Level Grinding Has Nothing To Do With Skill

I have heard more than a few times that RPGs don't require the same level of skill as other games do to complete. I disagree with this, the difficulty of a traditional RPG is hidden in the long term planning. Taking a team through a quest for 50-80 hours, micro managing items and stats and planning ahead can be hard, and the good role playing games make you prove your long term planning ability with an endgame that tests it. However, grinding levels has absolutely nothing to do with skill or ability, and losing a boss fight because I'm under leveled makes me angry. Walking around a dungeon, intentionally fighting the same group of mobs over and over just to increase my stats a little is mind numbing, and absolutely a relic of gaming past.

I'm playing through FF3 right now, and even in the early stages of the game, the grinding required of you is unreasonable. Up top here is a picture of the boss Salamander. He is brutal. Salamander attacks twice a turn and has a fire breath attack that has a dmg range of 175-250 WHICH HE CAN CAST TWICE A TURN. His speed is higher than yours can ever be at this point in the game, so he will go first every round, and his HP is around 4500, meaning even with 4 Blizzaras cast per round (his weakness) you still have to survive 5 turns with this fucking guy. I've read the message boards, I've dug through the internet and every single gamer who has completed FF3 says the same thing, you will spend half of your play time grinding levels. 

I did finally beat the Salamander boss after grinding in the Molten Cave for 2 hours and resetting the game every time he cast fire breath twice in one turn. The game immediately follows Salamander with this guy, Hein. He also attacks twice per turn, and can switch weaknesses on the fly. He can do this mid turn, unlike you, who has pre-selected every move. He will kill a player each round, and with no life spells and unpurchasable Phoenix Downs (you can only find them in dungeons and shit), you will need to beat him before your supply runs out. According to the inter webs, I'm in for another 2-3 hours of random battle after random battle if I hope to beat this guy.

Obnoxious level grinding is a thing of the past, and while I expect it from early FFs, there is no place for it in modern gaming. One of the reasons we all embraced the western RPG movement was because it did away with all of those silly "rules" that JRPGs forced on us. Why does the protagonist have to be a teenager? Why are there always so many dragons in outer space? How come I actually have to dedicate time to grinding levels just because your boss fight difficulty doesn't increase at a similar rate as my party? 

Addicted To Destiny

Just like Rust, Destiny is a social experiment that I have fallen head over heels in love with. There has never been a game quite like this one and since I have put a significant amount of time into building my character, I am starting to experience the true substance of Destiny. As soon as you hit level 20, the game completely changes, altering the way you level up and unlocking exclusive high level factions and missions. 

Now that I have hit the higher levels, I've been noticing that my PvP results have been improving. Completing Crucible bounties is getting easier, and the multiplayer is fun and addictive when you aren't constantly dying. 

I found a soccer ball just resting in an obscure corner of the Citadel. I can't find any mention of it on the message boards or Destiny Wikis. I kicked it around for a while, I certainly hope it wasn't important.

The Destiny experience is made better by their iOS app. I joined a group specifically for dads and you can read all of the extensive lore that the game offers.

I am hopelessly addicted. Not quite as life consuming as Fallout or Skyrim, but Destiny is getting 100% of my game time, and I love it when a game demands your full attention.

Ha. Cracks scanned.

P.T.

The first thing I did after turning on my PS4 for the first time was download the P.T. demo. Hideo Kojima has made Silent Hill my favorite horror franchise with his understanding of how to make a video game scary, instead of just making a horror movie that you can play. Now Kojima has released a demo of the Silent Hill game still in production that is also being written by Guillermo Del Torro. It is fucking horrifying.

What makes Silent Hill games special is that they embrace the medium. Silent Hill is a video game, so the scares it provides are based on the fact that you are sitting on a couch controlling the character's movements. Resident Evil on the other hand, makes a cutscene with some gore in it then tries to scare you with jumps, just like a movie. Silent Hill games never act like a movie, instead they fuck with your pause screen, read your memory card, and give you long tension filled environments that the player must find the courage to explore. 

P.T. continues this ideology, giving the player an endless loop through a series of hallways inside the home of a murdered family. Everytime you arrive at the end of the hallway and open the door, the loop repeats with an ever escalating number of terrifying mind-fucks each time. This little demo looks great, is genuinely disturbing, and pure Silent Hill.

Silent Hill protagonists are usually bad people. The player may take control of a man who has murdered his girlfriend, or is responsible for the loss of his daughter. The town and magic of Silent Hill is cryptic but seems to serve as punishment for those who have committed horrible acts, and this P.T. demo puts you in the shoes of a dad who has murdered his wife and kids. You suffer with him, just like every game in the series, but what makes Silent Hill so unique is that while your character suffers and descends into madness, you know they deserve it. I can't wait.

Hermits And Cults

I spend a lot of time reading and thinking about hermits. I always read stories about people who have encountered one and I am always very interested in what psychologists have to say about why certain people are drawn to a life of seclusion. I am also addicted to any and everything to do with cults. When The History Channel or A&E run an hour long special about Jonestown or Aum Shinrikyo I am a 7 year old with candy. I have no idea why I am so captivated by stuff like this, I am super squeamish with no desire to live in the forest (they don't have video games there) and to boot I am utterly devoid of religion or any sense of a higher power whatsoever. So why am I so eager to learn about people who either devote their entire lives to a dude with nice teeth who thinks he might be Jesus's dad or completely remove themselves from society completely?

I read an article on Gizmodo today that I think every person who is even remotely interested in modern cults should read. Here is the link to the article itself written by Ashley Feinberg, where she reveals that the infamous Heaven's Gate cult still has a website that is STILL maintained to this day. This was the cult that believed a spaceship was behind the Hale-Bopp Comet and the only way to board it was to put on Nikes and drink some arsenic. You can email the two people who are still alive and still members who run the site, and they will actually respond to all inquiries. The article is overstuffed with things I never knew about Heaven's Gate including responses to Feinberg's questions from actual Heaven's Gate members. 

Michael Finkel wrote a story in GQ this month about the Maine hermit that was captured just a couple years ago. He had been living in the forests of Maine for 27 years without any human contact whatsoever. During the harsh winter he stole supplies he needed to survive from the surrounding recreational campsites and homes. The community was aware he existed, every citizen of the town of North Pond had been robbed by the hermit, but nobody could catch in the act or find him. The short summary of the article;

"For nearly thirty years, a phantom haunted the woods of Central Maine. Unseen and unknown, he lived in secret, creeping into homes in the dead of night and surviving on what he could steal. To the spooked locals, he became a legend—or maybe a myth. They wondered how he could possibly be real. Until one day last year, the hermit came out of the forest"

They found him. He was arrested on a bazillion counts of burglary and put in jail to await trial. A man who hasn't spoken a word to another human in 27 years was now being housed in a jail among dozens of other inmates. The article is about Michael Finkel interviewing this man in jail, and about just how odd a conversation can be when your interviewee says that Chernobyl is the most recent world event he knows of. You also get to witness the hermit fall into a sad depression as his wilderness life is taken away from him. He truly was happy out there, alone. Here's the link;

The Strange Tale Of The North Pond Hermit

The Rundown

Dwayne The Rock Johnson is a hero of mine (he ranks below Shatner but above Kel Mitchell), so when he decided to stop wrestling and pursue his acting career, I vowed to support him. Beginning with The Scorpion King, I have to date seen every single Rock movie. None of the people that I get to see personally every day seem to care about The Rock's acting career like I do, so I decided to satisfy my need to rant about DTRJ here in a series of reviews of his films. Let's start with The Rundown.

The Rundown is by far my favorite Rock movie, despite it being only his 2nd film ever. While not as violent or gory as some of the other wrestler-turned-action-star movies, The Rundown has awesome fight scenes. There's a fight with an entire college football team in a hip night club that involves The Rock sliding a bus tray under a fat guy's foot so that he will do the splits, and later there is a fight with a hispanic midget with a whip. Also, The Rundown has the triumphant return of beloved character actor Ernie Reyes Jr.! In The Rundown, Ernie plays a pit fighting South American leader of a rebel militia, but you may remember him as.....

The Korean pizza boy from Secret of The Ooze!!! Added to the delightful turtle nostalgia, The Rundown also has in my opinion the best Christopher Walken scene ever. I started my streak of Rock movies with the best one, which was great at the time, but of course it could only go downhill from there.

The Rundown also has a sweet Schwarzenegger cameo.

Wild & Crazy Kids

I'm 27 now, and I've started noticing all of the more successful people younger than myself. I was reading an article this morning about an accomplished NASA scientist who was just 25 and I immediately thought, "It must be because he doesn't spend his days off binge-watching hours and hours of Wild & Crazy Kids."

Phoebe had a doctor's appointment Wednesday afternoon where she received two shots. Her pediatrician said that she would probably sleep that night and most of the next day too because of the medicine. Yesterday, I was left alone in the house with a sleeping baby for 8 hours and instead of studying astrophysics or building rockets like successful twenty-somethings, I drained a bowl and sat down to an uninterrupted 4 HOURS OF WILD & CRAZY KIDS. I had a great time and this man here has a playlist of every single episode in order, but why? Why is this something I desire? How come whenever I am presented with a significant amount of free time I immediately run to early 90's Nickelodeon youth-centered game shows? Somewhere deep inside this puzzle lies a great atheist statement, perhaps it is further evidence of the absence of God due to the pointlessness of my life experience. Why would that God guy make me if I'm just going to watch a young Omar Gooding's career with all of my spare time? Perhaps that is my purpose.

My New PS4 And The First Few Hours Of Destiny

Amazon promised me that my white PS4 Destiny bundle would arrive the day it was available in stores, and at 9:05am Tuesday morning, there it was. The startlingly pretty box stood out in the middle of my porch like an elegant Prothean beacon. I was just the tiniest bit annoyed that my mail carrier placed a box with a 500$ price tag unguarded right in front of my brown drug dealer neighbors. My Amazon settings clearly state that I would prefer to sign for my packages. I am not trying to be a diva, but I STILL don't have my Dez Bryant jersey because some cokie lifted it off my exposed porch.

The PS2 came out in the winter of 1999, and in Chicago it was near impossible to get your hands on one. Despite the release date being early December and having the money and desire to purchase one, I didn't get my hands on it until the morning of December 31st after waiting in an outdoor Best Buy line for 7 hours. Opening the PS4 yesterday kinda felt the same way. I have waited and waited, patiently and responsibly not spending that significant of an amount of money so soon after Phoebe's birth. That feeling of turning on a Playstation for the first time after waiting for so long, to be delighted in how futuristic it feels is an experience I think only Sony can provide. I missed the millennium because I was on a 24 hour straight PS2 launch game binge, and last night I stayed up until 3am playing Destiny as if I didn't have two kids to take to and from pre-school today. 

Destiny is great. I'm hesitant to start listing any complaints because I'm only at level 4, but so far I don't feel like a part of any community. Not yet. Kotaku has a great list of tips for new Destiny players here, and IGN has a very detailed description of each class here. If you happen to give a shit about my opinion, then I suggest not branching out of the story missions until you hit level 4. Nothing is available you you in those first 3 levels and exploring on your own is a waste of time. You need a ship, decent armor and a little story progression to unlock the different stores and locations. I picked Warlock and went with a look that screams American in a world with no countries. 

I Find It Impossible To Hate Amazon

I don't typically like corporations. If a single store or small chain sells something I need, I will gladly pay a little extra so that Walmart doesn't get any of my money. Just like a good liberal, I look into the practices and history of companies that I intend to buy from, and weigh whether or not I can ethically live with myself for supporting them. I shop at Target frequently despite their hazy past because of all the charity they do, and my childhood neighborhood in Chicago has directly benefitted from their donations. I don't eat at Chic-Fil-A (I have once) because of the way they shit on their employees, refuse full-time positions so that they can dodge health insurance, and their CEO hates queers. Yes, they do a lot for the community, but it's a list of pros and cons, and the cons are numerous.

Amazon is another company that my fellow bleeding Democrat vaginas have been screaming at me to stop patronizing. I understand that they have taken over American retail as we know it and are secretly investing in a drone delivery idea, but Amazon is too convenient to hate. I know it makes me an enormous hypocrite, but for fuck's sake, the Destiny PS4 bundle I bought yesterday will be on my doorstep TOMORROW. The PS4 Destiny bundle isn't released until tomorrow, and Amazon can have it in my house on the exact day it comes out. For free. 

Can Target's online service do this? Sure, but the overnight shipping would be a 30$ charge. Amazon included the delivered-the-day-of-release shipping option for free because they know nobody else can offer that. Yes, that is corporate strong-arming but holy shit is it convenient for me. Just like every hard-working tax-paying American, my morals are only preceded in importance by my money. 

Fox Mulder Is An Oldsmobile Man

Here's Mulder driving a 1993 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera

Just like the dad from A Christmas Story, Fox Mulder (who has been my inspiration for so many years) is an Oldsmobile guy. I know you're sitting there thinking, "How in the world could you know that?", but I assure you I watch A LOT of X-Files, and I love spending time doing investigative reporting on matters that nobody gives a fuck about. 

Here's an Oldsmobile Achieva, driven here by Skinner who is possessed by Mulder's brain in a body-switch

 I suppose it's possible that it is all a coincidence. Mulder and Scully criss cross our nation frequently, and these could all just be rental cars. Or, they could be a sponsor of the show. Those are rational and logical conclusions to come to, and thus have no business being included in any X-Files discussion of any kind. Fox Mulder is an Oldsmobile man, and he doesn't let impossible distances and impracticality stand in the way of a smooth, dependable drive.

Mulder driving an Oldsmobile Intrigue

He's even driving a 1998 Oldsmobile Intrigue in the X-Files Movie! Wake up America!

EDIT: After posting my theory, I was emailed a tip from an anonymous source; this video.

Oliver Starts School

Oliver's first day of school included parents in the classroom for the duration of the day. We shuffled in, and I sat down in a chair made for a 4 year old next to a giant toy castle that I desperately wanted to play with. The kids all gathered together as the teacher called roll call for the first time in their tiny lives, and us parents watched on, most seemed apathetic, others seemed like this moment absolutely must be on Facebook, and just a couple of us, myself included were watching in awe as our kids got excited about being taught something. 

Oliver was outstanding. He recognized his name and put it on the paper apple tree. He correctly told the teacher that 5+3=8, and when asked to talk about himself to the rest of the class, he spoke of his sister and living with his mom and dad. Oliver played with the viking castle with me for a couple minutes before asking to go play with the plastic tools with a couple of the other kids. I let him go, leaving me to shoot the little fake cannon at some barbies that I had set up.

I don't like the other parents. I hear them talking behind me, it's all about social media and celebrity gossip. I hear a mom speaking about how she's been a single mother for 7 years, and the dad she is telling this too is nodding, struggling to seem interested, just like he did when we exchanged boring whatevers earlier. There's a fat mom chasing her daughter around, taking pictures with her cellphone, never letting the little girl actually play. This is my son's first day of school ever, but this is also a new reality for me too. It won't just be picking up and dropping off, I will be a member of some classroom parent group for the next 2 decades at least. 

Oliver wanted donuts after school, I said sure. He had 5.

Final Fantasy 3

It took me 30+ hours to complete Final Fantasy 2, and now that I'm a couple of hours into FF3 I realize just how tragic the previous adventure's leveling system truly was. My FF3 party levels up when they accumulate enough experience points, and their magic damage is determined by statistics, not by how many times they have been cast in battle. I feel like I have emerged from 30 hours of hard labor within a copper mine, and a fellow rescued prisoner greeted me with ice cold water and brotherhood. I am enjoying Final Fantasy 3 more than I should be because of just how awful FF2 was. 

This is the first game that Square ever used their "job system" for. While the job system is better known in installments like FF5, FFX-2 or the Tactics games, it began right here, within FF3. You can switch your job on fly in this game, just like later Final Fantasies, but FF3 lays the groundwork for so much more. If you play FF3 and then return to FF9 for instance, you can see the ability system stealing from this earlier piece of the franchise. I love games that are historically important for the industry, and while largely unplayed and unknown, FF3 has a lot of ideas new to that time. 

I have been unable to completely confirm this, but I personally have never seen an earlier game use a specific class that gives you unique options outside of battle. IF you have a thief in your party you can unlock this door.

Ship battles though! The worst idea that you can program into an RPG other than losing HP as you walk (Lunar) is giving you random battles as you sail around the world map. I know that FF4 does away with them so I'm taking comfort in this being the last game that makes this mistake but fuck, it is aggravating.

I Have Completed Final Fantasy 2

The final dungeon in Final Fantasy 2 is called Pandemonium, and I now consider it to be one of the most challenging sections of any old school RPG. Pandemonium is a 10 floor dungeon, but you had to traverse an 8 floor dungeon called the Jade Passage to even get to Pandemonium, with no rest stops or towns or even access to a save point in between. So basically, FF2's endgame is a gargantuan 18 floors of the most difficult and punishing random encounters that the bestiary can provide. Add to this the fact that items don't stack, limiting you to a 50 item inventory and Pandemonium turns into a punishing test of resource management.

Like most retro role playing games, Final Fantasy 2 has an unreasonably high frequency of random battles. For 18 floors, I counted my steps between random battles and the furthest I went without fighting was 6 steps, and that only happened twice. The fights are brutal, just see above. This is a random battle that I received probably a dozen times in Pandemonium. 3 Fenrirs, 2 Frost Lizards and a Great Malboro. Final Fantasy vets would immediately go for the Malboro, fearing it's ability to inflict you with any and every status effect within the game, but the Fenrirs are the deceptively deadly ones. They cast Muddle, a status effect that makes you attack your own party, you know, the party that you've been building up all game, the ones with all of the ultimate weapons? It's a terrible handicap that makes you spend elixirs and ethers post-battle. 

The final boss is the Emperor, and you start to see some of the foundations for the more memorable moments in future Final Fantasy games. The final asshole is an Emperor just like in FF4 and FF6, the airships and steampunk themes start creeping in, and the final battle is in space! The Emperor here is tough, but I used a Blood Sword, a strategy that not all retro Final Fantasy fans use, but I swear by it. Every Final Fantasy game released before 7 has some version of a Blood Sword, a relatively weak weapon that heals the user the equivalent of the damage it deals. The damage output of these swords becomes obsolete quickly, but I find wielding one, (especially in a game like FF2 that allows your characters to dual-wield) slightly tilts the math in your favor. Firion never requires healing, ever, he restores every turn, leaving me with just the burden of managing three party members' hit points instead of four. Firion is in charge of resurrection too, as he is the guy most rarely killed. Also, I suspect this but have found no confirmation, but I think The Emperor is designed to go after the party member with the highest HP, so I had very little trouble with him. He damaged Firion every turn it seemed, and I was able to keep his health at a comfortable level. 

Just like the original Final Fantasy, FF2's real final boss is the dungeon you must defeat in order to get to the final boss. The Emperor survived just eight rounds against a team that I wasn't particularly confident in.

I know for certain that I will never play Final Fantasy 2 again. It is in no way harder than FF1, but the original has so much history behind it, the story of how it saved one of the most influential game developers from going bankrupt. Final Fantasy 1 is important, FF2 wasn't even released in the United States until well after Final Fantasy 8 had come and gone. FF2's stat system sucks, it's too easy to exploit and almost forces a player to give up on offensive magic altogether. I will however, take a little credit for beating what is probably the worst game in the entire series, twice.

My Online Pokemon Deck Has Leveled Up

I've talked about how genius the Pokemon Trading Card Game Online is before, because of it's level playing field. You can't buy cards with your silly Earth money, you can only buy randomized packs with coins earned from within the game itself. Yes, you can exchange promo codes found in real packs of Pokemon cards that can be exchanged online, but again, it only provides you with a randomized pack of cards, nobody automatically gets anything, and I love that.

I've been battling my way through online ranked matches, buying a new booster pack every time I scrape 100 coins together, and tweaking my deck here and there every time I get a new card good enough. My last booster pack happened to have my very first EX card, Tornadus. I got super fucking excited, immediately planning on how I was going to make him the keystone of the deck. However, if you look close enough, you'll quickly realize that Tornadus kinda sucks. Jet Blast is a move that requires 4 energy and only deals 60 damage, the output increases by 30 for each Plasma energy attached to him. I have 2 Plasma energy, and thats after 25+ booster packs. I decided to leave him out of the deck, he's more trouble than he's worth.

Then like beautiful serendipity, I opened another booster pack 100 coins later to discover a Kyurem EX card. It's unbelievably powerful, and just like every EX card, it's hard to maintain. I threw him in the deck and switched some stuff around to make it a lightning/water theme.

This new deck led by Kyurem EX is now 2-0. As you can see here, I got Kyurem EX out early against Physicist77, a guy with a much better record than me. I settled in, got a couple energy retrievals, and started picking his Pokemon off one by one. 

Kyurem EX was never knocked out, and stayed healthy for enough turns for me to get a Blastoise powered up on the bench just in case. I never needed him.

I am so excited about this new deck I've compiled. The versatility of Eevee along with a Master Ball and my new mighty Kyurem makes me extremely confident for the next tournament coming up.

My Ten Favorite Pieces Of Final Fantasy Music

A video game's soundtrack might not be the most important aspect of the experience, but it certainly isn't the least important. Some of the greatest games and the moments within are defined by the music that accompanies them. Final Fantasy and Nobuo Uematsu are pretty much the supreme overlords of video game music, so I wanted to share my absolute favorite tracks from across the franchise, and hopefully help some of the newer gamers aware of some of the masterpieces that preceded them. 

10: Quina's Theme FF9

When you wander into the marsh and meet Quina for the first time, this music takes over the scene completely. Every time I did a QTE about Quina or saw a clip from Quina's past, I would get so excited to hear this badass music. Tribal drums plus monkish chanting with a sprinkle of keyboard silliness. It fits Quina perfectly. 

9: Mysidia FF4

Final Fantasy 4 was for a long time my answer to the "favorite video game of all time" question, and this is the best tune from that epic game. It's a town of wizards, of random townsfolk who have been changed into pigs and toads. It's silly, catchy, and a necessary distraction from the slaughter Cecil brought Mysidia in the game's beginning. 

8: Cosmo Canyon FF7

Final Fantasy 7 is all about fast paced plot development, grueling boss fight gauntlets and the beautiful moments of peaceful serenity in towns between all the action-y parts. When you arrive at Cosmo Canyon, you have just survived the Gold Saucer prison and watched Barrett's best friend die. Junon was a debacle and you had to fight Sepheroth's 1000 mom reincarnated as a lump of sentient flesh in the bowels of a rusty cargo ship. Also, your car broke down in the middle of the desert. Cosmo Canyon offers relaxation, great stores with powerful weapons, and greets you with this awesome ass song. I love Cosmo Canyon, putting my feet up and watching the gang get together around the fire to discuss their next move. This song represents the last great feeling of hope, because after Cosmo Canyon is Nibelheim.

7: The Republic of Bastok FF11

In FF11 you get to pick your starting city, and I picked Bastok, the city of industry. This song plays the second you login, and as the cityscape unfolds in front of you, this song kicks in and you are filled with ambition. The 3 starting cities are in competition with each other, and it always seemed that us players from Bastok were consistently the most successful. I credit the Bastok theme song for that.

6: The Landing FF8

Final Fantasy 8 has the greatest soundtrack in the history of video games. It is a work of art, and every track perfectly describes the images that run along side the music. The Landing is a heart pounding orchestral power that makes Squall's first military deployment that much more tense. I love this song.

5: Crossing Those Hills FF9

It's the overworld music, the song you hear as you traverse the landscape, going from town to dungeon, or chocobo forest to treasure location. I love the way this track makes you feel as if the FF9 universe is infinitely massive. 

4: Blitz Off FF10

Somehow, someway, Uematsu developed a song for Blitzball that actually sounds like it's underwater. Amazing. 

3: Shuffle or Boogie FF8

This is the theme for the best FF side-distraction ever, the Triple Triad card game. This music plays in my head when I pull up next to someone at a red light. I think of this song when I feel challenged by someone, or whenever I play any card game whatsoever. Another monumental song from such a monumental OST.

2: The Sky City Of Bhujerba FF12

I love peaceful town music, Bhujerba's theme from Final Fantasy 12 is so serene. Bhujerba is a very unique place, a city floating amidst the clouds, and exploring it for the first time while hearing this music wash over you is a gaming moment I will never forget. 

1: Besaid FF10

This is my absolute favorite piece of music that Nobuo Uematsu has ever produced. FFX has a lot of island-y music, and Besaid's is the perfect theme for an island town. It's slow-paced and elegant. Besaid is the first town in the whole game, and it immediately makes you feel the pain that Spira as a whole has been suffering with along with that stark optimism that these islanders feel despite all of the heartache. When you think about what a video game's song is supposed to do, like make a boss fight feel more epic, or to help the player mourn the death of someone, Besaid's theme music is supposed to accurately represent what the town is all about. Mission accomplished.

(I know that I only added a single retro song to the list, but let's be truly honest with ourselves, midi chip bullshit cannot stand toe to toe with full orchestras. Get over it.)

Hopelessly Addicted To Hearthstone

World of Warcraft: Hearthstone is a card game that I was going to pass over because of all of the internet claims that it was too similar to Magic. I love TCGs, in fact I spend a significant amount of free time with card games, but I always get a little suspicious of systems that borrow too much from Magic The Gathering. Magic is perfect, and the standard by which others are measured, so I'm always skeptical when a new system tries to do it better.

Hearthstone is not Magic. It has found some rare system all it's own, and I am hopelessly addicted. You pick a class, Priest, Druid, Warrior, etc each with their own type of deck. Cards cost mana, ranging from 1 to 10, and on your first turn you have only a single mana to spend. Every turn your mana pool increases by 1. This is the cleverness behind Hearthstone, you can do more each turn as your mana grows, ensuring that no match plays too long. Have you ever been trapped in a Magic duel that lasts an hour? By the time your mana pool in Hearthstone reaches 10, you are throwing out game-ending creatures and trying to survive your opponent doing the same. At that level, with that much mana at the players' disposal, matches end quickly, and chaotically. 

Hearthstone is brilliant, unique, and FREE. You can spend real money to unlock all of the single player quests immediately, allowing you to battle to unlock special cards sooner, but all of that can be done for free too, just by painstakingly earning coins to spend instead. Of course, my rule of thumb is to pay the free game if you like it. Heartstone is great, and even better than all of the positives that I mentioned, the game is narrated by a drunk dwarf! What could be more up my alley?

Megaman Air Freshener

Remember when you used to live for shit like the Turtle Blimp? I begged and begged for one but never got it, every Christmas my hopes would be violently smashed. That commercial used to tease me everyday, dangling the perfect toy in front of my shiny, ignorant face.

I've just been spending a lazy morning around the internets, looking at old commercials that made me spend my mom's money. I never grew out of it though, which is why I still get excited when I see my lady driving a car with a Megaman air freshener. 

Final Fantasy 2's Mysidia Tower Is No Joke

I have been slacking a lot on my big Final Fantasy project. I'm still only on FF2, and since I'm eager to move onto the next adventure I tried to make some progress today. I then proceeded to hit the enormous brick wall that is the Mysidia Tower. It's a late game dungeon with ten floors that each take about 15-20 minutes to get through. This is the pivotal moment in FF2 when the game's tiny annoyances become serious problems. As you climb the tower, there are no save points whatsoever, but there are 4 bosses. There are no Super-Ethers or Turbo Ethers in this Final Fantasy, just regular old 30mp restoring ethers that don't stack and quickly fill your 50 item max inventory. You must overload on ethers if you want to survive the Mysidia Tower gauntlet, but the random enemies inside hit you with status ailments that no spell can cure. This means you must take up valuable Ether space in your inventory and replace them with some Gold Needles and anything that can fix Muddle. 

It doesn't help that the game killed off one of your party members in the last dungeon, replacing her with an under leveled Dragoon who is at best a 1/4 as effective as the rest of your team. The first boss is a Fire Gigas, easily beaten and very weak. The next guy is the Ice Gigas, with double the first guy's HP, but with an obvious weakness. The third boss, the Thunder Gigas, is exponentially tougher. His physical attacks can one shot anybody, and he gave me my first game over screen. I came back immediately and tried again, completing the tower with the second attempt. 

Mindu dies!

Barret Wallace: Planet Liberator Or Reckless Terrorist?

Remember the famous Clerks argument about how the rebels in Star Wars were actually the bad guys? The idea is that the 2nd time the rebels destroyed the Death Star it was under construction and thus required a large number of non-military personnel to build it due to it's massive size. This mass killing of innocents, regular citizens of the Empire, added a lot of new ideas to conversations and debate about the Star Wars universe. I remember immediately thinking about Final Fantasy 7 after watching that Clerks argument for the first time, and how Barret's terrorist group AVALANCHE dealt a blow to Shinra by dropping a section of the multi-level city of Midgar onto the citizens below. The game moves on, and it is rarely spoken of again, but that plate fell onto an entire sector of Midgar. There are 8 sectors, meaning that Barret, Cloud, and the rest of the group at the time pre-meditated the mass extermination of 1/8 the population of the largest metropolitan city on the entire planet. Is even Shinra responsible for THAT many deaths?

I suppose that is impossible to know, because we don't know the population of Midgar. I do however, think it is safe to say that it was a number high enough to make you cringe, and definitely large enough to lose the support of every surviving citizen of the city. This is a major problem that I have with Final Fantasy 7 because it causes me not to root for anybody. Shinra is draining the life out of the planet and must be stopped of course, but simply killing more people than they kill is a really stupid way of doing it. If you put yourself in the shoes of the average Midgar-ian I doubt you could find any reason to support AVALANCHE. 

If Barret really wanted to help the planet and stop Shinra, then address the issues that allow Shinra to have so much power in the first place. He killed 1/8 of Midgar's population, thus becoming a Lex Luthor level villain within that city, and seeing how easily Barret came to terms with what he had done makes me suspect that he doesn't really need the support of the common person to accomplish his goals. Is this because Midgar-ians can't vote? The city has a mayor, who directly reports to President Shinra and has no problems admitting that his position has no real power. So do average citizens have no voice?

Wutai has an army, and a government, but what about Nibelheim or Rocket Town? Is the entire FF7 world just a collection of independent city-states? In the Final Fantasy 7 universe, the world is deep into a life changing industrial revolution. The tech is getting advanced, automobiles, motorcycles, airships, power plants, and the population is allowing a corporation to amass power and take over governmental responsibilities. This is what needs to be addressed. Barret and Cloud know firsthand how powerful a group of just a few can be, especially with high-level materia in such abundance. Stopping Sephiroth was obviously the most pressing matter but they didn't know that at the time of the first reactor sabotage. Have elections, fight for the right to vote, use your technology to create a global community, and use these new fangled gadgets of yours to keep every city aware of each other's statuses. The mining population of Bone Village should hear about protests happening in Junon, or the hurricane that devastated Costa Del Sol. If I was a citizen of Midgar, I would applaud the destruction of Sephiroth, I would vote to establish a system of elected officials completely independent of Shinra, and then, angrily, I would hope for the imprisonment of every single evil motherfucker responsible for that collapse in Sector 8.

Positive change needs to come about in a positive way gentlemen. You fucked up.