I Am Completely Serious

How I can tell I have played the game too long: I tried to click on the dog to see if he was aggro.

Couldn’t figure out why the mouse wouldn’t go over to him.

(I’m pretty sure this particular dog is Hostile To All Factions. The St. Bernard is Friendly To All Factions, including Dognappers In Trucks, as has been demonstrated twice.)

I have no really specific reason for wanting to kill Regthar Deathgate. It just seems like he might find it a welcome change of pace.

This is the most hilarious thing ever if it’s for real.

Also, I can’t play WoW right now because the zombies keep killing me. And then, when I turn into a zombie, the guards kill me. I do appreciate the scale of the event, but it would’ve been nice if they’d put in some content for lower-level players.

(The one time I got away from the guards in Orgrimmar, I went and retched all over the orphans. Turns out orphans are immune to zombiedom. Oh, come on.)

Lately I have felt upon me the irresistible urge to make a bad decision. This happens to me sometimes, I recognize it. Not knowing what form the decision might take if left to sort itself out, I chose to direct it into something with an already-known impact. I got a World of Warcraft account. I am a level-15 Orc Hunter named Calper on Khaz’Goroth. My pet is a pig, and I have decided that I want a Kodo mount. Accordingly I am going through the low-level Mulgore quests to gain reputation with Thunder Bluff.

I have been sufficiently Orcish the past three days as to injure my right arm. My elbow is doing this thing.

Some Guy In Pokemon Pearl: I am a sailor because I love the Pokemon of the sea! *sends out a Feebas*

Me: Wait-a-second - Feebas is a freshwater fish!

(Feebas is not a freshwater fish, because a) Feebas is a Pokemon, not a fish, and b) Feebas isn’t real.)

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An apparent SEO company named “[chapeau noir] [software facilitating dual-booting of Windows on Mac OS X]” has been spamming me in ways that deliberately reveal who they are. Is this supposed to convince me to purchase their services? I mean, some of the spam looks like this:

Hi, I found your blog on this new directory of WordPress Blogs at [company's url]. I dont know how your blog came up, must have been a typo, i duno. Anyways, I just clicked it and here I am. Your blog looks good. Have a nice day. James.

I cannot properly describe all the ways in which this message fails to inspire me to give you money, ridiculous SEO company.

I’ve just done some Kingdom of Loathing math. Theoretically, if I were to liquefy all my items, I would have 380,597,379 meat. A Mr. Accessory, which presently has a market value of about 4,500,000 meat, costs $10.

So, I have about $840 in video game assets, if there was any way to cash them in.

(A lot of that’s in the form of Items-of-the-Month - the only things I’m missing since June ‘06 are the Travoltan trousers and the yuletide troll chrysalis.)

My main meat-bot script is actually pretty short - it’s only 670 lines, though it spans eight files. Because I use good practice and keep my MMO bots highly modular, you see. I also have about fifteen other, secondary bot-scripts for use in specialized situations, though several of them I think I’ve only ever used once.

People with carpal tunnel should never, ever play The World Ends With You. Also, I need to remember not to play it on days when my anti-consumer rage runs high. You get significant stat bonuses for continually buying and properly coordinating brand-name clothing. You have a cell phone that is subscribed to a service keeping you updated as to what brands you should wear where. On the plus side, the game also allows me to pretend that the miso ramen I ate earlier rendered me more agile.

Also, you can control people’s minds with memes.

DS games, why are you all crazy?

(I wrote this a few days ago but couldn’t get it to post. I’ve now played enough that I know some of my theorizing isn’t totally accurate, but I’m going to go ahead and post it anyway.)

In the game, the holy sword wielded by the King has been cursed. I’m sure the Universal RPG Protagonists consider this a refreshing change from all those other RPGs where the holy sword has been lost, or the holy sword has been broken, or the holy sword has been transformed into a monster you have to fight.*

The-Hero-With-High-HP Serdic goes to The-Wizard-With-Like-No-HP Arios to try and get it un-cursed, and we are treated to this fabulously subtle piece of humor.

Arios: I’m interested in your body.

Serdic: What!?

Arios: When we have a spare moment, may I perform a thorough examination of your body?

Serdic: E-er, that is… Ah yes! You must see this!

Arios: This is the Holy Blade of Bretwalde, isn’t it? I’ve always wanted a good, long look at this.

Come on, Atlus localization team, get on the ball, here. If you’re going to do this joke, you’ve got to say long, hard look. Do I have to do everything around here?

The game’s humor is mostly like this (and the romance stuff is thus far equally unsubtle), but there’s actually some really interesting meta stuff going on in the story. Basically, you get the story from four sources, and all of them have a slightly different view of what’s going on:

1) Narration before stages, which is very serious-sounding stuff about the progress of the noble Prince Serdic and his command of the valiant army of Bretwolde. Third-person omniscient, scrolls across a screen with a weathered map on it, so as to convey the vague impression that we are reading a historical document.

2) Cut-scenes at the beginning and end of battles. Basically, these consist of the characters have little conversations where they tell each other the Latest Big Plot Points, and what the next battle’s going to be about. Town X has been invaded by pirates - go kill them all while preventing the villagers from taking damage! The princess and one of our most valued bishounen have been kidnapped by a guy who kinda looks like Wolverine - rescue them! The desert is hot - leave!

The cut-scene conversations mostly seem to be held in public, with all the playable characters and a few non-playable ones apparently listening in on them.

3) The dialog you get within a battle, most of which happens when two characters stand next to each other for a second. Sometimes you’re required to talk to an NPC or a bad guy to beat the stage, but most of the in-battle dialog is “optional.” It’s possible to miss a lot of it if the “right” characters never line up, or you don’t take the ones who have something to say into battle with you.

These conversations seem to be private - people hit on each other and bicker and make fun of characters who aren’t present. Occasionally someone will even have a thought that they don’t share. (”Man - my identical twin brother so does not perform masculinity in a traditionally heternormative manner! It’s a good thing I wear this purple cape, otherwise people might confuse us!”)

And - sometimes - they say shit that’s really important to the plot that doesn’t show up anywhere else.

4) The character bios, which sometimes contain stuff that you’d call a spoiler if you were posting it on LiveJournal. There’s a stage where, if you click on one of the enemies and look at the bio, you’ll find that it describes him/her as “friendly with [party member A].” If this A talks to the enemy, the enemy will agree to join your party after a short conversation, apparently never having met A before. Did the people writing the bio jump the gun, and forget that Enemy is the enemy when he/she first shows up? But if you happen to have party member B with you, and B happens to line up with ex-enemy, they’ll have a conversation that seems to hint that A and ex-enemy have met before.

(Actually, this particular stage and enemy are interesting in all sorts of weird meta-ways. Though Enemy’s bio establishes him/her as being a member of the Evil Organization, and the player can clearly see that Enemy is highlighted in bad-guy-red (and can, I think, even kill him/her, though I didn’t try), A and B’s conversation make it clear that Enemy’s redness isn’t evident to them. So the game mechanic itself tells a part of the story not indicated by the dialog or art.)

5) The sound effects. Everyone has little phrases they say when they die, attack something, or perform certain other actions. Like the bios, these also tend to contain information you’re not “supposed” to have. An enemy in stage seven whispers, “I’m sorry, (spoiler) Princess…” when he dies, which tells the player they need to redo the stage and make sure the Princess talks to him.

Now, the very serious-sounding narration between stages focuses heavily on the brave Prince Serdic’s attempts to de-curse his sword and get himself properly coronated as King, so he can take back his kingdom from the evil empire. The player, however, learns at the end of the first stage that (spoilers for that, and for the beginning of stage eight) Continue reading “Rondo of Swords”

Thus far, I like the dialog and character designs for Rondo of Swords. But it is insanely hard. I can’t even get through the whole of the tutorial.

Conversation had on my fourth or fifth try on the first level:

Fuzzy-san: No, wait, you had another guy, on a horse -

Me: He died just now! I think in one hit!

Fuzzy-san: I did not even see that.

Me: It was one of the three guys in armor who are right behind me. And look, look at this, there’s like five more right behind them! And a bunch of wizards waiting to ambush me when I finally get over here - there’s more guys over here -

Fuzzy-san: These at the bottom aren’t wearing armor. So are they just some random villagers? Are they safe?

Me: They’re highlighted in red, so they’re just some random villagers who want to kill me.

Fuzzy-san: The one in blue is the important one, right? So if you can have the one in gray sort of guard him -

Me: Blue guy just died.

Fuzzy-san: Oh, he’s giving a nice death speech!

Me: Yeah. His voice actor’s okay.

I rescind the stuff I said about Golden Sun. It doesn’t have the worst dialog of any RPG ever. Luminous Arc does. Luminous Arc is what you’d get if you tripled the banality and length of Golden Sun’s dialog and threw in a bunch of disturbing lolicon character designs, and voice actors. This game should not have voice actors. This was a poor tactical decision.

I didn’t even make it past the opening cut-scene, I had to turn it off. There were five separate named characters with creepy lolicon designs, and they were all clearly important to the plot, and two of them said, “yes, master!” Another was in a maid uniform, and another was menaced by a Cardinal. And there were eight or nine other named characters, three or four different secret organizations (not counting the Catholic Church), and they were all clearly important to the plot. And there were four time-skips. During the opening cut-scene! Which I stopped at about the twenty-minute mark.

I need a new Phoenix Wright game. My DS is trying to kill me.

I climbed up a mountain, and walked down the other side to find the world empty. The hedgehog men had all vanished. The velociraptors, too. I thought they must at last have gone home, numb with the final, cold realization that they were not, perhaps, setting-appropriate to the Serengeti.

Thinking this was part of some kind of scheduled event (though it completely threw me off that the music didn’t change - the music always changes when weird stuff happens in games!), I explored for five or six minutes before realizing that the items, NPCs, and other players were also all gone.

Then it shut down and told me I’d been disconnected.

They make you do this when you get a student visa, I guess to make sure you’re not smuggling in any tuberculosis. (If that’s actually why they were doing it, I think Bruce Schneier would have words. It’s not like the god of tourists protects recipients of tourist visas from disease.) They sent some trucks with X-ray machines around for this, the trucks sat in the school parking lot and people formed whiny lines, and I took my bra off ahead of time so as to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible. I’m very grumpy about this.

As apparently I do not yet waste enough time on video games, I set up a World of Warcraft trial account last weekend. I have been running around being an Orcish warrior with a purely mercenary interest in geology. World of Warcraft espouses the controversial idea that orcs, however much that Tolkien guy went on about them, present an only slightly greater threat than does the cunning and ruthless zebracorn. That’s kind of a zebra-unicorn, I don’t know if you caught that.

My level-twelve orc has been repeatedly killed by level-thirteen zebracorns. This is in part due to my refusal to believe that I actually just got killed by a goddamn zebracorn, which means I have to go back and fight another one to make sure. They don’t even use the horn! Using the horn is basic unicorn strategy! They just step on you and snort, and I’m wearing all this armor and some of it’s magic, and it’s just really inappropriate.

The game has a lot of weird and unpleasant ethnic stereotypes. For some reason the trolls all have pseudo-Jamaican accents and a lot of voodoo-related catchphrases. Also, comical witchdoctors. The Tauren, who are big cow people, are supposed to be Native Americans. Their catchphrases are all seepy comments about living in harmony with nature, and they have placid-stoned-ish-sounding voice actors. There’s also an opportunistic merchant race with big noses, big ears, and nasal voices. The men have catchphrases like “Time is money” and the women say “Like see you later” in valley-girl-speak and appear to be wearing too much makeup. I wonder what that’s about.

Sibling, I charge you with the sacred duty of eating that edamame in the freezer.

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I am not sure how I feel about this. I don’t know if I want to listen to Edgeworth talk that much. But if it’s a prequel, Mia might be in it! So that’s good.

Man, pirating software is hard work. I have like a whole new respect for message board assholes.

I made Mom play the first chapter of Phoenix Wright the other day. She yelled inscrutable legal stuff at it the whole time and refuses to touch it again.

I also totally broke the blog the other day trying to do a test-run of copying it to a new server. I’m all grumpy at WordPress now. What is this forwarding bullshit you do? This is massively inappropriate, and the solution is fucking non-intuitive and for some reason broke all my Unicode characters. I’m not upgrading to this fucking 2.5 of yours until it’s been out at least three months and I know I can recreate all this work I’ve done messing around with PHP and hacking these fucking plugins to make them fucking work like I fucking want. Fucking.

The Mexican restaurant in town always has Star Trek playing. It’s really depressing to me I can hear a random line of dialog from Voyager and go, “Hold it, that totally contradicts that stupid episode where the Doctor’s fucking registry got corrupted or whatever!” I need rewrite privileges for my brain. That is space I could be using for kanji.

I started playing Apollo Justice last night. It looks like the torch singer dream did mean something. It just wasn’t apparent until I started the game. I don’t know what it means yet, but surely this will become clear as I progress.

(Seriously, I must have read some spoilers at some point and then got them lost in my brain, because the dream knew way too much about the plot.)

Last night, apparently in reaction to yesterday’s terrible dietary crime, I dreamed about eating sprouts. I had bought several varieties from the store, and I removed the roots and ate them. That was the whole dream. It was pretty vivid. I could taste and smell the sprouts and everything.

Figuring that my brain was probably trying to tell me something*, I bought some sprouts when I went out to buy curry stuff today. Unfortunately, I accidentally got daikon sprouts. Which taste like, you know, daikon. I hate daikon. I’ve covered them with kimchi and am determined to work my way through them today. My subconscious went to a lot of trouble on this one.

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* Probably an unwarranted assumption. I had another dream earlier in the night where Apollo Justice was a 20’s torch singer. I don’t think that means anything.

There’s a shopping center near the dorm called “Wing Town,” and in it is one of these cafes specializing in cuteness that Japan has a lot of, and it is called “Cat’s Cafe.”

A bunch of us went there today, and the whole time I was very concerned that my clone was going to show up in a shower of feathers and/or flower petals, rip my eye out of my head and eat it, and then disappear into another dimension wielding a massive sword and an unfathomable expression. Fortunately, this did not occur, nor did anyone become a vampire or lose their memory for reasons.

We ordered and consumed most of a bucket-sized 4000-yen parfait.

If you have eight people, this parfait is a slightly better deal than the cheapest individual parfaits, but not if you have seven. I calculated it out. Professor Layton is damaging my ability to engage in activities without doing math at them.

(Edited a couple times to fix the picture’s size. Flickr is maybe changing its interface around today?)

You’d think the people who localized Professor Layton would be paying attention to what the people who localized Phoenix Wright were doing. But I guess not. Evil women with mysterious doubles should clearly always be named Dahlia, and the double’s name should be that of a purple flower.

Anyway, this game is really cute, but I have to have scratch paper around when I’m playing it.

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For writing class today, we made posters describing where we’re from, because language school is sort of like pre-school, but with more emphasis on vocabulary relating to intoxication. A scene from today’s class:

*I am dubiously considering the way I wrote “marijuana,” because I think it might be wrong.*

Great Artist-san: What is the kanji for “kami”?

Dragon-san: What? “Kami” for paper?

Great Artist-san: No, no, “kami-sama” - “kami” for God. I have to write “Brazil: God’s Country!”

Me: What?! No! America is God’s country! Don’t you people have TVs?!

Fuzzy-san: Hungary is obviously God’s country.

Great Artist-san: Is Taiwan God’s country?

Dragon-san, disgustedly: No.

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I just upgraded WordPress in hopes that it will make comment notification start working. Thus far it seems to have broken my ability to preview in-progress posts and use the Open-ID thingie. Fuck you, WordPress.

I still haven’t written the follow-up to my previous Big Huge Phoenix Wright post, but I’ve just finished Trials and Tribulations, and I’m going to post massively spoilery thoughts about that real fast:

Continue reading “Oh, Godot.”

“Oh, my god! You have a whip! Why do you have a whip!?”

“For whipping.”

The platonic ideal of a fandom-breeding piece of canon is a story that’s full of massive holes which, 1) nonetheless do not damage the story’s emotional structure, and, 2) could be filled in without making it collapse under its own weight.

That is an excellent description of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.

This game has two of those particularly large holes. One is the one I mentioned before: that, though the game generally acts as though it is not aware of this, Phoenix Wright is a deeply unethical, self-absorbed, and, when unguarded, really creepy individual. He steals most of the evidence he uses in court, or else lies to or manipulates people to get it. He is capable of empathy, but rarely exercises it willingly or comfortably - whenever he is forced into some insight into another character’s inner life, he breaks a sweat, grimaces, and makes smart remarks to himself.

He’s apparently only really comfortable with dealing with other people’s feelings as weapons - that is, “motives.” In general, only when he’s accusing someone of a crime or a lie is he entirely comfortable in engaging their humanity.

What makes this more dramatic is the way he behaves towards the single character for whom he does willingly and consistently exercise empathy. Here, I shall cut for spoilers for episode 4 and up.

Continue reading “I Just Beat That Game (I had to use a guide sometimes)”