I’m going to take the time now to discuss the few new linked that showed up on the sidebar there to the right after the site’s latest redesign. I realize everyone who’s going to bother has already clicked them by now, but I feel a nice filler update is in order, mainly because I don’t want to put any real effort into writing something today. The Internet’s nice like that.

The first new link is to Gaming-Age which I’d known about for years but never bothered actually visiting until last July. Since then, not a day goes by when I don’t check their forums at least once, as they’ve become my only source of gaming news/editorials/reviews. I’ve yet to actually post there, mostly because I have no reason to, but they’re a fantastic place to lurk. All of this site’s other new links were taken directly from Gaming-Age forum threads, so you can thank them for that.

Por ejemplo, that UK Resistance link down near the bottom was linked to in a thread in response to their “Old Games Journalism > New Games Journalism” update (which has since been linked to from all sorts of other sites). I devoured UK Resistance’s entire archive over the course of a weekend and was hugely impressed/amused. They make me laugh, and that’s a hard thing to do.

The Perry Bible Fellowship also makes me laugh and was first brought to my attention in one of the many “OMF PENNY ARCADE IS TEH SUCK!!!!” threads that pop up on the forums all the time. I’ve been seeing these comics all over the Internet for years; I just never knew where they originated. Now I do. And it is good.

So this morning as I was browsing through the Gaming-Age games discussion forum as I often do, I read some new thread concerning the latest episode of an online video show called Pure Pwnage. I watched the episode in question and then downloaded and watched the remaining five episodes in the series before heading off to the first class of the last quarter of the rest of my life. Now, I can understand that Consolevania (see links) is an acquired taste, what with its mostly unfunny jokes, its Bit Torrent downloads, and its creepy, creepy website. I can image someone not enjoying Pure Pwnage, but I can also imagine people not enjoying riding a candy rainbow to a land of childhood dreams and unicorns. The show is ridiculously funny/Canadian and the files are usually less than 100 MB and Bit Torrent-free download options are readily available. Whereas Consolevania consists of sketch comedy bits and excellent game reviews, Pure Pwnage works more as a sitcom with a recurring cast of characters and threads of continuity. It has some great jokes, not all of which have to do with games, but many of which someone incorporate games into their telling. I can easily recommend episode 6 to anyone who’s ever played World of Warcraft and episodes 1-5 to anyone who doesn’t hate life with episodes 2 and 4 being the super radest (just like Star Trek!). FPS Doug alone is worth the 1.5-2 hours it should take you to download and watch all the episodes.

Someone once said that blogs exist mostly to link to other places. Sometimes this seems incredibly true.

Inn music for Final Fantasy X, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, and World of Warcraft has been added to the Inn Music Database.

It’s been about five months since I first played through Final Fantasy X (and my memory card holding my saved game was subsequently destroyed), but the thoughts and feelings I had towards the game still hold just as true today. In fact, its use of inn music, and any console RPG’s inn music, seems indicative of a larger problem for the genre. The console RPG is stuck in the past, clinging to conventions that are no longer necessary and consists of games which are either generic to an extreme or which strive for Nintendo-esque innovations which usually amount to little more than a different name for experience points or some overly-complex means of acquiring new skills.

Why do RPGs have inn music? Because RPGs in the past had inn music. Why do RPGs have levels, random battles, and spunky young men who defeat evil empires? Because RPGs in the past had them. The genre is stuck in a time that no longer exists, playing into technology limitations that are long since gone. Once upon a time, fading to black and playing a quick little sound effect was the best way to represent a group of people sleeping during the night, however we now have the technology to, you know, show people sleeping during the night. Of course, such technology has long since existed, but the inn music has never gone away. It’s how things were done in the past and therefore how things should be done today.

And though levels, experience points, and the collecting of PHAT LEWTZ came from Dungeons & Dragons and its ilk, they also existed largely due to technological limitations. It’s very difficult to come up with some sort of representation of progress, and it’s even more difficult to build the technology to support it. The technology is now here, yet we still use levels and experience. This isn’t to say that such a system is completely wrong, because it isn’t. Leveling up can be fun when it’s simply a mechanic in place working behind the scenes, acting as an extra layer of depth, not an extra layer of nuisance. Unfortunately, in the vast majority of RPGs (because they can’t all be Final Fantasy, and even that series isn’t immune to the genre’s stale conventions; in fact it mostly perpetuates them) leveling exists as a roadblock and time sink, a marker of when one should move from one area to the next rather than a system modeling the natural progress of the player’s character(s).

Fable comes instantly to mind when discussing the modern RPG genre, because in many ways it started out as a grand defiance to the RPG conventions before large numbers started appearing over characters’ heads and ambition gave way to limitation. It’s just become so easy to pump out another formulaic RPG, or to add slight variations to the tried-and-true recipe that it becomes all we ever see. I’m trying to think of a role playing game that completely sets itself off from the conventions of the genre, abandoning the ideas first dreamt up in the 1980s for something truly new and unique, but I can’t. Levels get new names or the math systems are more cleverly disguised, but the gameplay largely stays the same, gameplay that mostly consists of talking, fighting, talking, fighting, navigating through a dungeon, and then doing some more talking and fighting. Fighting is usually turn-based. Talking is usually non-interactive. Dungeons are usually long.

Final Fantasy X, for me, represents everything that’s wrong with the RPG genre. This is the golden standard to which we compare all other console role playing games? It’s either this or Dragon Warrior, depending on who you ask, and either way it looks like our standards are pretty damn low.

One of the things that have traditionally set the RPG apart from the rest of the video game world is its closer relationship with narrative. If you expect the player to sit with your game for 40+ hours, I guess you need to give them more of a reason to continue playing than “level up” (though really, you don’t). Final Fantasy X, like many story-heavy games these days, tries to tackle some complex issues with its narrative, but mostly just bumps against them before falling flat on its face. It clumsily plays with religion (painting a mostly negative image of the Catholic church – SHOCK!) while trying to maintain a love story, an extremely screwed up father/son tale, all that Al Bhed crap, and a multitude of other story arcs without really succeeding at any of them. Part of the problem is that the game is still just that, a video game. Yeah sure, watch Yevon lie to its followers and use the power of faith to generate an existence of fear (MASSIVE ASIDE! So, every hundred years, or how ever long it was, one summoner needs to die to defeat Sin and bring another Calm and end a whole lot of suffering/death. Is that really so bad? It seemed to me that Yevon wasn’t as bad as the game wanted me to believe they were. They didn’t seem to know how to defeat Sin permanently, and if one person has to die every now and again so that thousands of others don’t, that’s really not that bad of a deal. They seemed to be acting out of fear rather than with any malicious intent.), but you still need to go from temple to temple and fight bosses and random battles and level up and stay at inns that play little pieces of music to symbolize your night’s sleep. Because that’s how it’s always been done.

And that voice acting’s pretty terrible. Actually, it’s Christ-fucking awful. And even though we have this bad voice acting and subtitles to go along with it, the characters still jump around using these ridiculous, over-the-top emotes that are no longer necessary. They worked fine when characters were 2-D sprites seen from far away, but now that the game features high polycount, realistically proportioned characters, the super expressive emotes look laughably out of place, especially with voice acting, bad as it may be, there to add emotional cues to the dialogue.

However, that being said, I have a tremendous amount of hope for Final Fantasy XII. In all honestly, I know absolutely nothing about the game other than it takes place in the same universe as Final Fantasy Tactics and stars too offensively feminine lead characters (one of which might actually be a woman). The general buzz on this here interweb (general because, again, I know nothing about this game) is that Final Fantasy XII is in many ways something other than a Final Fantasy game, abandoning many of the series’ conventions (and therefore the genre’s conventions, because everyone copies the Final Fantasy series any way) in wake of something new. I have no idea just how new these news (the plural of new) are, but hopefully the game will be a step in the right direction and will inspire other developers to start experimenting more fully with the genre.

It’s insanely easy to point out what’s wrong with things. You might not have noticed, but I do it all the time. It’s a hell of a lot harder to come with solutions to the problems that are so easy to spot. Unfortunately, the most specific I can get on this one is “the RPG genre needs to move out of the past and embrace the technology which exists today and tap the enormous potential which could grow from the genre.” As it stands, more and more games are incorporating elements of the role playing game into their design. Narratives comprised of more than a dozen words are now present in nearly every genre and elements like character progression and the depth that every RPG veteran is so quick to defend are now present in football and survival horror games. If the role playing game doesn’t grow up and draw from sources other than the stagnant pool it’s been sitting in for the last decade, it stands to lose itself to irrelevance and see its most prized workings prominently featured in games without inn music.

Ok! The new layout is now online, lots of articles/features have been purged from the site, and registration is now required in order to comment. The main reason for this change from Movable Type to Word Press was WP’s super duper spam fighting features. Deleting over 18,000 spam comments isn’t my idea of a smashing good time. In order to comment, you’ll now need to register with dorkclub.com (which requires a valid e-mail address) and log in. Also, the words “xanax,” “viagra,” “breast,” and “poker” will get your comment instantly deleted before it even reaches anyone’s eyes. So don’t use them. Dorkclub.com staffers are already registered. If you can’t guess what your password is (hint: the same damn thing I always set it to), then contact me in some way.

All posts have been transfered from Movable type and all non-spam comments before October 2004 survived as well.

Everything else is pretty much self-explanitory. As always, expect 404 pages and broken images and don’t expect anything more out of me today.

More to come.

Forums work again. Movable Type still borked. Wordpress installed. Redesign/major overhaul coming. News in a couple of weeks.

I opened a package of bread this morning and discovered that it had gone to mold. I became angry, and, irrationally, blamed the bread for becoming moldy instead of myself for not eating it sooner.

(vector_black French bread)