FYI, you cannot marry a videogame.
Believe me, when Chrono Trigger DS came out, I tried.
Chrono Trigger is one of my favorite games ever, possibly my absolute favorite ever (although that usually largely depends on what I’m playing). Every aspect of it has always stood out as the pinnacle of what I love about games: a fun and creative battle system, an intensely well-written story (even after going through the translation process), likeable and identifiable characters, philosophical undertones about the nature of God, time, the planet, and the motivations of mankind without trying to smack you in the face with its big, floppy, Nietzsche-loving cock (like Xenogears did), and some of the best graphics ever seen in the second dimension, not to mention an amazing soundtrack. I’m very particular about things I love. Some might say I’m very passionate about them. Others, my wife for instance, might say that I’m a borderline alcoholic who snaps like a twig and goes ballistic at the slightest hint of something not going my way. So, naturally, it was extremely important to me that every one of these elements was executed perfectly.
Thankfully, despite the bad rap they’re getting concerning their newer games, Square-Enix still knows how to treat their old franchises. To illustrate this point, here’s a fun fact: I’ve bought Final Fantasy 2/4 4 times. Every single time it was a special experience. If another new version comes out, I’ll probably buy it too. The game just never gets old to me. I don’t feel bad about buying them, either. You can say whatever you want about a company releasing their old games over and over, but (and this is especially true of Chrono Trigger) it gives people a chance to play a game they may have heard about many times but never gotten to play, and in the case of people like me, gives people a chance to play a game they’ve played many times and have fond memories of in new ways. The biggest problem I have with the complaints of companies (especially Square and Nintendo) shovelling remakes out the door is that they seem to always ignore the positive aspects of these releases. They allow companies an opportunity to make a good profit on a product that has been proven to be considered good and which gamers actually want that more often than not goes directly into the development of other new games. It’s similar to how I feel about World of Warcraft. I don’t care for it personally, and I mock it at every junction, but I’d never suggest it shouldn’t exist, because with the nigh-infinite funds Blizzard receives from it, they’re able to produce games like Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2.
So anyway, Chrono Trigger. It’s exactly as good as I remember it (from when I beat it last a few months ago), but with some added features I like a lot. I really enjoy the addition of the ending counter, which will actually tell you when you’ve finished all the games endings, something I’ve never been able to do because of my tendency to try to squeeze all the life out of the game I can get, which means I always beat Lavos by going through the Black Omen at the end, the longest possible route through. I would have loved the music box option if I didn’t already have the soundtrack, and the addition of the videos from the Playstation version were a nice bonus I wasn’t expecting.
The most important addition, of course, are the new map areas. Most of the reviews I’ve read tend to concur that they’re repetitive. I, personally, enjoyed them quite a bit. Then again, I’m not the most objective person to review them, because I’m going to love them either way. New maps = more Chrono Trigger. Honestly, I thought the Dimensional Vortex areas were decently laid out but focused too much on battles instead of exploration, and suffered a bit as a result. After completing the areas, the new boss, the Dream Devourer, pops up. This battle is very, very hard. However, the strategy involved makes it extremely fun as well, and the new ending ties the game to its sequel (Radical Dreamers, a Japan-only visual novel, not Chrono Cross) in a way it never did before (that is, directly).
Overall, I solidly recommend Chrono Trigger DS to everybody. As a kid, Chrono Trigger is the game that was most responsible for the development of my concept of a narrative. It tells its story so well that it redefined the way I looked not only at games but at art and storytelling in general. If I were Sultan of America, I would make it a legal requirement to own and complete it, punishible by exploding. Of course, if I were Sultan, I would also ban the use of umbrellas and make it a capital offense to be Shaq, so maybe I’m not the best to judge.
“Art” Games.
This is probably going to be the angriest thing I’ve ever written, and it will likely move into “derelict rant” territory.
Over the last couple of years, a new trend has begun in video games: the “art game”.
There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with art games as a concept. In some particularly inspired cases, it can result in some pretty creative results.
Take, for example, Braid. It isn’t based around any particularly creative gameplay mechanics, as the use of the control of time as a feature has been used many times before (for example, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time or Blinx: The Time Sweeper), but its use of these gameplay mechanics resulted in some clever puzzles, and even though I think most of the narrative was overwrought and pretensious (although I loved the ambiguous ending, despite/because it wasn’t related to the story), I can’t deny that it was well-written, for what it was.
However, my issue with this entire “genre” is that it represents the basest form of art fuckery. Many of these games are made by the people who make me hate going inside of any business in the downtown part of my city. They’re the people who are talking to naive women about how they’re feeling so much “anguish” over everything that’s going on in their life, but totally aren’t just trying to get laid, because they’re sensitive guys, and own every album by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. They’re the people talking about how their “art collective”, which is totally not just him and his bar buddies who constantly talk about their horrible ideas that they never have time to finish (even though they’re always just wandering around the city), and are totally not just trying to get laid. They’re the kind of guys who bring girls to coffee shops and talk about “a philosophical concept” they’ve been “trying to wrap their head around” or the “project” they’re “trying to get off the ground”, but totally aren’t just trying to get laid. Honestly, I’d rather spend the rest of my life with unwashed hicks who alternate between talking about fishing, NASCAR, and hating black people, because at least they aren’t full of fucking bullshit. I seriously can’t go to certain places downtown because this kind of blatant horseshit literally makes me physically ill.
Now, they’re moving onto ruining my hobby with psuedo-philosophical crap.
Take, for example, Passage, by Jason Rohrer. The “game” endeavors to tell the story of life within an early CGA-graphic style (think King’s Quest). There is no real storyline or narrative, so all you have is the game itself. The game is about walking right. You walk right, then you have a wife that walks right with you, then she dies, then you die. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the point, it’s a simple simulation of life shown in a video game. Artistic? Yes, much in the same way as when you’re in 8th grade and think you’ve come up with the totally original idea of image as metaphor. Fun? Of course not.
Therein lies the problem; why do the creators of these so-called “art games” not realize that art can actually is aesthetically pleasing? Creating “avant garde” or “nontraditional” art is nowadays overdone to the point of being more cliche than traditional art. It’s actually looped around to the point where it would be fresh and original if someone created a piece of visual art that was actually beautiful instead of “forcing you to take a skewed interpretation of reality” or something. I think the problem is that our society has made it too easy for people without talent to be praised as talented.
Talent doesn’t necessarily have to come in the form of traditional skill, of course; to relate this to video games (which I doubt I’ve done a very good job of so far), what I mean is that you don’t have to be able to create poly-rendered mipmap anti-aliased z-buffers in order to create something with meaning. It doesn’t matter if it looks like crap, or has a terrible soundtrack, or even if it’s buggy. It can still have meaning and be enjoyable. However, many arthouse “game” developers miss this point, and think as long as something has a philosophical theme, even if it’s an incredibly cliche and amateur theme, it’s automatically great art. Just because you use a lot of five-dollar words in the title and have quotes from Nietzsche doesn’t mean you’ve created art. The opposite is also true; a game doesn’t cease to be art or is devoid of deep meaning just because the game is fun or even simplistic. Look at Mega Man 9. Beyond just being fun, I think the game has deep meaning in that it is meant to inspire the same feeling of wonderment and fun the player would have had as a kid playing the original series, or even to inspire that same feeling in players who never got a chance to enjoy it when they were younger. By returning to the aesthetic values of such games intentionally, rather than by necessity, the designers have made a conscious artistic choice, thus making an entirely valid piece of art in the medium, possibly even more valid (depending on the definition being used) because they actually managed to create something that exists within the medium of video games, rather than just being a game-like creation.
I think the reason why this is so difficult to understand is that many of these artists misunderstand the medium. That’s completely understandable; most other popular forms of art are very simple. A painting is paint on anything. A movie is anything that is filmed. But a video game is not just anything on a computer that requires input. It’s possible to stretch the traditional definition of a painting or a movie because the technical definition allows it. The technical definition of a game is as follows:
“a competitive activity involving skill, chance, or endurance on the part of two or more persons who play according to a set of rules, usually for their own amusement or for that of spectators.”
Obviously, many arthouse “games” do not fit under this definition. This being the technical definition, it’s not possible to expand it to include things that are not that, just how you can’t change the technical definition of banana to mean carburator. Believe me, I’ve tried. The repair cost $2800.
If you change the definition to mean “any art that requires user input”, that would include all kinds of art that obviously is not a game. Take, for example, Yoko Ono’s Ceiling Piece, well known as the work that intrigued John Lennon and led to their relationship. The piece is a ladder that reaches the ceiling, where a magnifying glass hangs. You are meant to climb the ladder and pick up the magnifying glass (already, this is far more interactivity than most arthouse games offer). Upon picking up the glass and holding it up to the ceiling, the word “yes” is found. Obviously this is not a video game. If you stretch the definition to include anything that requires user input on a computer, then I’m enjoying art right now, by using Internet Explorer on my shitty work computer.
Of course, maybe this is just splitting hairs. We don’t have to use a technical definition, because art cannot always be defined in technical terms. This is true, but the problem there is that “game” can be defined in technical terms. I can’t stand it when people talk about how they work in the medium of video games. Unless you’re actually making a game, you are not working in the medium of video games. You are creating interactive visual art. There’s a huge difference. This can be rectified! You can create an actual game to carry your message. Do you know how I know this? Because games have been doing it for over 20 years. What’s the difference between Rod Humble’s grossly pretentious Stars Over Half-Moon Bay: The Gentle Bite of the Ouroboros and, say, 187 Ride or Die? One is a game, and one is not, although they’re both at an equal level of fun. Also, one is stupid, while the other is retarded. There’s a panoply of differences. They both make artistic points, so just because one is pretensious and one is dumb doesn’t mean one is more artistically valid than the other. One does, however, succeed in existing in the medium it claims to exist in.
To wrap this aimless rant up, I guess what I’m trying to say is that, for the most part, the whole art games “movement” is utterly full of horseshit. Arthouse Games, a blog concerning the movement, sums up everything I hate about it. The tagline of the site is “Insisting that our medium can reach beyond entertainment”. That would be fine, if designers and gamers had been doing that (and doing a much better job at it, for that matter) for years, or even if they were at least actually using video games as a medium.
Ok, I feel better now. Back to dick jokes and 80s references.
Optimus Prime? More like OptPENIS Prime. lolol
ZOMG
Prepare for an announcement of pants-shittingly huge proportions.
=O
The 10 Biggest Asshole Bosses in Gaming – Grand Finale!
1: Horace Belger (Final Fight)
Hooooooooooly shit.
Horace Belger is the leader of the Mad Gear Gang, best known as the only street gang to have every member murdered by the mayor. To cover for this, Belger pretends to be a businessman.
A handicapped businessman.
Yes, he pretends to be handicapped. And also, yes, that is a crossbow.
Horace Belger pretends to be handicapped so he won’t get beat up. And really, what kind of ruse would work better? Imagine the news the night Haggar walked down the street and killed everybody he saw to save his daughter. “Well, if you’re just joining us, Mayor Mike Haggar has ended his brutal killing spree by dropkicking paraplegic philanthropist and businessman Horace Belger out of a 40th story window.” What if it was an election year? What kind of reelection campaign do you run? “Mike Haggar: Tough on Crime, Tough on Cripples.” I don’t think there’s a spin doctor powerful enough to fight that kind of public image. The only way Haggar could save his incumbency would be to literally threaten the voters. “Vote for me, or… you’re next.“
Biggest Display of Dicketry:
Surprisingly, there is actually a worse fate than being known as the guy who pushed a crippled businessman out a window, and that would be to be known as the person who recrippled the recovered paraplegic. Sadly, Haggar has that as a bullet point on his resume as well. In Mighty Final Fight, Belger is a cyborg with robotic legs. To most people, that’s just going to be how a rich man overcame his handicap after being defenstrated, but the truth is he just wanted a new way to fuck up Haggar’s image. That’s why he is truly sultan among assholes.
The 10 Biggest Asshole Bosses in Gaming – Part 9
2: Fun (World of Warcraft)
This is another one of those creative boss fights you rarely see in games, like most of Shadow of the Colossus, or the battle against Giygas in Earthbound. Instead of just using the regular game mechanics to fight, the game requires you to rely on your creative senses to find a clever way to beat the enemy.
Because the core of WoW, of course, is mind-numbing, repetitive, tedious work, a lot of people don’t realize that the true boss of the game isn’t the difficult enemy they’ve right clicked on and watched the game fight for them 10 times a day for the past week. The true boss is fun. In your quest to destroy fun, you have to do the same 3 quests (kill mob A, run item A to location B, run item A to location B, C, D, E, and F, then back to A), over and over and over again, from different people and for different clothes. The objective, rather than to be a delivery boy or pest exterminator, is to bore yourself into a coma. Theoretically, once you complete enough quests, you’ll either lose your mind or successfully conquer fun forever. So far, however, fun remains elusive. Well, for WoW players at least.
Biggest Display of Dicketry: Constantly tempting players with enticements of communication with other people and activities such as bowling. Only the most hardcore players can successfully avoid these lures by pooping in socks and never sleeping or bathing.
The 10 Biggest Asshole Bosses in Gaming – Part 8
3: Blind the Thief (The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past)
This isn’t a topic I like to talk about much so I’ll keep it short.
I fucked Blind the Thief.
He disguised himself in the form of a girl, and I rescued him. We talked for a while, really got to know each other, and then we fucked.
Obviously, as I led him out of the dungeon, the light hit him, and he freaked out and turned into his real form. I scrubbed and scrubbed but I just wasn’t getting clean. I’ve been in therapy for 4 years. And, of course, by therapy, I mean I became a raging alcoholic with repressed memories.
Whiskey makes the demons go away. I need a drink.
Biggest Display of Dicketry: He didn’t call the next day.
The 10 Biggest Asshole Bosses in Gaming – Part 7
4: The Latin Alphabet (Elmo’s Letter Adventure)
The basic premise of Sesame Street, if you are unaware, is that terrifying monsters teach kids to read by entertaining them and talking on their level instead of talking down to them. Or, rather, that was the premise when I was growing up. Now the premise is Elmo, a monster with a sub-3-year-old intellect and a nonexistant grasp on the concept of the personal pronoun talks to kids like a dumber version of themselves and teaches them about basic concepts in a slightly condescending way.
Of course, this is incredibly successful with 3-year-olds, as a result of the fact that Fisher-Price keeps making more and more merchandise based on him. Elmo is like the Thomas Edison of toys, every year coming out with some ridiculously advanced new toy just in time for Christmas (although they’re never as successful as the company seems to think they are), as well as a version of… well, everything. If it exists, you can get it with Elmo on it.
Tragically, this is true even of video games. Of course, that depends on your definition of “game”.
I’ve never been one to mock edutainment games. Or rather, I am, because they offer easy laughs, but I understand that I’m not their target audience. However, I think there’s a point to which even kids lose sympathy with a game’s designer, and this game manages that difficult task.
Elmo’s Letter Adventure is the story of Elmo’s quest to identify and eliminate all letters of the alphabet. The alphabet, as you know, has a history of sinister behavior, from being used to write the letter ordering the Holocaust to a pending implication in aiding communication between terrorists on 9/11. Elmo recognized the threat of this standardized set of letters, and set out to eliminate them the only way he knew how: make a game so bad it would cause every generation after its release to stop learning the alphabet.
You have no idea how deep the letter conspiracy goes. They hide in plain site, as you can see here.
Sadly, even exposure to this sinister set of symbols allows people to learn them. For example, take this Amazon user review:
” THIS IS DEFINETLY JO GAME MAN!!!, December 14, 2005
YO DUDE, THIS GAME IS AMAZING. IF YOU DO NOT BUY IT YOU ARE TOTALLY WACK, BIG TIME. I AM 13 YEARS OLD AND I HAVE BEATEN TIS GAME EXACTLY 971….. WAIT….. 972 TIMES AND I LOVE IT. THIS IS THE BEST GAME ON THE PLANET ”
As you can see, not only did they learn the letters, they learned only the uppercase ones. This increases the alphabet’s potency over 9000%! As a result, the alphabet, no doubt in collusion with the Majestic-12 or possibly the New World Order (best known for its stint in World Championship Wrestling), continues unabated.
Biggest Display of Dicketry:
About halfway through, there’s this little son-of-a-bitch run of letters called LMNO. I know the alphabet, as most people, through the alphabet song, so as a result, I thought LMNO was one letter until I was 15. Fucking pinko letters.
Brief Hiatus
I’m going on a brief hiatus until I beat Chrono Trigger. That’s a lame reason, I know, but… honestly I don’t know how to end this sentence. So, once I beat it for the 19th time, I’ll come back and post about it. kthxbai
…and apparently you play as Persian Magneto.
