The Internet is specially suited to certain things. Unnecessarily detailed manifestos on subjects of no particular importance are one of its greatest strengths. See: The six years of content buried away at this very site. Perhaps you can understand, then, why I took it upon myself to create the most comprehensive CD/DVD list for Monster Rancher 4 that the Internet had ever seen. Very few CD/DVD lists exist for the game, partially because it’s five years old and nobody cares any more, but also because not many people ever cared in the first place. Mostly, however, it’s because there’s no great effort involved in sticking a CD or DVD in the PS2’s drive and watching a polygonal monster come bounding out of it yourself, always to the delight and shock of the kindly shrine attendant. Only the most lazy have any need for a list that saves them twenty seconds of work.

Still, at no place on the whole wide Internet is there a list of which monsters are born of which M*A*S*H DVDs, most likely because I’m the only person on the planet that owns both Monster Rancher 4 and every season of M*A*S*H. If anyone were to finally right this wrong, why shouldn’t I be the one to do it? I’ve had no trouble wasting more time on more useless projects in the past. See again: The six years of content buried away at this very site.

It turns out I probably should have read my own Monster Rancher 4 review. I’ve spent the last two days trying to earn the last two breeder badges, and with them the right to train any monster that could possibly spring to life from any disc. But, no more. The game is just too damned repetitive for me to put up with any longer, even though my army of Garus are nearly ready to take the final tournament circuit by storm. I could certainly just post what I’ve already accomplished (in a .txt file only usable by dorkclub.com and gamefaqs.com, naturally), but the obsessive-compulsive completionist in me could never settle for birthing the most thorough Monster Rancher 4 CD/DVD list on the Internet if it didn’t also include the monster hidden on the Final Fantasy Chronicles version of Final Fantasy IV. Incidentally, I’ve had Scott Brust’s copy of Final Fantasy IV since 2003 when I first needed it for the Inn Music Database, though I suspect he’s had my copy of Monster Rancher 2 far longer.

Discouraged, I drowned my sorrows and ever-present sense of failure in the Internet, eventually finding solace in the screenplay for an unproduced version of the Watchmen movie written by Sam Hamm. Written in 1989, the script has recently become relevant again thanks to Zack Snyder’s upcoming Watchmen movie and 20th Century Fox’s claim to Warner Bros. that, “hey, we actually own the rights to that.” Anyway, like Monster Rancher 4, Hamm’s Watchmen script is terrible and I was unable to finish it. At least I spent the better part of a week with Monster Rancher 4, though. The Watchmen screenplay lost my attention after about twenty minutes.

And with good reason. Hamm’s version starts in 1976, where Watchmen’s cast of characters have formed a superteam of superheroes called, wait for it, the Watchmen. I’m cringing even as I type that. His script opens with a terrorist attack against the Statue of Liberty, where these Watchmen ineptly bungle the NYPD’s peaceful resolution with the statue-threatening bomb-wielders. The sequence features such cinematic gems as:

The three TERRORISTS fall into a tight cluster at the base of a long metal stairway. One of them grabs the JANITOR, holds a gun to his head.

TERRORIST I
I’M NOT JOKING!!

The COMEDIAN shrugs: okay. He lifts his rifle and fires TWO SILENCED SHOTS directly into the JANITOR’s gut. The old man’s body jerks twice and he slumps to the floor, stone dead.

The TERRORISTS stand there aghast. For an instant they’re too stunned to shoot. The COMEDIAN breaks into a dopey grin –

COMEDIAN
The joke’s on you.

– and opens fire with a look of VICIOUS PLEASURE on his face. As the saying goes . . . it’s nice to see a man who enjoys his work.

This poster child for missing the point eventually ends with Dr. Manhattan rewriting history so that he never exists. A trio of characters then find themselves in our very own version of New York circa 1986. Here, of course, they’re nothing more than characters in a book called Watchmen. Clever in that ‘makes your brain want to jump out of your skull so as to never experience such stupefying pain again’ sort of way.

David “Solid Snake” Hayter’s own take on the unfilmable comic book is leagues better, allegedly, even garnering an indifferent shrug from Alan Moore, which is his highest honor given to adaptations of his work. Zack Snyder’s movie is supposedly using Hayter’s script, in whole or in part, and Snyder himself seems hellbent on capturing the essence of the original book on film, even going so far as to film the Tales of the Black Freighter story-within-a-story as a DVD extra. Sadly, like unhealthily comprehensive Monster Rancher 4 CD/DVD lists, you just can’t find such things on the Internet.

Tomorrow: More stories of failed feature ideas disguised as content.

Ulillillia assures us his name is easy to pronounce. And for him, it is. This is not a man that exists in the same reality as the rest of us; he is obsessed with video games and mathematics, afraid of chairs and mirrors, and endlessly captivated by an imaginary game only he can play – The Mind Game. He writes with a devout enthusiasm for his subject matter because his subject matter is his life – his neuroses and hang-ups, his successes and failings. All of it is categorized with a meticulous precision that comes off as absurd to the rest of us, every paragraph and thought clearly labeled and quantified.

The Internet assures me that Ulillillia is actually fairly well known, as far as things that are fairly well known on the Internet go. Until just a few days ago, I had never heard of the man. Now, I find myself unable to get him out of my head. His obsessions have become my own, and I long to see him overcome them.

Ulillillia blames his problems on video games, but it’s difficult to imagine that’s the case. He certainly plays games in a way that is wholly his own, however. He has transformed the linearity of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 into an open-ended puzzle with infinite solutions. In his mind, drowning Tails or triggering a bug are no different from finishing the game. In fact, Ulillillia has spent so much time so completely obsessed with certain games – having spent 500 hours in the second level of Bubsy 3D, for example – that he has long since deconstructed them. He now plays to find what he calls “secrets,” but what the rest of us realize are simply bugs or obvious, unsaid exceptions to gameplay rules. In one video, he shows off 50 “oddities” in Spyro 2. Why is he not working as a video game tester?

His many social hang-ups, for one. Though he has overcome his fear of blue water, he is still so afraid of the words “people” and “person” that he writes them as “peo___” and “per___” instead, and then only if he truly must. Ulillillia is also afraid of chairs, forcing him to update his site and edit the many videos that fill his YouTube account from the floor. These are but a few of his unusual selection of “issues,” as he calls them. Metroid is the reason he can’t stand red ketchup. He rarely showers.

He also seems to be a mathematical genius of sorts, despite only having a high school diploma. Math dictates the very way he thinks, every thought and statement numbered, filed, and organized. His site is a massive, sprawling beast, held together by a strictly rigid system of numbered categories and subcategories. Its pages are filled with charts and graphs detailing his ideas and trains of thought or the specifics of one of his animated GIFs. He offers up several helpful math tips and dabbles in C++, having written a program he uses when editing his YouTube videos. There’s a sense that Ulillillia doesn’t think in the same way you or I do, that his thoughts form a carefully constructed matrix of ideas, and that organizing these ideas is just as important as having them in the first place.

The Internet has decided to figure out what’s wrong with Ulillillia, in the collective, Wikipedia copy-pasting way only the Internet can figure things out. Maybe he has OCD, suggests one Blogspot post. A Something Awful forum thread suggests it may be autism or Asperser’s Syndrome. Maybe he’s just so genuinely different, so unlike anybody else and yet so able to express his differentness with such clarity and poise, that a large group of strangers have grown to care so much about him.

Whether something is “wrong” with Ulillillia or not, his site, his videos, and his life are infinitely fascinating. The Internet is good for very little; this site and the million like it are proof enough of that. But occasionally, someone produces something truly worthwhile, something that could not have existed in any other form. I wrote once, in a post that may or may not still exist somewhere in this site’s archives, that a blog’s real strength is its ability to exist and be updated over time, an autobiography that is written as a per___ lives. A blog left unviolated becomes a record of a per___’s thoughts, ideas, and opinions, recorded forever on a server in a well-cooled basement and available online for an entire world to see. It becomes, in a way, a record of the per___ themselves, or at least as much of them as they were willing to share. Ulillillia shares everything – his exhaustive dream journal, detailed descriptions of his most intimate psychological hang-ups, and a couple dozen videos of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 – and we are thankful for it.

Today was a busy day, kids. Or at least, it was as busy as a day can be when I only rarely get out of my chair. I implemented various changes and minor improvements across the sites, including fixing some long-standing display errors and correcting a few outstanding lapses in consistency. Plus, I even dealt with some years-old, depreciated HTML elements buried deep in the hidden regions of the site and converted all the pages to PHP files, taking advantage of all their new age wizardry. Ultimately, like most of the hours I waste on this site, the effects of my work are virtually invisible, but rest assured that I have, in fact, spent an entire day doing a great deal and accomplishing very little.

The real fruit of this labor is a rather unimpressive “video games,” page, which may or may not become something worthwhile at some point in the future. It really only exists for organizational purposes at this point, and differs very little from the preexisting Games, Games (Video), and Games (Also Video) categories. At least here I can be slightly more discerning with what’s displayed. And once I rewrite/heavily edit the Astro Boy, Baten Kaitos, Billy Hatcher, Defcon, and Gradius 5 reviews, I’ll actually be quite proud of everything linked to by that page. So, huzzah for that, I guess.

In an hour I’m going to watch Rise of the Video Game on the Discovery Channel, which promises to be the first part (of five) of something superbly awesome. After that, however, site maintenance continues as I attempt to upgrade our Wordpress backend. If you’re reading this anytime past four hours from now, assume I was successful.

What is the Monkeysphere? Why, the very secret to human interaction, of course.

A reprieve from CRACKED.com’s onslaught of 80s nostalgia-fueled top ten lists, the Monkeysphere is hilarious, enlightening, and soul-shatteringly depressing. It is, of course, the basis for human society and the explanation for the very structure of our lives. If you only visit CRACKED.com once in your lifetime (and honestly, you’ll be hard-pressed to come with a reason for a second trip), today is the day to do it.

Sportacus knows the secret of the Monkeysphere. Do you?

In the last 24 hours, Halo 3 made more money than either Spider-Man 3 or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows did within the same time period. Congratulations on your newest $170 million, Microsoft. No adjustment has been made to take the difference in price between a $10 movie ticket, a $20 book, and a $120 cat helmet into effect. Regardless, be sure to celebrate with a Halo 3-themed Whopper meal and the largest bottle of Game Fuel you can get your greasy gaming hands on. I’ll be doing my part.

I played some Star Fox Adventures today. About five hours worth, to be exact. I hadn’t played the game since the weekend I bought it and subsequently played through it, back in 2002. The game is still graphically very impressive and proof positive that the last console generation ended too early. Anyway, I wanted to write about Star Fox Adventures being indicative of Nintendo 64-era Rareware as a whole and a symbol for the relationship between Nintendo and the British developer. I had also planned to categorize the various widgets and wingdings players collect along the way. I still can, I guess.

As you can imagine, the game wasn’t holding my attention. I would play for a while, take a break to take a shower or look up Japanese Beast Wars Neo characters on Wikipedia, and then play a little more. I’d just pause the game and leave it running, never bothering to turn the GameCube off or actually save my progress. Imagine my surprise when I returned from one such diversion to find that the game had returned to the title screen. With no explanation in sight, I’ll just take this as a sign from the almighty.

Star Fox Adventures isn’t a good game. I’ve collected enough pukpuk eggs, bafomdads, and blue grubtubs to last a lifetime. Actually, now that I’m thinking about all the mean things I could say about this (five-year-old) game (that nobody would care about), I might just go ahead and write my Star Fox Adventures update anyway. This update basically would have served as an excuse to post the following picture regardless of whether or not my game ate itself.

Never one to wallow long in defeat, I quickly moved on to equally productive activities:

My fingernail on my right ring finger had a little discoloration stemming from a recent finger wounding. I just clipped my fingernail, removing the discolored bit.

Some things from Ye Olde dorkclub.com are worth saving. Most aren’t. This is:

Thanks, archive.org and Hideo Kojima.

I spent the better part of two years playing World of Warcraft. My account expired on February 3 of this year and I do not intend to renew it. Ever. Leaving Azeroth behind, my feelings on the game are divided. On one hand, World of Warcraft is one of my life’s premiere gaming experiences. On the other hand, for two years World of Warcraft has been my life.

Blizzard puts a great deal of effort into convincing both current players and would-be players alike that WoW is something other than it is. The game is marketed and discussed in such a way as to paint an image of a very casual, laid back gaming experience. This representation is accurate up to a point, but the real meat of World of Warcraft – representing the most development time, post-release content, and volume of playtime – stands in direct contrast to this casual-friendly image.

As one begins to play the game, they find themselves within a massive, beautiful world filled with content perfectly suited to short 15-minute bursts or all day marathons. The game is subdivided into small, manageable, and often overlapping chunks: the world is divided into continents, continents are divided into zones, and the zones themselves are divided into smaller, named sections often revolving around some sort of landmark. Leveling, the game’s primary goal at this point, is likewise cut into bite size pieces. Levels are quick and offer a plethora of rewards and incentives at their end. 20 “bubbles” displayed near the bottom of the UI measure progress, filling as players receive experience from discovering locations, killing monsters, and completing quests. Players are always doing quests. Quests can be simple A-to-B affairs or epic, sprawling multi-zone adventures. Often times they overlap, requiring different objectives within the same subzone, or slowly funnel towards larger objectives. Breadcrumb quests send players to new areas while other quests teach players new play mechanics. The game is simple and inviting, comprised of feats requiring only small investments that reinforce and grow upon one another and encourage players to complete one more quest, travel to one more zone.

Though the leveling process here is far quicker than in many other MMOs, it still requires a sizeable investment from the player; it takes the average player 15 days worth of playtime to reach the levelcap. That’s 360 hours. At first, this seems to be the entirety of the game. With so much care and love poured into every inch of every zone, how could anything waiting for players at the levelcap match the leveling experience?

In reality, for the players World of Warcraft is really designed for, leveling comprises but a tiny minority of the total play experience. WoW’s casual-friendly adventure towards the levelcap is really just the game’s tutorial, teaching players how to best utilize their character’s skills and abilities alone or in a group. World of Warcraft’s core gameplay mechanic isn’t leveling. It’s raiding.

And just what, exactly, is raiding? Technically, any group with more than five members ceases to be a party and instead becomes a raid group. Realistically, a raid group consists of either 20 or 40 players. For this discussion I’m going to focus on 40-man raids, specifically 40-man raid instances. They are, after all, the core focus of the game for both developers and players.

Raiding is, in all honesty, a ton of fun. It’s fun for the same reason being part of a team in anything is fun: getting better through practice and ultimately overcoming obstacles and realizing goals that once seemed far out of reach. It’s fun because the challenges provided are incredibly difficult, not just because the creatures that inhabit these raid dungeons have millions of hit points and do thousands of damage, which they do, but because they require a great deal of skill, coordination, and organization to overcome. The boss fights especially are amazingly clever, the sort of gaming experiences that would be heralded as noteworthy if any sizable amount of players actually played them.

Unfortunately, the price of entry for these experiences is unreasonably high, and because of this, only a relatively small percentage of the player base is able to enjoy them. Outside of the typical requirements for World of Warcraft (decent computer, internet connection, monthly fee, why am I even typing this?), raiding demands far more of the players. Obviously, you need 39 other people ready and willing to do the instance when you’re ready and willing to do it. However, 39 random people won’t do. You need 39 other players who are skilled at the game and will form a raid group with the correct class composition. Raiding requires a great deal of organization, so you need a guild that can support this raid – lead it, make sure players pull their own weight and show up when they’re supposed to. Finally, and most importantly, you need time. To say that raiding needs dedication is an understatement.

The problem largely stems from the fact that World of Warcraft is an MMORPG that requires a monthly fee. Granted, that monthly fee pays for a multitude of additional content, but Blizzard needs players to keep paying. When initially learning a raid instance, it’s not uncommon to spend ten or more hours in the instance during the week on top of any time spent farming for materials or items needed for the raid. Though a sizable investment requiring a great deal of organization, such a time requirement is still manageable. However, all raid instances are on raid timers, meaning anything raid groups accomplish within the instances is saved until Tuesday morning at about 3:00 AM at which point the raid timers, and the instances themselves, all reset. Because a typical 40-man instance yields about 25 items, which are dictated by drop rates and loot tables, these instances need to be run multiple times in order to properly gear up the raid party for future challenges. Each player has up to 16 item slots to fill. So, given perfectly ideal drop conditions, it would take a raid group consisting of the exact same 40 players (zero attrition DOES NOT HAPPEN. EVER.) 26 weeks (that’s 26 full clears) of a single raid instance before they no longer need to run it. However, players do not simply run a single raid instance for 26 straight weeks before moving on to the next challenge. Instead, after one (or a few) full clears, the raid starts on the next raid instance in the progression while continuing to farm loot from any previous raid instances. World of Warcraft is a game that demands you play it constantly in order to play it at all.

There are four 40-man instances in the game (Molten Core (MC), Blackwing Lair (BWL), Temple of Ahn’Qiraj (AQ40), and Naxxaramas (Naxx)) and it’s common to have guilds running at least three of these instances at the same time. This sort of insane time requirement is necessary in order to continue to progress through World of Warcraft beyond the initial leveling. Let’s look at my human priest character for some numbers. My priest was both my first Alliance character and my first raiding character. He joined a guild that had only killed the fist boss of MC and helped them progress all the way to the eighth boss of Naxx, becoming the second-best guild on the server. He took about 15 days of playtime to level to 60 and about 6 days of playtime to level from 60 to 70. His total time played was 108 days or 2600 hours. That means he spent about 2000 hours raiding. 2000 hours playing through the same raid instances, downing the same bosses with the same people over and over again for a little under a year. Since August 2005 – when I first began really playing World of Warcraft with any sort of seriousness – 27% of my time, be it waking, sleeping, or otherwise, was spent playing World of Warcraft.

Shortly after World of Warcraft was first released I declared it Blizzard’s best game. I still stand by this statement, based largely on the quality of the raiding experience. Raiding is a blast. Honestly. Sure, it consumed my very existence, but only because I allowed it to. A huge portion of my favorite gaming moments comes from these raid instances, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. Blizzard has crafted a masterpiece. Dying a dozen times to the same boss, seeing your group edge ever closer to victory, and finally watching it die to a roar of cheers over Ventrillo is exhilarating like nothing else in gaming. However, working through the same encounter for the 20th time just to get the last few items the raid still needs is boring like nothing else in gaming. This inane time requirement, existing only to pad playtime and perpetuate monthly fee payments, represents a cost of entry that is far too high for most World of Warcraft players, preventing them from ever seeing the real World of Warcraft.

By Blizzard’s own admission in a May, 2006 interview with the New York Times Jeff Kaplan, lead designer for World of Warcraft estimated that “around 25 percent” of WoW players had killed Ragnaros (the final boss of MC, the first raid instance) and that “15 percent” had downed Nefarian (the final boss of BWL, the second raid instance). These numbers are so low not for a lack of desire among players – our guild saw a constant stream of applicants desperate to raid with us – but because the casual players Blizzard so desperately reaches out to are unable to devote the time and energy required to see the most polished and interesting aspects of the game. Despite this, three of the four 40-man raid instances, both the 20-man raid instances, and all ten of the outdoor 40-man world bosses were released post-launch, paid for with the monthly fees of players that would never even see this content. What a huge fucking waste.

To be fair, Blizzard has made good progress towards more closely aligning World of Warcraft with the image of the game they project. The game’s first expansion, the Burning Crusade, has no 40-man raid content, instead seeing the raid limit reduced to 25 players. Additionally, a great deal of the loot problems have been corrected with the introduction of a token system. All the same, there are still six raid instances at launch, with at least one more on the way. In a classic case of taking two steps forward and one step back, this is a solution that acts as a hastily applied Band-Aid, only lessoning issues already present without addressing the real root of the problems.

It’s nothing short of a travesty that such a tiny percentage of WoW’s 8.5 million subscribers have been unable to participate in the amazing gameplay experiences waiting for them in the game’s raid instances. Unfortunately the obvious solutions (players earn all useful loot through a single clearing of a raid instance, drastically reducing group sizes to 5 or 10 players) don’t exactly mesh with Blizzard’s financial goals. Perhaps someday someone will distill the core essence of what makes World of Warcraft so great to a smaller scale experience that doesn’t require entire years of your life in order to play properly. Until then, for better and for worse, we’re stuck with WoW. I’ve never loved a game as much as World of Warcraft or hated a game as much either. It’s the worst best game ever made, held back by its genre and business model.

A couple days ago I scrawled several pages worth of notes concerning my thoughts and feelings on World of Warcraft, which I played for the better part of two years. I had planned to write this massive(and massively boring to almost everyone) thing today.  However, after posting the update below this, I crawled back into bed and spent  most of the day slipping in and out of consciousness.  When I was awake, I felt as though someone was holding my head under water with one hand and hitting the back of my skull with a hammer with the other hand.  Thankfully, after a day of mostly sleep and heavy doses of medication, I’m feeling much better.  We should celebrate disease in its myriad, wonderful forms.

In related news, vector_black’s probably gonna get good n’ sick after all the totally straight fluid swapping that went down yesterday.