u r mr. gay PART 2

So, for the first Wii game purchase since June, I picked up Super Mario Galaxy.

What's that? No games I wanted to play? Not quite. There are plenty of games I wanted to play, I just didn't want to pay $50 a pop for them. I would have liked to FINALLY sit down with Twilight Princess and make it happen, see if it can make up for Ocarina without having so much open expanse of nothingness like Windwaker. Metroid Prime 3 really appealed to me for a conventional game taken to the controls (instead of a Gamecube conversion). Mario Party, Super Paper Mario, Cooking Mama, My Sims, NiGHTS, My Little Pony (ha ha, little joke there). I'm just not going to pony up $50 each for what , frankly, I'd be pressed to spend $40 for. PARTICULARLY the older stuff like Zelda (still $50) and Super Paper Mario (still half a Benjamin).

If you ask me, some DS games are pretty pricey, too. I know I don't have to pinch pennies but maybe I've seen too many games find themselves in the bargain bin at a 90% price cut. I mean, I can't even CONSIDER buying PC games most of the time. There are very very very few exceptions. And, yeah, there's always used but I try not to buy used if I can avoid it. Used games aren't exactly great for the industry and I like my games virgin, not ones with potential flaws and problems. I remember picking up a used copy of Klonoa and the 2nd to last level of the game has music that's got pops and cracks from a scratched disk that was filled in to not look scratched but was still damaged. By the time I got to the end I couldn't return it due to story policy, but even if I sweet talked the guy there I'd only be able to get store credit since they didn't have a billion copies of it around.

But I digress.

Always.

Anyway, SMG. I didn't like how it required me to upgrade the Wii. Once a system is compromised, in the past, there might have been protections in the game to detect the hacked hardware and refuse to run, but with live flashing, now it has the ability to brick itself. Live-flash systems are here to stay so I guess we'd better get used to it. Hence my "don't hack until you can get two if you run into problems" policy. I didn't do anything wrong to my system, but those forced upgrades just make me feel uncomfortable, like I need to pass inspection or something. And it would get carried on the flagship game of the past holiday season.

Of course, maybe the game uses some undocumented features that would crash without a shim in place on the system's OS? Still too cynical? Ok, maybe it uses some documented features in a strange way that could cause glitches if not patched. Ok, a little better.

But this is about the game, now, isn't it? Not the techno-politics behind it.

First, the graphics. Why do I start here? Well, because the graphics... ehhhh, I don't think they're that great. Starlit backgrounds and distant astronomical phenomena looked pretty bad, IMHO. Shading and coloring looks technically poor. In the opening sequence I saw filter aliasing almost as bad as the macro-blocking during Sunshine's opening video making me almost wish for video. The resolution isn't there (only 480p) so the next thing would be anti-aliasing and there just isn't any going on. It's not the first Wii game I saw that made me wish it was more of a graphical powerhouse, but, the high contrast really shows up poorly. Meanwhile, Sunshine didn't have a whole lot of high-contrast spots to show off the graphical limitations of the system.

Now, technical limitations aside, I love the art direction. Colors and effects are vibrant and fluid. I guess if you want to tie it in to the aforementioned problems, the framerate is almost always smooth as butter. I think I had maybe 10 seconds of slowdown within 2.5 hours of game play, not bad. The newer more organic look is tremendous while still doing artificial stuff really well. Halos, pseudo-fur, true reflections instead of just cube mapping, all really show off the attention to the shaders for a balance of look and performance. One of the first levels on a little bump-mapped cratered microplanet with holes in the surface leading to certain doom just impressed me tremendously with the look and the framerate.

Remember when cel shading was novel and new? And the kind of air it imparted to what might have been ordinary looking 3d games? It feels like that new spirit without the overly obvious gimmick of cel shading.

The sound is pretty good. With Galaxy, the potential exists for many different types of worlds and the music selected is perfect. Always. It doesn't stick out like a sore thumb, but, it's also not totally noteworthy. I pay super attention to the old-school fanservice tunes, as they were intended to do, but the rest of the tracks so far don't hold out that far. Which is the problem with audio fanservice to begin with. It doesn't irritate me, but I don't exactly see myself lusting for the OST.

Now, the controls. Muddy. The camera angles and art direction look to disorient the player quite a bit. And I LOVE the feeling. I haven't played a game that gave me the same kind of feelings that I get at the top of a roller coaster looking down anticipating the gravitational forces of which I would soon enjoy. Mario is upside down, he's left, he's right, it's like a camera control needs to be a full 360x360 control style, like the Novint Falcon. But they don't give it to you and, frankly, you don't need it. It's kind of annoying you don't always have camera correction ability, but I never really found myself using the C button to right myself.

It does a great job of portraying the feeling that things aren't right in the universe. It's a legitimate film-making technique, too, so it's no wonder it works. So what am I complaining about if I like the disorienting awkward camera angles and it suits the game perfectly (and they turn it off when inappropriate)? The directional stick. If you need 360x360 for a camera, you need it for motion. There are at least a few jumps and movements I needed to try a few times until I got the direction I wanted. I'm not sure if it's that I'm new at the game and need to learn at it or if it just really is that motion turns out to be based on your guestimate of direction, but, either way, it's not the tight little apple of a control scheme that I learned to appreciate in Sunshine, which I found tighter than 64. When you fuck up a jump in Sunshine, you know it's YOUR FAULT. Here? Uhhh, depends. It really feels like they robbed from Paul (classic control) to pay Peter (motion control).

For the record, I didn't hate Sunshine. I thought it was a fine Mario game and among the top Gamecube games. Easy. Personally, I think it's become "cool" to shit on Sunshine just like it's "cool" to gush over any polished turd named Zelda.

And I can't help but go back to the disorienting camera stuff. You're so close to the action sometimes it's not always obvious you can just walk off the edge and stick on the surface instead of plummeting to certain death. In general, Mario games tend to start with the camera close in so you can get the "ooh ahh" factor and then scale out slowly so that by the end of the game you can just see more of what's going on around you... which helps because there is just so much more that is out to kill you. Actually, now that I think about it, lots of games follow that camera-closeness pattern. So hopefully it'll correct itself as I get farther. For the time being, I've got plenty of lives and losing one or two there doesn't seem to punish too badly at least at this stage in the game.

That's about it. I'm enjoying it and I'll give the rest when I'm done with it.

What else is going on? Not much. Not at all.

*cough*
1) had a date with a stripper (yes another one) but she stood me up
2) phonesex with a 16 year old
3) swearing off of waffles for the rest of time.
*cough*

Like I said. Not much.

FAILGET

Ok, so I recently checked out J-List again. No, it wasn't the advertising on 4chan. No, I didn't need some overpriced porn at a $1 to 250円 exchange rate.

I used to go there a lot, actually. I used to SPEND a lot there back in the day, actually. Like, 10 years ago actually. As a whole I just plain used to spend a lot on porn. A LOT. I've got like two years straight of every issue of Milky Drop. Huh? Oh, sitting in storage, naturally. Some I've never so much as removed the clear plastic cover on. I guess collecting and being a consumerist fuck was more important than seeing a bunch of porn, huh? Gee, I sure hope there isn't a golden ticket in any of them that I never redeemed for my free permanent harem.

Anyway, I stopped buying from him when I learned about how Peter Payne ruined Anime Expo one year when he picked up loli-hentai off another vendor's table and showed it to a Disney cop affirming that it was ALL the medium is. I don't remember the complete drama filled details other than it was enough to get a lot of showings canceled at the Disney-owned location at the time and pissed off a lot of people, and that he was no longer invited as a vendor from then on.

Anyway, during my last and regrettable trip to California for Anime Expo I was surprised to see him there and figured if the con can forgive him then surely I can. I bought something off him for way too much money and did manage to get it home without it being stolen from me, which is more than I can say for my original copies of Advance Wars DS and Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow (I had 100% in that one MOTHER FUCKING BITCH*).

(* I just got mad about it again just now. LOL. Look, I call myself a gamer, but as put so eloquently by Zero Punctuation's Editorial on Super Mario Galaxy ** , I have a life. So I'm not typically a 100% completion gamer. There are few (and VERY FEW) exceptions. Zelda 1, 2, and 3. Super Metroid. Megaman X series. Castlevania's "metroidvania" games. THAT'S IT. All 151 251 386 493 Pokemon? Nah. 120 stars shines stars? Pshaw. Complete set of armor? If I can't buy it at the bazaar, nah. Unlock every song in DDR? Boi, don't make me bitch slap you. And with Castlevania DS the first 95% of collected souls were fun and easy but the next 4% were a grind and the last 1 was a pain in the motherfuck.)

(** I happen to disagree that there's no place else for Mario to go after space. The clear answer is time. Time travelling Mario, this time for real and not as some excuse to learn shit about history. And, when that happens, Mario either had jumped the shark, is jumping the shark, or will jump the shark, all within a one-game distance, as Sonic CD vs. Sonic 2 or Sonic 3 so clearly demonstrated.)

Anyway, time has come again that I need a 2008 wall calendar and had trouble finding the next Shirow Masamune calendar at the usual suspects. I've had the Masamune calendar every year since 2004. And, admittedly, the 2007 one sucked. The man draws anime women really fucking great: the way he blends CG and drawn art is amazing inspires me to pine over wanting to draw (which I can't). The 2007 one was too clusterfucked with series promotions and not so much illustrations. It was also a smaller format calendar with lower quality print on it so it just wasn't as good as the 2006 one. I blame it due to it getting picked up by Black Horse Comics instead of good ol' Tide-Mark. AND with that, it's probably because Shirow stopped illustrating? Maybe? I haven't heard of anything. The dude's probably making a fortune with his properties getting taken over and expended and kicking back some royalties. Oh well.

So the time has come to find a new calendar. But, who? What subject? I don't want an out-and-out porn calendar. Not clever enough. In searching, though, I found a Shirow Masamune 2008 calendar! Holy crap! At J-List! WOW! So I open the link and, nope, not there.

I remember way back in my [more] naive days I actually wrote them and informed them of the "problem". "I looked on page two of the doujinshi category and there's a VCD on there!" Even got a response back, too. "Uhh, we're looking into it." Little did I know that it was their version of the Amazon recommendation system: show something marginally related in the hopes that they will become educated and perhaps put items like it on their shopping list in addition to what they're browsing for. Searches usually had unrelated items thrown in for just that reason, too.

The trap, she had sprung. It was a page of calendars and, on the side, keywords for related projects. A pitiful SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, trick to get more hits than you otherwise wouldn't have. Counterproductive because if you search for something and it turns out to not really be there you won't buy anything else? Maybe, but I guess SOMEONE SOMETIME ago did that, didn't find what they wanted, but instead decided to buy a Hello Kitty cock-ring or whatever so from then on they continued to use that same tactic, quite similar to that original munged search/category trick.

Anyway, after the Firefox page search for Shirow Masamune and seeing it on the side, I scroll up and see what looks like a personals ad. ADS? ON MY INTERBUTTS?! I KEEL THEM ALL! Well, it turns out to be a true-affiliate ad, where the ad is literally hosted on the server whose page embeds them. Sounds strange, I know, but normal ads consist of pages with blocks sold to brokers who then find the ads to fill it with at that moment of time. This is a more conventional ad in which the site itself set aside the space for A SINGLE specific ad. Ah, the stuff you learn being a ex-full-time web developer.

So the personal ad had three japanese women writing about how they want to meet a new friend and practice English and all. I smirked and scrolled up and saw Peter Payne's face and a blurb about how it's really good or whatever so at that point I'm wondering what's so great about it.

Well, here it is: J-List Friends. Pretty amazing, huh? Thankfully for you, you don't need to think it's amazing or pretty much form any opinions whatsoever because I formed them for you.

Thank me later.