Well, we didn't make our goal of seven hours, but it's become clear, I think, that it's a futile effort. We did, however, beat least year's time and cleared the game, total completion run, in 7 hours and 30 minutes exactly!
And we beat Lavos before he made a single timeshift!
Okay, not really burgers per se, but I wanted to name the post after a video game.
Below the fold are pictures of our glorious feast of Arby melts. This is only 25 of the original 30 we bought, because we got hungry before the camera was finished charging.
Click to embiggen the deliciousness.
Mmm...And then tomorrow we're making the Bacon Explosion, and Wednesday it's to Hooters for all you can eat buffalo wings. What a week.
We're knee deep in Chrono Trigger at the moment. More on that when we get our final time.
Praise the Gods of Wintereenmas!
Nothing too eventful, so far, owing partially to Magus working yesterday and today, which meant there wasn't much gaming to be had. Also, a good friend visited from out of town yesterday, so we got some dinner and watched Yojimbo, which was awesome.
We've played some 2-player House of the Dead on the Wii. Today Magus went hog-wild in Assassin's creed, killing everyone he came into contact with just to see what would happen. He claims that it's actually far easier that way than trying to be stealthy.
Today, I played through the first level of Donkey Kong Country 2, which I found the other day at the Goodwill Store fore $2.99. Magus played some Trauma Center: Second Opinion. I wore myself out on Okami, which is fucking amazing. I beat Oroshi and entered the big city before breaking to eat dinner and do some reading for class tomorrow.
Tomorrow: Chrono Trigger speedrun!
Sadly, there will be no six-foot sub.
Those fuckers cost, at minimum around here, $72. I can get six one-foot subs for less than half that. What happened to buying in bulk?
So this year, like last year, we're back to 50 Arby melts and a shitload of pop. Though probably not a shitload of pop, actually. We stopped regularly buying pop when we started lifting weights in 2007, and last year at WEmas, we discovered that a shitload of pop makes us feel sick. So probably Gatorade G2 or something.
Now, for the games. Ahem.
Of course, Chrono Trigger, as mentioned before.
Trauma Center: Second Opinion and Trauma Center: New Blood on the Wii
A bit of Twilight Princess on the Wii
Secret of Evermore on the Super Nintendo
Street Fighter Alpha 2 and Killer Instinct on the Super Nintendo
Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii
Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance on the PS2
House of the Dead 2 & 3 on the Wii
And, for some strange reason, Magus wants to play Shadow of the Colossus on the PS2, a game that I consider one of the most overrated pieces of shit ever produced. He wants to replay the first couple of colossi, the ones that were fun before we realized that the game was awful and disgustingly frustrating (intentionally so; they purposely made the horse not do what you told it, because it was apparently more "relistic"). But it's preeeeety!
I have a pile of games to trade into the Game Xchange so I can get credit for a new Wiimote; House of the Dead would be much less fun single player.
So far, that's the tentative plan. I want to say there are games in the to-play pile that I forgot about, but I can always mention them later.
Happy Wintereenmas to all!
Despite my very public and very negative feelings towards the holiday's creator, Tim "I'm A Giant Douche" Buckley, I still find time every year to celebrate Wintereenmas. And why not? It's an excuse to dress up in a ridiculous costume, take a week off work, and play video games from dawn until dusk.
Last year was quite a celebration. We found an Arby's coupon for "99 cent Arby melts - NO LIMIT!" so we decided to test out truth in advertising. Rather surprisingly, not only were they not annoyed at our order of fifty Arby melts; they were ecstatic. They never get that much business, apparently. We used to have pictures of the ziggurat we built with them, but I think they're on my old hard drive that I haven't bothered to hook back up yet. I hope they are.
Anyway, herein I'll partially lay out our tentative agenda for this year.
First thing's first: we found another coupon for no limit 99 cent Arby melts. So that's good. We also have a coupon for Subway where if you buy a six-foot sub, you get 36 cookies for free. That's not a bad deal, since we'd be buying that many cookies anyway, and it means we can have some variety between our six-foot sub and our unlimited Arby melts. So that's our food situation, as it stands.
Games-wise, our first order of business is our annual speedrun of Chrono Trigger. Now, this isn't any normal kind of speedrun. It's not "Fight Lavos in the right transporter with only Crono and Marle." Nor is it "Go through as fast as humanly possible by skipping all the dialogue." No, this is a speedrun based on game enjoyment and personal perfection. We read every word of dialogue and complete every inch of the game, because it is simply one of our favorite games of all time. The test is basically to see how well we have the game memorized so that the actual gameplay is down to a very strict routine. The only parts that continue to fuck us up are forgetting who has the Jerky and the battle with Son of Sun, which is based on a roulette structure, so it's pretty much out of our hands anyway.
Last year we finished in 7 hours, 47 minutes. This year we're going to shoot for 7. That might be a bit low, but you have to have something to work towards. 8 hours was our old goal, and we weren't sure we'd ever make it, but we did, and then some.
Other than CT, we tend to avoid RPGs during WEmas, because they're simply too time consuming. If we dedicated ourselves to an RPG, it would take the whole week and leave no time for other games. Though last year we did tear through Super Mario RPG, but it's neither long nor hard.
It's hard, sitting here in my office at work, to say what else we'll play, since I'm not looking at the game library at the moment. There might be a fighting game tournament, either Street Fighter Alpha 2 or Killer Instinct, probably a Mario game of some sort...I've had a hankering to replay Kingdom Hearts II for some reason, but that would take too long. Same for Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. Any of those might see a bit of playtime, though. Just not a whole lot.
If I can get my NES working again, that opens up a world of possibilities. A few weeks ago I suggested a Duck Hunt tournament, but that was before I knew the NES was on the fritz. And it's not just the games; it gives me the same flashing blue screen no matter what game I put in. And no, I haven't blown on them. That only makes things worse.
We've been saying for a while now that we wanted to buy a second wiimote (yes, we still only have the one) and House of the Dead 2&3, so that's a possibility.
Anyhow, when it's all figured out, I'll tell you about it. I'll also try to make a short post every night with something interesting about that day's events. When I get a picture of myself in the King of Wintereenmas ensemble, I'll probably post that, too. I'd use the old one, except I was much fatter back then, so it couldn't hurt to take a new one.
Happy Wintereenmas to all!
Yesterday I ran by the used game store and, as luck would have it, they had a copy of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX for the Game Boy Color. My copy of that disappeared years ago and I have no idea what happened to it. I've been looking for a replacement ever since. Even better, it was only $9.99.
(Side note: is it just me, or do some used game stores tend to misjudge prices both ways? I've seen Link's Awakening for upwards of $20 elsewhere and given the popularity of the game and the difficulty in finding used GB or GBC games, I'd figure it was worth about that much. On the other side, you can't seriously have a display case with a dozen copies of Final Fantasy VII in it and expect me to pay $50 for it.)
I dig out my old GBA SP (long abbreviations are amusing; a friend and I once laughed when I bought "The Saga or Goku" or something on the GBA in high school because it meant I had a DBZ RPG for the GBA SP), charged it up, and plugged LA into the slot this morning. What resulted was something I've experienced with other games, but rarely so acutely.
Basically, here's a game I haven't played at all in close to ten years, but the whole thing still lives in my head. Some years I forget my girlfriend's birthday, but I can play LA with my eyes closed. At first, things were muzzy in my memory, but after about ten minutes in, it all came flooding back. "Dig here for a secret seashell." "Walk around back of the shopkeeper to steal items."
I can even remember a good chunk of the trading sequence; Yoshi Doll-->Ribbon-->Dog Food-->Banana-->Stick-->Honeycomb. At some point later, you trade food for a flower, a flower for a letter, give the letter to Mr. Write and...then it goes fuzzy again. But it'll come back. It's all coming back. I imagine I'll have trouble with the 7th dungeon, but then I always had trouble with the seventh dungeon. Never once did I get through it without quite a lot of frustration. Once I somehow found a glitch that caused a mid-boss key drop to redrop every time I reentered the room; after a while, it was keeping track of my keys in hexadecimal and dungeons 7 and 8 were cakewalks.
It's weird how games I played ad nauseam as a kid become almost reflexive even after such long spans of time. My freshman year of college, I visited someone at another school and we popped Super Mario Brothers 3 into her NES. She was terrible at it, as she had never owned an NES as a kid, so she was content to watch me play while we talked. I remember beginning World 1, and then I remember looking at the screen at some point during World 4 and saying "When did I get here?" I honestly have no memory of the intervening levels; I was on autopilot the whole time. What I know I know because I was told: "You didn't warp, and you didn't lose a single life."
Other games on which I operate similarly: Super Mario World, Donkey Kong Country, Final Fantasy VII (though I still need the strategy guide for chocobo breeding and some steals and enemy skills), Chrono Trigger (going for seven hours in this year's speed completion run!), Super Mario RPG, Metroid II and Super Metroid, and Mega Man X.
It's no coincidence that they're all games I played during middle school and before. These days I simply don't have the patience to play a game until it's ingrained into my mind so thoroughly. It's something I both miss and don't miss.
On the one hand, I got so much more time out of games when I'd play them like that. It came from a number of factors: an abundance of free time and an obsessive need to play until everything in a game was second nature were definitely factors. I'd put a lot of it down to a lack of metagame awareness, though. These days I can tear through many games because I've played enough to understand how the developers have structured them, and move forward at an accelerated pace. Games don't require nearly as much random wandering and trial-and-error as they used to for me because I'm just plain familiar with the standard tropes and design decisions. Thus I spend less time in beating them, and they don't get imprinted on my mind because of it.
Take Twilight Princess. Many reviews claimed that it was a 70-hour game, even before you took into account pieces of heart and the other various sidequests. I beat it in just over 30, during which time I completed that 100-level pit-dungeon thing, beat a few of the mini-games, collected a lot of the shiny bugs, even a few extra pieces of heart, and spent loads of time trying to figure out the less-than-intuitive controls for fishing. Assuming the reviewers were not padding the game's length for some reason, I assume that I'm simply more familiar with Zelda tropes than they are and so nothing really hung me up too bad. Looking back at it, I really don't remember too much of the game, except that I enjoyed it thoroughly, which probably means I should go back and replay it sometime soon. I have three weeks off here in a month or so; sounds like a plan.
So part of me really misses the sense of pure fun and lack of behind-the-curtain knowledge I had that led me to play games so much (and enjoy them all the while) as a kid. These days I only do that with the big open-ended games by Bethesda, and even then only because I can play them so differently each time.
On the other hand, that kind of obsessiveness caused me to miss out on a lot of games because I was too busy playing others. To this day I'm still catching up on a few PSX games I missed while I was distracted by the various Final Fantasies. That's really not a huge deal, though, because I usually had fun playing the games I was playing, and that is, after all, the whole point. I can just pick up the games I missed later on and have fun with them then. It helps that these days I'm rarely really interested in more than 2 or 3 new launches a year. I have my whole life to catch up.
One thing I cannot excuse, though, and that I don't miss at all, was the sheer amount of frustration such obsessiveness often caused. I got every single star in Super Mario 64 when I was 12 or 13. It is an achievement I am quite proud of, but the long days and nights spent dying over and over and over until my blood pressure was through the roof and I was ready to throw my controller into the screen are nights I don't miss. It's those nights that made me decide not to go for the completion in Super Mario Galaxy; ray surfing was simply too awful and frustrating, as was that stand-on-the-ball-and-roll-it thing. I got the stars I had fun getting. I only did a couple of the time trials, but eschewed the rest because I'm really not interested in them. I'm looking forward to Mirror's Edge PC for the ability to replay segments of the game and race against my own personal best. That kind of trial I still really dig. It's one of the reasons I enjoy the Trauma Center games so much. But I really don't give a shit about competition, much less necessary competition against an arbitrarily fast, AI-controlled character. I just don't have any fun with that at all.
I've said a hundred times before how little time I have for multiplayer games. I think this is a function of that. I'm honestly not interested in competition when playing games. I'm interested in fun and palpable achievement. I want to have a good time and I want to feel like I'm going somewhere (note to Xbox obsessives: Achievements, while a good idea in principle, are not what I'm talking about; they're far too often related to arbitrary goals and are generally used solely for metagame competition and Live e-penis waving).
I honestly can't think of a single game in the last couple of generations that I have memorized so thoroughly that I could play it on autopilot. Part of me worries that I'm simply not having enough fun playing most of my games; that I'm playing them out of a misguided sense of necessity rather than because I'm having a good time. And I think that's partially true; my metagame awareness certainly lessens my fun factor at least a bit. But generally, when a game stops being fun, I just stop playing it. I've stopped playing a lot of games in recent years, and I'm not sure if that's me or a problem endemic to modern game design. In "Wind Waker," it certainly wasn't me; rupee-grinding to find the plot coupons is just plain bad design.
Anyway, I'm putting all of this out there mainly to see if anyone else has had similar experiences. Any games that set your brain on auto-pilot? What are they? Any thoughts on the rest of what I've said?
Years ago when I was a teenager (way back in the last century when the internet was powered by steam), the only access I had to the net was through my parents' AOL account. My time was spent IMing with friends, trolling Christian chatrooms and trying to convince them that Spam was the One True God (seriously), and hanging out at Antagonist, Inc.
For those of my five readers who don't know (probably all of you), Antagonist (known to its adherents as ANT) was AOL's resident video game community. And it was glorious.
ANT was the place to be for anyone who really dug games. Before anyone gave a shit about IGN, before Gamespot was a blip on the radar, there was ANT. ANT was centered around two things: a great love of video games, and a take-no-prisoners attitude towards those who disagreed with you. It was all in good fun, with a healthy dose of irony most of the time, but still, the flame wars were legendary.
ANT's layout was a parody of military conventions, kind of a general web-based satire of the console wars. Each game platform had its own "fortress," and they all played like they were mortal enemies. None moreso, however, than the N64 fort and the PSX fort. The bitter rivalry between those two consoles led to many a chat spam of "PSX SUXX!!!!!" and retaliatory "N64 IS FOR LOSERS!!!!1!!"
Each fort, too, had its "commander." I can't remember if they were actually called that, but there was most definitely a central person who was in charge of each fort. If I remember correctly, ANT Asur had the N64 fort, ANT Camper had the PSX fort, and ANT Caustic had the PC fort. I could be wrong, however, and I don't remember who had the Dreamcast fort at all. That could be because DC SUXORZ.
There were also "bunkers" for smaller platforms: the Game Boy bunker is one that springs to mind.
Thus everyone antagonized everyone else (get it?) and had a good time pretending deep, heartfelt hatred for others. Of course, I'm sure some felt it for real, but overall, it was a lot of goofy fun and a good time was had by all. Hell, there were even anti-ANTs who, for some reason, hated Antagonist and would occasionally rally their troops and mount a flamewar offensive on all of us, at which point the ANTs would put aside their differences and join up against a common enemy.
Membership in ANT was simple: snag a screen name beginning with ANT. Early on (probably sometime in 1996) I claimed ANTMuaddib, owing to my obsession, at the time, with Frank Herbert's Dune. I posted under that handle for years. I twice won the ANT creative writing contest. I pissed off ANT Caustic by promising to make him an Atari T-shirt (this was long before you could find them at every store) and never getting around to it. I cussed out PSX fanboys, because N64 was totally better (eh...hindsight is 20/20). There were tons of us.
What I personally loved so much about ANT was the atmosphere. It felt like a place where people who really loved games got together to talk about them. The writers were on the same level as the rest of us; they were paid employees of Antagonist, Inc, and worked in their offices, but they were basically forum admins who wrote game news and reviews. They seemed to have an honest love of games and, to a one, a great sense of humor. In particular, the precious few episodes of ANT Radio they put together made me laugh my ass off.
But, like I said, it was clear that everyone there loved video games. The writers were big game dorks from way back; they loved games because they had been playing games for as long as there had been games. That's a feeling I don't get from any of the big modern video game communities online; it feels like their writers are people who needed a job and writing about games happened to be one. Maybe they played a game or two in the past, maybe not. Places like IGN, Gamespot, 1UP, and Gamespy feel cold and corporate to me. It's all very professional, and there's a wide separation between the writers and the community (what there is of one). ANT, by comparison, was kind of a homespun bastard child of games and the internet. And it was glorious.
Unfortunately, AOL's market share began to falter with the introduction of DSL and cable internet service, and ANT felt the crunch. Probably less than a year after a major upgrade and overhaul, updates began to dry up. Then the news came that ANT was moving to the web, trying to extricate itself from AOL. Antagonist.com was launched, but updates were slow there, too.
Soon, updates were nonexistent. Before much longer, Keyword: ANT redirected to the general AOL games area. ANT had died, and it had gone out with a whimper rather than the kind of bang befitting its bombastic existence. Its writers scattered to the winds and it became a phantom memory. The granddaddy of modern online video game communities met a slow, bitter defeat and faded away into nothingness.
And all the ANT points I had accumulated from the various lotteries and contests I had won disappeared, and the ANT t-shirt I was saving up for never materialized...
Every once in a while I think about ANT and wonder what happened to everyone. All I can find with the Great Google is a pretty-well defunct Livejournal community, one that hasn't been hit by anyone I remember. I really miss ANT for the gleeful absurdity of its mock military premise, for its humor, and, overall, for its authenticity. Today's review sites just can't live up to it. It was the first and only online community I was ever really a part of; to this day I don't post on forums. Don't really like to. But I did when ANT was live. I have a Gamespot membership, but that's just to access their downloads. I never use it. Gamespot (while it tends to be my preferred news and review site these days) is generally douchey and lame.
Where did everybody go? ANT Camper, who pissed everyone off when he created "radioactive decay" and downgraded Final Fantasy VII's 100% score to 70% after a couple of years? ANT Asur, whose name (pronounced as-you-are) was taken from a Nirvana song, and who kept us hyped even when it was clear the N64 was failing? ANT Caustic, who weathered the giddy highs and cthonic lows of John Romero's Ion Storm?
ANT Nomad?
ANT Johker?
Johnny Law?
Anybody?
So if anyone remembers ANT, leave a short message on this, my little paean to times gone by. If anyone was an ANT, feel free to reminisce, or tell me anything you know. And anyone that didn't know about ANT, well, you missed out on some true greatness, my friends.
ANT Muad'dib, signing out.
