes in my life recently, but suffice it to say that for the first time since I was in school, I actually have a social life. I feel like I'm making stronger bonds with people than I have in a long time, too, and I'm getting the opportunity to figure out some things about myself that I never knew before. Given how I am about self-knowledge, you can imagine what a cool thing this is for me. I can't deny being kind of fearful, though, given how I've messed up situations like this in the past. I finally get a nice, long break from teaching after this month is over, and I'm hoping to use the next couple of months here to try to reintegrate things into my life that I've let slip for a while now. That should mean more blog entries, but it won't, for example, mean paying more attention to sports. This blog still serves as an important outlet for me and a way of connecting with people; I just don't feel that paying close attention to sports is doing me much good any longer.
Labels: hockey, personal, sports, videogames
posted 2009/05/12 at 16:32
After getting my Wii last autumn, I played it a fair bit, especially after I got Wii Fit for it. (Like with my dance games, though, I really don't think of Wii Fit as "playing a video game" because for me it's exercise.) As much as I don't like using my Gamecube controller to play Virtual Console games, there's no denying that the downloadable games were one of the main selling points of the system to me. I've bought more than a handful of Virtual Console and WiiWare games, whereas apart from Wii Fit, the only packaged game I've bought for my Wii so far is Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Not only are the downloadable games a lot less expensive, but they've been a lot more fun for me as well.
Unfortunately, video gaming just isn't as enjoyable for me as it once was. I hardly played any video games at all from February through April -- this included breaking my use of Wii Fit, much to my chagrin -- and my systems are, quite literally, collecting dust in a corner of my room right now. After ending this past semester, though, I fired my Wii back up and downloaded a few new games, most notable Dr. Mario Online Rx. Dr. Mario wasn't exactly my favourite puzzle game when I was younger, but it was definitely up there. I've really gotten back into it -- I've had some games go close to two hours long -- but at the same time I've tried playing online, and I keep getting slaughtered. (Worse yet, when I am about to win games, quite often my opponents disconnect, rendering the game a draw.) I know that I should expect that my video game performance should degrade as I play games less and less -- I've blogged about this before -- but for some reason there's still a part of me that feels sad, and sometimes gets irritated, over this fact. Even if video games don't matter that much to me any longer, it still bothers me that I'm not that good at them. (Not that I was ever in any contention to be a video game champion in my prime, but at least I was a lot better then.)
What I've found myself doing lately is gravitating towards videos of people playing video games on YouTube. In addition to just watching people play through the games, I've become fascinated by tool-assisted speedruns, or TASes, where players literally slow the game down frame-by-frame and exploit every bug in the game to run through a game at superhuman speed; they're quite astonishing when replayed back at "normal" speed. I've also enjoyed videos where the players add their own commentary, although, like so many other things, Canada seems to have cornered the market on quality in this regard, with Proton Jon and Azura being the two who entertain me the most.
At the same time, though, the fact that I've been watching people play video games more than play them myself makes me wonder about how I've changed these past few years. Although I still play video games, it seems that by focusing more on watching these videos, in a way I'm kind of saying to myself that my video game-playing days are over, and video gaming is something more for "other people" to do now. Granted, I have much more serious things to worry about than video games now, but it wouldn't be that hard for me to make more time for video games if I wanted to. I don't want to, though. I've found many other things I'd rather do than play video games, and while some of them are quite enjoyable (stop snickering), most of them aren't as meaningful to me and my past as video games are. It seems like everywhere I look, I find more evidence of how I'm changing as a person, and although I know that change is a huge part of life, I still want to fight it, especially as I'm watching the trees I played on in my childhood be cut down day by day right now. I guess it's only natural that under these circumstances, I'm pining for other things from my childhood right now.
Labels: internet, videogames
posted 2009/04/26 at 20:36
Among the other things that have been put on the back burner of my life lately is video games; after treating myself to a Wii after slogging through that miasma of an election cycle, I pretty much let it collect dust from early February until this past weekend. I'm finishing up my "weekend off" where I didn't have any real work to do for teaching; tomorrow my classes end and I get final portfolios, and of course those will keep me occupied for the next week as I get final grades for the semester calculated. Since I had a few days off here, I busted the Wii out, nought a couple of new Virtual Console games (I don't understand how my gaming skills on so many other games can die so easily, but for some games, like Super Mario World, it's like I never stopped playing them), and tried to decompress. As with sports, however, I feel like video gaming may be something that's becoming much less important in my life, as I have other things to do that I feel are of more importance and are more fun to do.
(Of course, when I say "video gaming," I'm not counting dance games, which for me are about exercise. To that end, this past month I finished collecting and assembling all of the items for a PC-based setup, which means that now I can add the songs I want -- if I want to play Björk and Tori Amos songs now, all I have to do is rip the tracks and make stepcharts for them -- and I don't have to deal with the deficiencies in all the home versions of the arcade games I'd been collecting for so long. I haven't had a chance to use this setup as much as I'd like lately -- I've been busy, and the weather and other factors haven't been cooperating -- but it's finally rekindled my passion for that, so I hope I can get back on my diet soon and start taking all of this weight off.)
I guess that as fun as the Wii is, though, I'm still just fascinated by the general design of it. I'm not the Japanophile I once was, but there's still something about the general aesthetic of some Japanese goods that appeals to me. Too often, Japanese video game stuff that has come here has been "Americanized" and, I feel, made worse; I'm specifically thinking about the redesign that the Super NES went through from its Japanese roots. The Anerican Wii's menu retains the soft curves and somewhat ethereal background noises of its Japanese counterpart, though, and I really appreciate that. I understand that this is probably a small thing for most people, but honestly, if I'd had to put up with generic nu-rock every time I turned my Wii on, I don't think I'd be half as likely to play it. The same holds true for the design of the various channels; there's something distinctively Japanese about them, and not only do I find it more soothing than the kinds of menus that American designers develop, but it's a nice change of pace from what I'm used to on my PC and my other video game consoles.
When I first got Wii Fit, I was especially pleased with the voice that's used during the body test. I've always been fascinated at how differently female Japanese voices sound compared to female American voices -- something I've attributed to various factors, such as lower rates of female smoking in Japan and different cultural expectations -- and the difference means a lot to me. I guess this may be due to me getting into anime in the mid-90s, back when the English dubs that were being done were mostly horrible. Anyway, I really like that Nintendo put a similar voice in Wii Fit (although the non-body test voices are definitely more American), and I like that it keeps with the Japanese aesthetic of the game's visuals.
Labels: videogames
posted 2008/12/07 at 21:14
I've said often that while I'm okay reading horror novels -- it's been about eight years now since I was turned on to Poppy Z. Brite -- I don't care to watch horror films. I grew up in the age of the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises, and even at an age where I was only concerned about whether or not I liked a film and had barely any conceptions about what made a "good film" and a "bad film," there was still something I could grasp that let me knew that these films were not good films. Then again, I've never been much of a film person to start with -- that age was also the age of the first home video game consoles and personal computers, so I've always desired more interaction with my entertainment -- but I seemed to go out of my way to avoid horror films in my youth. To this day, even if I need to know something about a horror film (usually because one of my students references it), I usually check out the plot summaries on Wikipedia. On rare occasions, though, I've checked out YouTube clips, and I've regretted it every time I've done so. I'd heard that they'd upped the gore content in recent years, but lately it's just become, pun intended, overkill.
However, several weeks ago I found myself going onto YouTube to watch videos of all the fatalities in the Mortal Kombat games. I played Mortal Kombat a fair amount a dozen years ago; I really got into Street Fighter II, so that led me to try Mortal Kombat out, and Mortal Kombat II was the only recent arcade game they had in the Student Union building at Antioch while I was going there. I'd stopped playing before the series went 3-D, though, so I had several games' worth of fatalities to watch. Surprisingly I found myself cringing a lot at the fatalities from the more recent games, even though I think the fatalities from the old 2-D games were a lot more imaginative. I didn't have problems looking at those old fatalities, either. I'm trying to figure out why I would have such varying reactions to these displays of blood and gore; I don't think it's the three-dimensional aspect of the new fatalities that is getting to me, especially since the first 3-D Mortal Kombat games had fighters that looked less realistic than the ones in the later 2-D games. Whatever the case, I hardly had an inclination to pick up another Mortal Kombat game -- I don't even follow Street Fighter any longer -- and watching the new fatalities has soured me to the idea even more.
That being said, I've seen many television commercials for Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe lately, even on CBC. I was a Marvel Comics reader growing up, so having DC characters in there doesn't exactly want to make me pick up the game. Anyway, I saw the fatalities and "heroic brutalities" on YouTube, so I'm guessing that I've seen all there really is to see about the game. There are two questions I have that are bugging me, though. First of all, how can anyone kill Superman with the usual range of fatalities since, you know, he's invincible and stuff. Secondly, one of the commercials I saw featured the Joker playing the old joybuzzer prank on Raiden. Would someone care to explain to me how, exactly, the God of Thunder is supposed to get hurt by a shock like that? Yes, I know that in all the other games you can play two Raidens against one another and they can each be hurt by the other's electric blasts, but still, the Joker/Raiden thing is kind of counterintuitive, and it's definitely not the kind of thing I think Midway should put into a commercial just because of the strained logic involved in trying to explain it.
Labels: videogames
posted 2008/11/28 at 16:18
Yes, a Wii (system code 1071 6479 4037 0105). I couldn't help myself, what can I say? I also picked up Wii Fit (which I'd had the chance to play recently) and Super Smash Bros. Brawl (friend code 1075 4346 0459). I'll try to keep posting here every once in a while, honest. I have to post more of those product links to convince you to buy stuff off of my Amazon.com affiliate account this shopping season. Anyway, it's Jon Stewart's birthday, and here it is, your moment of zen, in the form of the friday5.org Friday Five.
1. What’s a profession you believe to be overpaid?
Professional athletes. I don't mean the trainers and associated staff; I just mean the ones who get tens of millions of dollars every year to go out on the field or the court or the rink or the diamond and still find things to whine about.
2. Who’s a musician you believe to be overrated?
Seriously, I want to go back to playing my Wii; don't make me spend thirty minutes here listing all of them. Let's just go with Axl Rose here because he's back in the press and I really, really never liked him.
3. What in your life could stand to be overhauled?
My room, because I've just been getting so many books and other things that there's not much room for me any longer. (No jokes about my weight, darn it.)
4. What’s something interesting you recently overheard?
I overhear interesting things from my students all the time, but you wouldn't understand them if you didn't live in this part of the country, and I'm sure many of them could lead to libel suits, so I'm taking a pass on this one.
5. Who is the most overextended person you know?
Me. I've got so many things going on right now it's not funny; getting that Wii might have been the best thing to do to keep me sane here. On that note, see you.
Labels: fridayfive, videogames
posted 2008/07/09 at 23:50
This past weekend I picked up a CD/DVD rack from Best Buy. Mind you, I haven't exactly been buying that many CDs or DVDs (or even video games) lately, but I have bought so many books that I needed to repurpose one of my DVD towers for books. I put the storage rack together over the weekend, and it was a huge hassle because the directions weren't all that clear; I had to put several of the supports on three different times before I got them assembled in the correct order. It was only after I got the storage rack put together that the real fun began, though, because I had to move my big heavy bookcase about six feet to make room for the new storage rack. This required unloading the whole bookcase first, moving all the books into my sister and brother-in-law's old bedroom, and then moving the bookcase and loading it right back up. After that, I was finally able to move the new rack in here and get it fully loaded up, something I didn't manage to finish until late this afternoon. I had some more rearranging to do after that, and I still have a large pile on unsorted papers and other items in front of my television, but for now I finally have all my media organized the way I want it, and I have room for it to grow once more.
My big bookcase, which had been behind me at my workstation here, is now just off to my right, and I literally had less than an inch of space to fit it in between the wall and the windowsill, but it's here now. The shelves, particularly the top ones, are starting to sag, and I know that I've probably got twice as much weight on those shelves than what they're rated for, but I still want to keep this bookcase if I possibly can. Not only is it a good fit, but it's made by Sauder, and Sauder is one of the few local companies that produces stuff that I like. (I don't know if Sauder products are marketed outside of the Toledo area, but they make good-quality, inexpensive furniture and storage solutions.) I'm starting to have so many "big" books, though, that I may eventually need to buy a second big bookcase to house them, and I don't have the space for a second bookcase in this room. I could always put an extra bookcase in the loft or the vacant bedroom, but I don't feel comfortable having my books and other stuff in another room like that.
The other big development that came from this most recent rearrangement of my stuff is that I've finally given up on finding spare plastic cases for my old Nintendo games, and I'm just shelving the cartridges by themselves. (I have a small "library" of manuals in the new storage unit.) I had tried forever to find those old clear plastic cases like they used to put the games in at video rental places, because I thought they looked good and did a better job of protecting games than the sleeves Nintendo packaged the games in. Let's face facts, though; what kind of luck was I going to have trying to find standard-issue plastic cases for NES games in 2008? Finding these empty cases was hardly my life's work for the past few years, but it was something I kept trying every so often for the past several years. Rather than continuing to fight that battle, I just took the games out of the plastic cases, and now they're by themselves on my new storage rack (and taking up a lot less space, too). I guess now I just need to find someone else desperate for these old plastic cases and see how much money I can get for them.
Labels: books, dvds, personal, toledo, videogames
posted 2008/05/25 at 20:09
Southwyck mall to close June 30 (toledoblade.com)
It's amazing how every little detail of something like Dad's death seemed to add just that much more pain to the ordeal. When I was young, Dad always took me out to a bunch of places on Saturday morning and afternoon, as soon as my morning cartoons ended. He called it "Adventures," and in retrospect he was probably doing Mom a favour by getting me out of the house for a while, but I probably did more bonding with Dad during Adventures than I did with anything else we did together. We'd get lunch together, go to the arcade together, and see a lot of stores at the mall. When I say mall here, though, I'm not referring to Southwyck; I'm referring to Franklin Park Mall, the mall closest to our house, and the only major mall still left in Toledo. (Mind you, it's now called "Westfield Shoppingtowne Franklin Park Mall" and barely bares any resemblance to the mall I remember as a kid. To me, that mall died a long time ago.)
My first memory of going to a mall, though, is going to Southwyck. There are a few things I remember about going to Southwyck as a child. First of all, they had a lot of small water fountains throughout the mall, all of which had different coloured lights in the fall that projected up and made all the water these soft, translucent colours that I thought were some of the prettiest things I'd ever seen. Secondly, in the middle of the mall -- it was one of those malls with several "spokes" full of stores around a central location -- they had the only full-size merry-go-round I've ever ridden on (the miniature merry-go-round they used to have in front of K-Mart doesn't count), and a kind of small pit that sloped gently and seemed, to my young mind, like a natural performing venue, a theatre-in-the-round sort of thing. Third, Southwyck had the first "arcade" I ever went to, a place called Old Towne that had the kind of machines that you used to associate with arcades before the Pac-Man era.
I can only remember going there a few times when I was young, but I went there a lot when I was a teenager. The mall's a fairly short walk from the private school I went to for fourth through twelfth grades, and since I usually stayed after school to use the computer lab (the only computers we had at home at that point were old TRS-80s), if I had some extra time before my parents got off of work to come pick me up, I'd walk over to Southwyck. Old Towne was long gone by that point, but our local arcade chain, Red Baron, had set up shop there, and I was in the middle of my Street Fighter II phase around this time, so I played that an awful lot. My first post-high school crush worked at the Waldenbooks over there as well, so that just gave me more reason to go over.
Southwyck has been ailing for a long, long time, and there had been a lot of talk about doing something new with the property for a long time. A few years ago a developer opened a new shopping complex down in Perrysburg called Levis Commons that, surprisingly, is a pretty awesome place. (Aside from the Books-A-Million and East of Chicago over there, the stores are painfully upscale, though.) The thing is, Southwyck is not in a very good part of town, and even if they raze Southwyck down to the ground and construct something truly grand in its place, that's not going to change that it's surrounded by a lot of low-end businesses in crumbling buildings on moldering streets. I'm fairly certain that someone will try to do something to "fix up" that part of town -- we're in about the tenth attempt to "revitalize" downtown Toledo in my lifetime -- but Southwyck shuttering feels to me like the one true note of confirmation that this part of Toledo is now dead.
Labels: personal, toledo, videogames
posted 2008/03/22 at 20:41
Some of my birthday gifts have still yet to arrive -- including a couple of CDs I bought for myself -- but among the things I got this past Tuesday were Gandhi's autobiography (I don't know how I didn't pick it up sooner), Dr. Strangelove (ditto), an Oh My Goddess! manga (I am way behind on those), and most importantly of all, I am finally in possession of a Guitar Hero game, namely Guitar Hero III for PS2. However, not only have I had next to no time to play Guitar Hero since getting it (between teaching and bsiness relating to Dad's death I'm still swamped here), but the bundled guitar isn't working that well. It's one of the new wireless models that runs on Bluetooth, and the receiver only picks up the guitar if I hold the guitar about six inches from the receiver and keep the guitar facing at just the right angle. It's playable this way, but it's definitely a huge pain.
When I get paid next week, I'm going to head over to Best Buy and pick up a wired guitar. In a way I can understand the huge push towards making all video game controllers wireless, but at the same time these problems I'm having with my Guitar Hero controller just seem to highlight for me the problems with wireless-only options. (This is just one of the many reasons why I'm in no rush to pick up a PS3.) In addition to the problems I have with the receiver (and given how poor my cell phone reception is at the house I'm wondering if we're in some kind of dead spot here), I don't like the thought of having to keep throwing AA batteries into the controller just to keep using it. Honestly, having a cord run from my guitar controller to my console isn't that much of a pain, especially considering how much I'll be likely to save on batteries that way. I don't like that I'm going to be stuck buying an off-brand guitar controller here, though; why can't Activision continue to sell and support their old wired models?
I only made the wireless mistake once, a long, long time ago. Back when attachments came out for the NES for plugging four controllers into the system at once, Nintendo offered two models, a wired adapter (the Four Score) and a wireless one (the Satellite). This was back when Mom was buying me most of my video game stuff, and even though the Satellite cost ten bucks more, I asked for it thinking that the ability to move the adapter around my bedroom would be a major convenience at some point. Ignoring the fact that I think I only ever had more than two people playing my NES at one point in my whole life, the Satellite went through a lot of big, expensive batteries (I think 6 C batteries) in record time. The worst part was that I continued to use the Satellite for a long time, even for single-player games, just because I thought it was convenient, but it was really just a waste of batteries. (It was also a huge pain when the Satellite ran out of power in the middle of a game and I had to frantically plug and unplug the Satellite and my controller just to pause a game down to replace the batteries.) I suppose one of the good things about being such a loner is that I don't have to worry about picking up multiplayer adapters any longer, so I don't have to deal with these problems.
Labels: personal, videogames
posted 2007/11/20 at 23:18
With little more than forty-eight hours to go here before Black Friday and with the holiday shopping season more or less kicked off already, I figure it's time to make my annual plea for you all to either buy me stuff or help me buy stuff for myself, particularly now that my student loan repayments are eating up so much of my money. As I've done every year since I launched the .org, I strongly request that those of you who plan to shop at Amazon.com do so through my Amazon.com affiliate link (also below the Google ads on the .org's pages) so that I get a small percentage of whatever you buy back in store credit. In addition, my Amazon.com wishlist (also in the right-hand bar on the .org's pages) is full of stuff I'd really, really like, so if you're feeling a little generous this season, please shoot something my way. I'm going to be nice and whiny about how I don't have money to buy all this stuff for myself for the next few weeks, believe me.
That being said, I will have a bit of money in my pocket here later this week, and I'm not all that sure just how I will spend it. There is a small chance that I might wind up being one of the lucky people to pick up a Wii for eighty bucks thanks to Amazon.com's "Customers Vote" promotion (check their homepage for details). I have to admit, I've said before that I wasn't that interested in the Wii, but a lot of that had to do with the Wii's price and the fact that it's so difficult to get your hands on one, even all this time after the machine's release. Now that I've started to think about getting one, though, I can kind of see myself paying full price for it at some point (read: once I have more money) somewhere down the line. See, if I'd just kept thinking that the current generation of video game systems wasn't for me, I wouldn't be thinking like this, but the moment I let myself think for even a second about getting a Wii signaled the point of no return. Now I'm probably going to keep thinking about getting a Wii here until I finally get one, whenever that may be.
There is one other possibility that might stop me from just placing another huge book order with Amazon. According to a post I saw on one of the bulletin boards I visit, Circuit City is going to be offering Guitar Hero II bundles on Black Friday for sixty bucks. Given my love of music and music games, I'm kind of surprised that I haven't bought Guitar Hero sooner, although given the additional health benefits of playing DDR and ITG I don't think I can be blamed for focusing on them. Again, the price was probably a bit of a barrier in terms of me starting to get into Guitar Hero sooner (I've played it in store displays and certainly enjoyed it), but for this price, and given that I don't feel a particular need to get Guitar Hero III (since it'll probably take me a while to get really good anyway), but if I can pick up a bundle for sixty bucks, I think it'll be worth it for me. Then again, do I really want to go out for any reason, let alone shopping, on Black Friday? I'll have to think about that these next couple of days.
Labels: shopping, videogames
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