#I liked that they made it less linear with the different towns and the mini sidequests i hope they do that again for nwos

[darklight-owl]

HE'S OK!!!

Jsyk I haven't finished Azran Legacy yet and my assumption for continuity's sake is that everyone who isn't in the original trilogy is dead.

[phoenotopia]

2019 August Update

"Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the clouds." That's a quote ... that I think succinctly captures what transpired these past 2 months. A lot of progress... but the game is still not done >_<

(extra note: actual quote is land among the "stars", but stars seems like a higher goal was achieved, so I modified the quote).

Anywho, here are some of the things we have accomplished in the past 2 months.

--- ALBUM ART ---

With the sound track essentially done, Will requested some album art. So Pirate and I compiled a bunch of album art that we liked from other games, and from that Pirate made a bunch of concepts - and then we narrowed it down from there, with the 3 of us interjecting our opinions throughout the process, and Pirate doing all the heavy lifting. The album art will be revealed later. For now, here's a teaser of our initial brainstorm process.

(round 1 : brainstorming and concepts)

(round 2 : Survivors from round 1 progress a little more)

--- NEW BOSS ENCOUNTER ---

I thought the scope of what needed to be done for the game was settled, but while writing out the new ending sequence, one part started to drag. There was too much exposition, so after brainstorming a bunch of ways for how this new ending sequence could flow better, it became clear... There needs to be another boss encounter! This boss would really help the pacing of the scene, and it made nice thematic sense and tied up the game's whole story arc in a more satisfying manner. To avoid spoilers, I won't talk it too much, but here's a little silhouette teaser.

(hint: it's not a bat)

--- WRITING ---

Writing doesn't happen linearly since I'll skip around fairly often. It's a delicate balancing act - if I force myself to stick in one area before I move on, progress will grind to a halt, snagged on those last few unscripted lines due to writer's block. But if I skip around too much, the context switch takes some time in itself, and the game can't be enjoyed by playtesters. So for that reason, the beginning and ending sequences are now finished (excluding the credits roll...). But there's still a lot of middle parts to fill in and plenty of side quests still.

For example, there are ~90 NPCs in just Atai town. And each one will talk about 4 text boxes of dialogue (some more, some less). A bunch of NPC dialogue will also change when a big event occurs in the story. So there needs to be a healthy mix of NPCs that push the important story bits, NPCs that push side quest hints, NPCs that talk about geography or history, NPCs that are just for fun, etc. So there's a lot of variables to keep track of.

I've started thinking of better ways to manage it all. One of my new workflows is to use a spreadsheet.

Topics to cover exist in a column on the left. Lines to be spoken by NPCs are stacked  to the right. A cursory glance at the spreadsheet lets me see which conversational topics could use more coverage, and so on.

I even took on new writing help in a young Mr. Cody. Taking on a new writer has been a process because it is not as simple as tossing them some NPCs and letting them run loose. There has to be a ramp-up period for the writer to become familiar with the lore and writing style. There are also unspoken rules about Phoenotopia's universe I implicitly understood and never had to think about. But now that I'm cooperating with someone, I've had to think about verbalizing what those rules are. It takes up more time, but in a weird way, having an outside perspective also helps me understand Phoenotopia more. I also find that I can push through my writer's block more easily when coming from a corrective angle.

I've been quite the strict taskmaster to the new writer, but he's been very resilient and teachable. He's also a great ideas guy. So look forward to Cody's contributions in the finished game!

--- PLAYTESTING ---

The long road of playtesting begins! As mentioned in my previous blog, my goal was to have my brother playtest the finished game during our trip. He didn't get to playtest the *finished* game, but he did get to playtest through a good 40% of it. The game is pretty complete in a linear fashion up until the 40% mark - after that, the rest of the game world exists but the NPCs have placeholder dialogue, and the cutscenes to connect the story events together are still unscripted.

But that wasn't too big a limitation because my brother only reached the 40% mark during the tailend of our trip. My brother preferred to play in 1-2 hour chunks throughout the trip (no marathon session on the plane as originally planned). I think it took him about ~15 hours to get through the game's first 2 chapters and a little extra - unfortunately, the game's timer bugged out so I don't have an exact figure.

Tons of useful information came out from his play test. I wrote down *127* things to fix based on his playthrough - some were small things, like adding more signposting. Others were big issues - a boss stage needed to be redesigned, a needed change to the control scheme, item dupe bugs, etc. I'll speak on some of the ones I've fixed so far here:

A. Warehouse Visibility Low 

For some reason, when starting out my brother completely missed the warehouse where you'd find the starter weapon. He ran past it a few times. Upon inquiring him about it, he said he didn't think it was interactive. Sure enough, all the doors on the left start open, so I see how the misconception could form. When players experience a game for the first time, they're developing a mental image of the game's rules - what's interactive and what isn't. And this early on, the language for doors is still unclear. Per his suggestions, I made this door start open, and moved the camera's edge left a bit to make it less likely to be missed.

B. Eating instructions unclear

Another thing that didn't go as planned was the food eating tutorial. Early in the game, an NPC gifts the player a potato and asks the player to eat it there. After doing so, the NPC gives the player additional tips regarding food. But my brother actually just ran away with the potato so the rest of the tutorial didn't occur. But now with an additional subtle dialogue box, the player is more likely to behave as desired.

(If you design it right, the player won't know you're holding their hand at all)

C. Gear Ring Too Sensitive

One of the game's new features is what I now call the "Gear Ring". The player can equip 8 items to it and quick-access items/tools with a flick of the right control stick. My brother HATED this feature since it was too easy to flick it accidentally when reaching for the regular face buttons. I've now guarded the quick-equip behind an addition RIGHT-CLICK press. Add in a few more FX, and it now works and feels better!

D. Wrecker Too Hard

(In the old boss arena - the 3D printer on the ceiling just made the fight more confusing)

The game's difficulty to players is a big blind spot for me. My brother's no slouch when it comes to gaming. He's beaten all the Dark Souls games and he loves a challenge! So to see him get pulverized in 10 seconds (literally) was a clear sign that the boss was too hard. The boss is able to easily corner the player and there’s no clear opportunity to escape. So I've decided to rearrange the arena - get rid of the 3D printer above and add 2 platforms to the battlefield's edges. This makes the fight more manageable (for the first encounter).

E. Aerial Attacks Too Hard

(Each hit fills the meter at the bottom. Hit the speed bag 10 times in quick succession to win a prize!)

I love the current aerial attack system but there's a steep learning curve to it. Gail takes time to wind up her aerial swing so the player has to time it so that Gail's jump trajectory and swing coincide with the target. Swinging the bat too close to the ground will result in Gail not only failing to attack, she'll be punished with a short "landing lag" recovery state. So aerial attacks are hard it seems. Instead of revamping the system, which I'm still fond of, I've introduced an aerial training course disguised as a mini-game.

So that's a small snippet of some issues I'll sort through with playtesting. Once the game is further scripted, my plan is to do another round of playtesting, followed by fixing. Then rinse and repeat until the whole game is all polished. It seems there's still a long road ahead... So I apologize if I've gotten your hopes up!

--- FANART ---

Three new fan arts popped up in the last 2 months.

The first one is thanks to Cody. G, who's made many fanart submissions before. He continues to improve - really interesting choice of angle and great water effects!

The next two are thanks to Shafiyahh on reddit. Both depictions are of Gale in 2 different art styles and angles. I really like the sparkling effects! Gale also has 2 different eye colors. Which do you think is more fitting?

That's all for now. We'll continue working diligently, and be back with another update come end of September.

[carrollstreetstation]

cryptic passage: a level-by-level breakdown

CRYPTIC PASSAGE

the first official expansion pack, made by the legendary sunstorm interactive, and colloquially referred to as “episode 5.” as this was developed by a different studio from monolith, it has a distinctive style all its own, albeit one that's recognizable if you've played such classics as the duke nukem 3D expansion "duke it out in D.C." it's an eclectic mix of creepy european villages, dismal swamps and ancient ruins, offering a range of themes for you to shotgun cultists in. while a number of people had their hand in level design, the majority of it is by project director robert travis, who also had a big hand in designing the maps for the duke expansions. his style is immediately recognizable.

CP01: boat docks (michael beaulieu) the expansion starts off right with caleb fresh off the boat onto a dock. most of the level is a series of watery caverns, populated by ordinary trash mobs to start you off light. eventually you find a back way into a creepy fisherman's cabin, and from there, an old lighthouse. mostly linear, but you can sometimes open shortcuts to earlier parts of the level. fun encounter by the lighthouse.

CP02: old opera house ("WBB", who i'm going to guess is bill buchalter) given that duke nukem 3D's most famous level is an adult theater, it probably was inevitable that blood would have an opera house as a counterpart. after a short little path you come upon the town gates; beyond is a surprisingly well lit street, shops open for business. the opera house itself has seen better days, but it's currently being squatted by zombies and cultists. poking around in the auditorium uncovers a key to the back entrance down a long alley; from there you get to clear out the backstage areas, ultimately winding up in the cistern below with a surprise gillbeast in tight quarters. a little exploring and you'll find the lair of a certain phantom. one of my favorite levels in the expansion.

CP03: gothic library (robert travis & shawn swift) between this and "old opera house" you're not suffering for creepy urban locales, which outside of episode 3 were a bit rare. following directly on from the previous level, this is a small, yet fairly open layout that has you poking around in various wings of a 1920s-style library. lots of ambushes here behind every door, save one, behind which is a dark, foreboding mini-maze of bookshelves that has zombies lunge at you from the shadows when you grab the key within. great looking map that annoyingly has a couple of "find the button" puzzles blocking progress.

CP04: lost monastary (robert travis) true to blood tradition, we're running through a crumbling religious site, though this one is less "creepy ancient temple to a forgotten god" and more "defiled church." though it starts off linear, it soon begins to get sectioned off behind locked doors. a few good ambushes here, such as when you drop down a chimney to get ambushed by bloated butchers. lots of broad outdoor views too, especially in the back half of the map when you're forced on an extended river ride to get the eye key and back. fun hexen reference in the belltower.

CP05: steamboat (michael beaulieu) an unusual map for blood, seemingly more suited for redneck rampage, and yet it works. (amusingly, redneck rampage rides again has a riverboat level as well.) geographically it's quite small, but beaulieu has made great use of overlapping sectors to create a realistic-feeling vessel, with three decks on this tub to explore. lots of ambushes here, a few fun moments like a zombie climbing out of a toilet to come after you, a caged velociraptor(?) in the basement. just when you think you've won and you've opened the way to the exit, the boat repopulates, requiring you to clear it out again on your way out.

CP06: graveyard (tyler larsen) what's more of a blood staple than a spooky graveyard? this one's far larger than the iconic "cradle to grave" though. tyler larsen has crafted a sprawling collection of graves and monuments separated by hedges and walls and populated mostly by trash mobs. once you get the skull key and head into the mausoleum, the theme changes to a maze of tombs and catacombs with the occasional watery cave to keep things interesting. bloated butchers are out in force here, with a few hellhounds to keep you on your toes. cultists lurk around every corner, and the finale has you facing off against a mess of them, plus gargoyles, plus a hellhound, in tight quarters. at the very end you have a choice of going up some stairs to exit the tomb, or jump into a burning crematory chute to find the secret exit.

CPSL: boggy creek (robert travis) secret levels should be distinctive and memorable. while i don't know if this small, swampy map is distinctive compared to, say, "house of horrors" or "mall of the dead," it's certainly memorable, chiefly for the ruined house with its locked basement full of spiders, and the multi-gillbeast assault after you come back upstairs. similar to "crystal lake" in blood's 4th episode, wall textures looking like trees stand in for actual trees to define the boundaries of the map. charon ferries you around the swamp, but you'll need to find a key to your own boat to get to the ending, which leads you to the same spot the regular ending of CP06 would have taken you.

CP07: mountain pass (robert travis) reminiscent of some of the levels in blood's second episode, though with somewhat less snow. the cabal have set up some kind of bunker or another in and around some ruins set into the side of the mountains, and your task is to find and lower a series of obelisks (similar to what unlocked the boss levels in the main game) to gain access to keys. mostly fun except for an annoying bit where you have to wait for a stone platform that ferries you across a chasm.

CP08: abysmal mine (shawn swift) more cues from episode two, this is a relatively short little jaunt that starts you off underwater and makes you climb ashore right into an ambush. you'll be heading back and forth as each key seems to go somewhere else on the map. fun little scare when you break through a wall right into a phantasm-haunted tomb. the finale is a bit abrupt.

CP09: castle (jeff cleveland) your final destination is this gloomy castle in jeff cleveland's sole contribution to the mapset. compared to the relative ease of the rest of this mapset, cleveland really turns up the heat, throwing hordes of enemies at you, plus multiple boss enemies including a nest of stone gargoyles. starting off relatively linear, it branches out once you reach the castle proper; a trip to the dungeons prefaces a slaughter in the living quarters. after you clear out the big badasses and step into a portal you'll face off against TWO cerberuses (cerberi?) who serve as the final boss in a strange, otherworldly, vaguely egyptian-themed temple. after that, you're done!

final thoughts: quite the varied little adventure, though mostly thematically appropriate for a jaunt through the carpathians. difficulty generally starts off fairly light and doesn't ramp up much as you progress, but the final level will have you frantic. the design aesthetic is overall tighter and somewhat more realistic than the base game. it's clear that sunstorm has learned a lot from their duke nukem expansions, which were also great. though it's worth pointing out that many of the levels are surprisingly quite short. overall, though, while this won't bring anything new to the base formula, it's an entertaining romp with some original ideas.

[spoadicdeviance]

Simple and Clean: The Kingdom Hearts Conundrum

Well it looks like the hype of the release of Kingdom Hearts 3 has calmed down significantly, mostly due to the fact that the game is considered by many to be lackluster. As for myself, I have finished my first playthrough of the game, on proud mode, and done most of the side quests, and while I did like my experience overall, I can’t really refute the criticisms the game has gotten and have to agree that Kingdom Hearts 3 is a disappointment.

I suppose I can’t be too surprised with how the third game in the franchise turned out considering the direction the series has been on since the second game which is actually the third game released but due the number placed at the title the game is still the second game, and I’ll just stop right now before I go on a tangent over the names of each game.

Kingdom Hearts, to me, is a series that captivated me right at the very beginning. I love Kingdom Hearts 1. It’s probably in my Top 20 favorite games of all time. The game managed to encapsulate the whimsy and charm of Disney, while delivering an epic, yet simplistic tale of adventure, light vs darkness, and friendship. The game was fun to play, and the story kept me engaged to the post credits scene. To this day, the game is still one that I would gladly replay and enjoy in its entirety.

Can’t say the same for the other games.

I know, I’m in the minority here on this, but in my opinion, the Kingdom Hearts series peaked with the original game from 2002 while all subsequent games have struggled under lackluster levels, a combat system that favors style over substance, and a convoluted plot with dull, heavy-handed dialog. Heck, a lot of what made Kingdom Hearts 3 such a disappointment to many players can be found in Kingdom Hearts 2 and (to a lesser extent) Birth by Sleep, the two games fans say are the pinnacle of the series.

Now I’m not simply here to say that I like this game over that game end it there. I’m going to explain why I think the Kingdom Hearts 1 (or KH1) is my favorite game in the series while putting into words my disappointment with the later games in the franchise, particularly KH2 and Birth by Sleep. This is going to be a long one so just get yourself comfortable and wait until you finish reading my post before you comment. Let’s go over why Kingdom Hearts 1 is the best in the franchise.

First things first, let’s discuss the levels in these games. The worlds of KH1 are a lot of fun to explore. While not exactly Thief II: The Metal Age complex, they were expansive and navigating them was more than just going from point A to point B. Some of the worlds were almost maze like in their design. There were light puzzle elements to most of the worlds. There was even platforming that, while clunky, added some variety to each level. These different elements made the moment to moment gameplay more than just brawling and therefore playing KH1 never got stale.

It’s quite a different story for the other games. The worlds in the latter games are straight forward in their design. The worlds were usually a singular pathway with the occasional branching off into a mini path, (Enchanted Domain, KH2’s Halloween Town), or central hub area that branches into three-four linear pathways (Beast’s Castle). Just look at the maps of Agrabah from KH1 and KH2 to see the downgrade firsthand.

Not only did the levels lack complex designs, they also had little to no puzzles in them and instead of tweaking the platforming to make it less clunky, the worlds minimize or flat out remove platforming all together. This resulted in worlds where you mostly just walk and fight.

Now these games are not simply all combat. There is something added that is intended to break the monotony, and it’s one of the most out of place aspects of the game; the forced minigames.

To be fair, having minigames isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, even if its put into the main campaign/quest. Games like Jak and Daxter and Donkey Kong 64 have plenty of minigames, however most of them are optional to beat the game. Finishing DK64 requires 50% of golden bananas and minigames give roughly 25% of golden bananas. Final Fantasy IX and Skyward Sword have the player do a minigame, but it lasts for 2-5 minutes out of a 35+ hour campaign and serve more to entice players to do a side quest. Even KH1, the only moments that feel like the game forces you to do a minigame like activity were the race against Rikku at Destiny Islands, the 1 minute of vine surfing at the start of Deep Jungle, and the 2-minute magic carpet escape at the end of Agrabah.

The other Kingdom Hearts games are not as stingy with minigames. As each world progresses, minigame after minigame is dumped on the player. KH2 is one of the worst offenders of this. It doesn’t help that these minigames, unlike the ones from DK64 and Final Fantasy IX, don’t provide a real break from the endless stream of battles. The majority of minigames are just regular fights with an arbitrary stipulation added to it; fight the enemies before the timer runs out, fight the enemies until the timer runs out, fight the enemies while collecting some orbs, fight the enemies while filling the bar onscreen, fight the enemies while depleting the bar onscreen, fight the enemies while escorting a slow ass character. It’s all just more fighting, and it even spills over to some of the bosses as well.

Even the minigames that aren’t centered around fighting, like the rhythm games in Atlantica, are too shallow to provide any sense of fulfillment while playing them. Subsequent Kingdom Hearts games aren’t exempt from this. From Birth by Sleep’s Disney Town world being dedicated to minigames, to the shallow imitation of Nintendogs in Dream Drop Distance, these games also have the same minigame issue that KH2 has.

I have talked about how the games became more combat oriented, however I haven’t really discussed combat itself. This is probably the part where I’ll get the most flack.

Combat in KH1 is a lot of fun and the highlight of the game alongside its story. While basic at first, the fighting gets more complex with the addition of special moves, extra combos, spells, and summons adding variety to the system. Plus, different enemies and bosses a certain attacks and weaknesses. Mashing the x button repeatedly will not get you far, you will have to think and be strategic during battle.

The later games, however, do not have strategy in their combat. Sure, you have different options with drive forms, shot locks, trinity limits, and other sorts of abilities, but at the end of the day, combat from KH2 onward is mostly whaling on the attack button over and over again. The amount of enemies that require certain strategies to defeat them diminish, dodging becomes practically unnecessary, and combat becomes simplified as a whole

Drive forms and trinity limits require little to no strategy when using them. Just activate them and mash buttons while your character zips their way through the battlefield while all sorts of flashy effects fill the screen and enemies go down without a fight. How fortunate that certain abilities could only be unlocked when the player fights with each drive form for a certain amount of time. Forced grinding, what a treat.

The worst offender of this is the context sensitive “reaction commends” that can clear waves of enemies and knock out a huge portion of the bosses’ health. Sometimes it’s the only way to defeat certain bosses. All the player must do during these reaction commands is simple press the triangle button over and over. It’s like a quicktime event only virtually impossible to fail at. There’s a reason why the phrase “press triangle to win” exists.

Magic also got a downgrade as the series progressed. In KH1, magic was not always at your disposal. When your MP got depleted, the player (or companions) would have to use an elixir/ether or land enough melee strikes on enemies to replenish your magic. Despite that, spells and summons were incredibly useful in battle, as well as for environmental puzzles, and the proper use of magic could mean the difference between success and failure.

In the later Kingdom Hearts games, the inverse seemed to be true for magic. Not only were puzzles that require spells became almost nonexistent, removing more variety in level design, but spells and summons became less effective in battle. In KH1, the player could focus on spellcasting, while doing the occasional melee attacks, and get through the game with relative ease. In later games, due to how magic became nerfed, using magic primarily was more of a self-imposed hinderance rather than an alternative style of play. This results in the player using magic almost exclusively for healing. Lucky for those players, MP automatically regenerates after depletion at a relatively quick rate, making ethers useless, which gives the player an unlimited amount of heals.

After KH2’s release, with the emphasis on style over substance, combat in Kingdom Hearts games became more about how to make the player look cool while fighting rather than making the player feel good after the fight.

The reason why it felt good to complete a battle in KH1; the game was actually difficult. Enemies and bosses didn’t just let you pummel them with combos and stylized forms. You had to react to the enemies and the arena you fought in. Even to this day, fights against Clayton, Ursula, Maleficent (human and dragon), possessed Rikku, many more bosses still put me on edge as I fight them.

There was no challenge to the fights in games like KH2 and Birth by Sleep. Since the player has multiples ways to dispose of an enemy, virtually endless amount of heals, and less adversaries that require any strategy outside of “hit me a bunch of times until I no longer exist”, they face little to no challenge while playing latter day Kingdom Hearts games. Bosses that make creative use of the environment you fight are less frequent too. The only way a boss can begin to test the player is when a minigame-like stipulation is added to the fight. Stipulations such as kill all the water clones in this time limit, put the coins in the chest before you can do damage, whatever the heck the Luxord fight was supposed to be, and so on and so forth.

Even then, I still didn’t get that much of a challenge. After three playthroughs of KH2, two of which were on Proud/Critical mode, the combined total of times I died does not even come close to a quarter of the amount of times I died in my first playthrough of KH1. I never even died during KH2’s Sephiroth fight, and I still struggle to defeat him in KH1’s proud mode. The other games provide even less challenge outside of a few endgame/postgame bosses.

And before you reply, the re-releases did not remedy this issue. In fact, the re-release of KH2 gave the player new abilities that allowed the player to cheese his/her way through some boss fights.

Now I have talked about the level design, the moment to moment gameplay, and the difficulty. I supposed that leaves us with the plot of these games.

Do I even have to explain why KH1 has the superior story?

KH1 had a simple yet effective hero’s journey story about a child who wanted to explore the various worlds with his friends but got more than he bargained for when his home is engulfed in darkness and he’s separated from his friends. He goes to various worlds, forms friendships with numerous people, and learns about his newfound abilities as well as the forces that try to stop him on his quest to find his friends. It’s not the most complex of narratives and that’s all for the better. The amount of exposition is kept to a relative minimum, characters can breathe and are not just there to explain the situation, dialogue was never forced or awkward, each world had their own mini-story that’s both entertaining and connects to the overarching plot, and the story is self-contained, no outside material required to understand what’s going on.

You know the pattern by now, but I still need to elaborate. For some reason, Square-Enix thought that they could pull off this grand epic saga spread over multiple games, well they couldn’t. KH2’s plot is a total mess. It’s a constant bombardment of new ideas, exposition dumps, vague allusions to events from games that weren’t even released yet. It was bad enough that the player had to have played a GBA spinoff in order to understand a lot of the plot, but the narrative was so muddled with inconsistencies and unexplained concepts that two more spinoffs had to be made in order for KH2’s plot to make some sort of sense, even then the plot is still convoluted and heavy-handed.

I’ve seen spiderwebs that have less interwoven parts than the plot of Kingdom Hearts, and far fewer holes as well.

And no, this does not make the story “complex and deep”. While I expect a game called Kingdom Hearts 2 would require me to play the first game in order to get a clear understanding of the plot, that doesn’t excuse having to play multiple spinoffs just to get a iota of a clue of what the heck is going on. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, one of the most celebrated series of books ever, contained an epic tale of war across multiple kingdoms and fleshed out worlds with history and culture. Even then, the reader didn’t have to refer to The Hobbit or The Silmarillion in order to follow the plot of the novels. That’s mainly due to the fact that J.R.R. Tolkien, unlike Tetsuya Nomura, can actually write an overarching story.

There’s also the fact that a lot of the plot in these games feels like filler. In KH2, the first visits to most of the worlds don’t connect to the main plot about the nobodies and Organization XIII. It’s not until the second visit to Radient Gardens where the plot starts to get rolling. In Birth by Sleep, almost all of Aqua’s campaign feel inconsequential until the very end. You could cut her story and have her just be a side character in Ventus and Terra’s campaigns and not much would be lost, plot wise.

The reason why I find a lot of the plot to be filler is due to the stories of most of these worlds are retellings of the Disney movies they’re based on while having little connection to the game’s main plot. In KH1, the stories of the worlds were mostly original tales that were intertwined with the game’s main plot. Whether it was dealing with Maleficent’s group of villains, the search for King Mickey, Rikku, and Kairi along with the rivalry between Sora and Rikku, learning more about the keyblade and its various abilities, visiting each world moved the main plot forward while having fun mini-narratives of their own. Even worlds like Wonderland, Deep Jungle, and Neverland focused more on one scene/act from the movie and expanding on it rather than rushing through the cliff notes of the source material.

It seems like for the other games, Nomura just copied and pasted the scripts of the movies the worlds a based on, added interjections from Sora, and called it an original story. It sticks out like a sore thumb and makes visits to these worlds feel more like distractions than anything else.

This longwinded plot also extends to the dialogue. The dialogue in KH1 was natural, aside from a few moments of emphasizing the difference between light and darkness. Characters acted normally, they had actual personalities and chemistry with each other. That was because KH1’s plot was not domineering to the point where the characters were relegated to just be vessels meant to explain the narrative. In games like KH2, conversations don’t feel like a group of people talking amongst themselves but rather like a lecture that the player needs to pay attention to. It makes a large chunk of scenes drag on for what feels like an eternity.

The fact that characters feel more like lore dispensers than actual people leads me to my next point, I don’t care about these new characters. Almost every character introduced from Chain of Memories onward has left little to no impact on me.

Organization XIII are a bunch of cliché Shonen Jump villains, either cackling at how evil they are or brooding over something quasi-poetic until the main character comes in and inevitably defeats them.

Roxas got a 2-hour prologue in KH2 in order for the player to get to know him and I was more relieved than upset whenever he “sacrificed” himself in order for Sora to wake up. Even 358/2 Days couldn‘t get me to care for this guy.

Xion exists solely to die at the end of 358/2 days and then be resurrected in Dream Drop Distance, that’s it.

Hayner, Pence, and Olette are like the annoying group of kids you’re forced to hang out with during college orientation, then they think you want to spend more time with them afterwards.

Ventus, Terra, and Aqua might’ve been interesting characters if we had more than 10 minutes dedicated to their friendship and personalities. Birth by Sleep is so focused on explaining the origins of Xehanort, the ways of the keyblade master, and linking its plot to the overarching plot of the series, that I never find myself connecting to any of the characters. The three separate campaigns don’t do the plot any favors. In fact, it makes the story seem disjointed. To be honest, when the characters were either killed, possessed, or banished to the Realm of Darkness, I did not care in the slightest.

It doesn’t help that Tetsuya Nomura can only seem to write 4 or 5 kinds of original characters, resulting in everyone being a Xehanort/Ansem clone or a copycat of the Sora, Kairi, Rikku dynamic. Seriously, the amount of Sora clones in this franchise is absurd. 

The worse thing about these new characters is that Square seems convinced that the general audience needs more of them and forces them into the plot at the expense of characters we already have investment in.

The most egregious example of this happens at the end KH2 when during the final fight against Xemnas, rather than allowing the player to use Donald and Goofy, the game forces you to use only Rikku in the fight.

I don’t care that it’s meant to serve as Rikku’s redemption. He seemed to have redeemed himself with his self-sacrifice at the end of the first game. I don’t care about that stupid reaction command in the middle of the battle looks cool. It’s just another example of the game preferring style over substance. I don’t care that I get to fight with Rikku. I want Donald and Goofy.

I know we play as Sora and therefore focus on building his stats/abilities, but we put almost as much time into Donald and Goofy while we played the game. The player had to find the best equipment, do the side quests in order to obtain their ultimate weapon, mastered their trinity limits, managed their A.I. to suit the player’s needs in battle. Then the game rewards your dedication to these characters by saying “Screw you! Here’s a premade character with a default weapon you can’t change, and you only have the final level to learn how he is like in combat. You’re gonna love it.”

I’m sorry, but for an RPG to do that is inexcusable. Imagine in an Elder Scrolls game, before the final part of the main quest, your character is killed, and you must play as a premade Dark Elf Mage for the rest of the game. How about in Persona 5 before the last boss, instead of the Phantom Thieves, Joker gets a party consisting of some random side characters you barely interacted with in the game. Would anyone defend that design choice then?

The fact that I’m forced to only use Rikku in the fight, alongside how easy it is, makes the final battle against Xemnas in KH2 one of the worst final bosses in gaming, in my opinion.

I’ve been ranting about KH2, Birth by Sleep, 358/2 Days, Chain of Memories, but I haven’t talked specifically about Kingdom Hearts 3. KH3 is a weird case because it fixed some issues that I had with the later Kingdom Hearts games while doubling down on the issues it didn’t fix and adding new issues altogether.

KH3’s level design is improved somewhat. There’s still generally not much to do in the worlds aside from walk, fight, and do a minigame, however the actual levels are more open and intricate compared to KH2 and Birth by Sleep. The presentation is the best in the series, not just the graphical upgrade but also cinematography of the cutscenes and animations are more expressive than in past games. Plus, I got to give the game credit for making me like Axel/Lea, who before was just another forgettable side character.

However, combat is even more style over substance with additions like the Attractions Summons. The minigames are still as intrusive as they are lacking in quality. The retelling of the Disney plots is so bad here that there are literally shot for shot recreations of scenes from the movies with Sora, Donald, and Goofy added in the background. The Frozen and Tangled worlds suffer the most from this. Plus, the Pirates of the Caribbean world is based on the third movie despite the fact that no Kingdom Hearts game covered the second Pirates movie. Good luck understanding that plot without seeing the films. Dialogue is just as mind-numbingly dull. Also, you know how the plots of the latter Kingdom Hearts game can be described as having 30-50% filler, well KH3’s plot is almost 80% filler.

All this is combined with new problems such as combat feeling floatier compared to KH2 and Birth by Sleep, the emphasis on Disney over everything else, and the fact that this supposed “conclusion” to the trilogy didn’t fulfill on all the promises of past games, forgot to fill some of the plot holes, and felt like advertisement for games yet to come, makes it hard for me to say KH3 is a total improvement over the other Kingdom Hearts sequels and spinoffs. In many ways, it’s a downgrade.

You know, it feels like Kingdom Hearts is the Guns and Roses of the video game industry. Their first effort is groundbreaking and makes a huge impact on the scene. Subsequent follow-ups do their best to expand upon the initial outing only to end up with well regarded yet still confused end products. Then a new project is in the works and gets constantly delayed during which a revolving door of crew members tries to salvage the development, all the while a talented yet egomaniacal leader is micromanaging every aspect. Then when the long-awaited product is released, reviewers give mild praise while the general public is disappointed and finds the end result to be a mish mash of disparaging ideas while feeling almost unfinished.

Yes, Kingdom Hearts 3 is Square’s Chinese Democracy.

If I were asked to do a tier list ranking of each game in the series, at this moment, it would look like this.

This maybe a bit of a surprise to you since I spent the entire time ranting about KH2’s flaws, so let me explain. After playing KH3, I’ve come to notice more of the positive aspects of the second Kingdom Hearts. While I do think that they serve more to make the game easy and hate the excessive grinding that comes with them, the drive forms do give the player a sense of experimentation with some of these fights. In fact, compared to KH3, 2 has more builds for the player, as well as more balanced. KH2 is still easy as heck, and in my opinion inferior to KH1 in almost every way. However, I now appreciate more of the second game’s strong points.

Also, the music is excellent. I think that goes without saying. Yoko Shimomura is a goddess of music.

So as if this entire post hasn’t made it clear already, I love Kingdom Hearts 1. Unlike the other games in the franchise, it knew where to be straightforward and where to have complexity. It had a robust, dynamic combat system, the plot was self-contained and had more personality than exposition, and the gameplay was varied without being diluted. To this day, I find it hard to understand why most Kingdom Hearts fans prefer games like KH2 and Birth by Sleep over the original Kingdom Hearts.

Who knows? Maybe they like the combat to have some flash and felt the fighting in KH1 is too rigid. Maybe they found the puzzles, exploration, and platforming of KH1 to be more akin to fat that had to be trimmed in service to the aspect of the games that they actually like. Maybe they enjoy the plot because it has such a detailed lore and expands the narrative beyond three guys saving the universe from darkness. Maybe they find the new characters charming and enjoy the parallels between them and other characters like Sora and Rikku.

If that’s how they feel, then that’s more than fine. We’re all allowed to have out take on things and no one should tell someone else that they shouldn’t have their opinion.

That being said, in my opinion, while I do enjoy most of the games in the Kingdom Hearts franchise, the only game that I find exceptional is Kingdom Hearts 1.

[fictionstuff]

Final Fantasy X-2 (Switch) Points: 3.75/5 Status: walkthrough used 94% achieved played through in approximately 55 hours

I've finished the HD Remaster of X last year already, but then stopped playing due to having no time. With the release on the Switch however, I thought I could try it again. X has always been very dear to my heart, because Tidus was a great main protagonist to me, even though he was probably a bit of an airhead a lot of times, but that didn't mean that the love story wasn't beautifully leading us along a journey of sacrifices in a world, that was always in despair because of Sin. The end of X however totally broke my heart and nonetheless it seemed just right. X-2 delivers a sequel, that hasn't got much to do with X anymore, but it's special in many ways.

Artwork/Design

X-2 doesn't look much different from X honestly. It doesn't feel like 2 years have past in the meanwhile and while the HD Remaster does look nice, it is what it is, a HD Remaster, not a Remake. The FMVs are very beautiful to look at, but everything else seems just as “old” as it is. Spira has been an interesting world in X and still remains beautiful, with vibrant and colourful towns and unique dungeons. Anyone who has played X thought, won't find many new spots or dungeons, although the dungeons don't consist of the same puzzles anymore.

The design feels outdated nowadays, but in 2003 that might have been completely different. What X-2 lacks are new places. Indeed you visit the same places over and over, finishing new side quests that help you contribute to 100% to get the perfect ending. This is too repetitive for my liking, while I do like these places and the few new dungeons that have been added. NPCs also look completely the same as in X.

I've always loved Yuna's and Rikku's design in X and with Paine joining, I'd love to say she looks quite amazing and she's every bit fierce in battle, while soft for her 2 partners.

Story/Combat System

The story continues where X ended, Tidus is gone and Yuna has saved the world from Sin, but while you might think it's all great now, it really isn't. There's much political uproar from various sides as the story starts with a music dance performance from Yuna? Well, that was weird enough at first, but the first FMV already shows how much Yuna has matured and that a lot of things are completely different from X. X-2 focuses on Spira, on politics and corruption, on how the world still doesn't find rest even after Sin has been defeated.

X-2 has a much more laid-back story, while it does display potential danger for Spira once more, but I don't think that has been the focus of X-2 after completing it to a certain extent. I sadly didn't reach 100%, but I finished enough to say that side quests are the main part of the game and make the story feel less important overall. Y.R.P – Yuna, Rikku, Paine (our new female addition) are sphere hunters, a likeable funny trio. And for once, they're all female.

They search for spheres all over Spira to find out more about “Tidus” as Yuna has seen him (or someone that seems identical to him) in a sphere Rikku has brought to her. The sad part about this trio is that we're never shown how everything started and how Paine even joined. I would have loved to venture into this story as well. I am glad we get a lot of back story about Paine though, as well as Spira's new leaders, Gippal, Nooj, Baralai. Then again, I also would have loved to see more interactions between all of them. It's the very end that satisfied my thirst a little.

X-2 is no linear RPG that you simply walk through, no it consists of a mission based story system. You can choose wherever to go and let's say, it makes sense to visit every place before starting the main missions. It's literally what X-2 wants you to do, to get to know more about Spira, its people and what has become of the world after you defeated Sin. 80% of the game are side missions, the main missions are secondary and also the downfall of the game to be very honest. The main story is engaging, but it's rather badly delivered. They should have added so much more to the story to make it even feel emotional. The only time I actually felt a spark was when I viewed the sad and good ending. Yes, X-2 has more than just one ending and whichever you feel is most appropriate is up to you. I felt that the sad ending was ten times as emotional as X, while the good ending has made me feel very very very happy. I mean, Yuna and Tidus belong together, no matter what you may throw at me for saying this. Same goes for Lenne and Shuyin, the main antagonist although I'd never even truly describe him as such. He's not gotten enough spotlight in my opinion.

Also there are fantastic Jpop songs, Real Emotion and 1000 Words are absolutely fantastic while the original soundtrack itself is quite alright. X-2 features many rather annoying mini games which never got me feel any involved, while X-2 has completely destroyed Blitzball for me and honestly, I've loved that shit game in X. Other questionable things are: chocobo farming, dancing to none existent beats (at least for me), moving some musicians into a life (this does have a purpose, I get it) and watching SO MUCH CONTENT THROUGH SPHEARS FOR HOURS. Some scenes never even appeared for me, sighs.

The combat on the other hand goes back to the roots, I'd love to say, but that's just the job system. The combat itself is still action based as you wait for your gauge to load and to react with our three lovely ladies. X's system has been completely revamped and turned into a real time battle (while you can opt for a slower system as I did, cause no way can I choose that quickly). In X-2 you receive dress spheres and grids, where you can implement those dress spheres, while the grid themselves have different abilities attached to them. You can choose which job fits you girls and fight however you want with them. That's freedom and it's a very refreshing combat system, but developing every ability of each dress sphere was just too tiring for me. I could never really choose, while I did always opt for Paine to be a knight while Yuna remains a gunner with Rikku being a black mage or thief. I kept close to the original dress spheres.

New monsters haven't really been added to X-2, you'll fight the same kind of monsters as you did in X and even the summons remained completely the same, although they're obviously not on your side any more. With every battle fought, you gain APs (which you can use to master abilities from the dress sphere) and experience points to level up. I finished the game at 73 for example and I'd dare to say that was too high.

Overall I would have loved for more main story content, more on our characters, but X-2 is a good sequel. It shows exactly what we have to do, move on. One cannot remain in the past.

[lordwaffleking]

Stop Holding My Hand And Let Me Masturbate Already

Official review of Pokemon Sun and Moon via Lord Waffle King Dot Com.

www.lordwaffleking.com is still currently down and under construction so I’m just gonna post this here for now.

The Pokemon series has come quite a long way. From the very first games for the Game Boy, all through the many sequels and spin-offs, the world of Pokemon has grown exponentially and touched many, many lives. I’ve been a huge Pokemon guy ever since the first games, and whenever a new one is announced, I’m always nothing less than enthralled.

They’ve been with me through it all, man. When I was learning to read? There’s a lot of reading in Pokemon. When I was learning to make friends? Pokemon was what brought us together. And when I started touching myself for the first time? Yeah, I busted some fat nuts on Pokemon.

And then Pokemon Sun and Moon came along. I followed the news all the way up until release. I reported it all, right here on WWW Dot Lord Waffle King Dot Com. The designs looked great. The game looked perfect. I was sure this would be the greatest one yet, beating out my previous favorite that was Black and White.

I was very, very wrong.

Pokemon Sun and Moon have to be the greatest train-wreck of a Pokemon game I’ve ever played. To simply call the game “bad” wouldn’t quite explain the situation well enough, but I wouldn’t hesitate to call it my least favorite Pokemon game. And it really breaks my heart.

In my time playing Sun and Moon, I lost interest several times. Something that’s never happened to me before in a Pokemon game. I had to force myself to complete it, and only because I wanted to know who all the characters were so I could jerk off to hentai of them.

I mean, you can’t just whack it to a girl you don’t know. What kind of animal does that? Someone that doesn’t respect women, that’s who.

Pokemon games have slowly become more and more bloated over the years, but Sun and Moon are the first to ever truly be weighed down by it. Sun and Moon doesn’t know who it’s catering to anymore, and in an attempt to please everyone, they’ve really only succeeded in providing a clusterfuck of things that really don’t mesh well.

It’s an incredibly ambitious game, don’t get me wrong. Graphics are great for a 3DS game, and the presentation is phenomenal. A great soundtrack like always, and the Alola region has to be one of the best out of all of them. The Pokemon designs are fucking fantastic, all of the characters are likeable and well-developed. And surprisingly, even the story is great. The writing potentially rivals Black and White, actually. There’s real character development and everything. Not just a fat kid that likes to dance. In that sense, I’d actually rank it as one of the best Pokemon games. Possibly the best.

And yet the promising plot and world-building is held back by what I can only assume was corporate meddling on the Pokemon Company’s part to try and make the game appeal to the little shits sucking their glue through a straw because their negligent moms let them play Pokemon Go in the fucking street. Maybe they felt like they had to compete with Yo-Kai Watch and try to make the whole game into one long cartoon episode.

Fuck that shit though.

I wanted to explore Alola. I wanted to catch Pokemon and immerse myself in this world. I wanted a grand adventure. What I got was a special ed class Easter egg hunt. Getting lead by the hand to all the conspicuously placed Easter eggs, and having them all pointed out to me and placed gently in my basket by an adult so that I wouldn’t accidentally shove them up my ass by mistake.

It’s like going to Disney World with gassy Uncle Boris. No, don’t go on ride. Uncle Boris no feel good. Uncle Boris eat too much asparagus. Please, keep walking. We walk around park and go home.

Elsa and Snow White could be flashing their tits and beckoning you to join them on the fucking tea cup ride, but no. Keep walking. Look, there’s Mickey Mouse over there. No, you can’t go say hi to him. That’s not a part of the fucking tour. Keep walking.

The entire first half of the game feels like one long tutorial. It doesn’t at any point let you go to explore on your own time. You go where it tells you, you explore the way it wants you to. Read all of the dialogue, do the battles it presents to you, watch all of the completely unnecessary cutscenes. Why so many cutscenes? Pokemon doesn’t need that many. The cutscenes are done very well, yes. They help to build up the characters and make the emotional impact they deliver in the end that much more powerful. Sure. But the same was accomplished with N in Pokemon Black and White, and it didn’t require stagnating the whole fucking game.

When the action does open up, during that entire first half of the game that spans two of the region’s four islands, it hardly even makes a difference. The islands are designed in such a linear fashion, there really isn’t even a need for the map that takes up the bottom half of the screen. It’s a straight, Point A to Point B map. There are no “dungeons” in the same sense that older Pokemon games have had. Caves, forests, and other places to explore are kept to a minimum, and when there are some, they’re usually presented as part of the game’s “trials” which replace the gyms from older games.

Which would be fine, if it didn’t hold your hand through trials just in case battling a singular wild “Totem” Pokemon with slightly higher stats than usual was too hard for you. It tells you very clearly where to go, what to do, and how to do it. The mini-map on the bottom screen, which is an unfortunate waste of UI space, always has a very clear marker point of where you’re supposed to go. It’ll even offer you little hints. Say, didn’t the professor go that way, you know, where the little red flag is? Gosh, there might be something important there. Let’s go there.

There’s genuinely a point in the game where the map will present a goal for you, and then instead of just letting you go there, you’ll walk out and find that an NPC was out there waiting for you with a brief cutscene telling you which way the mini-map, that’s always on the bottom pointing you in the right direction, wanted you to go. And then it’ll proceed to lead you there, having you follow the NPC all the way to the trial site. You know, in case a giant red flag on the bottom screen was too hard to find.

And that’s after the fucking two island-long tutorial.

This was a big step in making the game autism-proof, I get it. It was to make sure that the generation of kids raised on Angry Birds and fidget spinners could play the game just like everyone else. But there’s no way to turn it the fuck off? I wanna play Pokemon games too. Come on.

Pretty much every older DS Pokemon game used the bottom screen in a better way. Even Pokemon Ranger. I’d rather draw fucking circles than put up with this bullshit. Sure, make the completely redundant mini-map the default. But there’s so much more you could’ve put there.

The incredibly promising Poke Pelago, a touch screen-based way to interact with your Pokemon, is locked away in menus when it could’ve easily been at your fingertips at all times. And on top of that, every time you want to use it, you need to watch an unskippable cutscene of your trainer traveling to the fucking Poke Pelago just to use it.

The touch controls are also fairly sloppy with Poke Pelago, something surprising considering Pokemon’s years of slowly perfecting its touch screen UI. There’s so many tiny sprites on the bottom screen moving around, it’s easy to accidentally tap the wrong thing when you’re just trying to collect some God damned beans.

So many strides have been made in eliminating annoying quirks that the games have had for ages, and yet all the tiny steps towards progress are fucked up by glaring bad design choices.

It’s really sad, it really is. It’s like a Miss America pageant contestant in Pokemon game form. It’s really fucking gorgeous. I’d fuck it. And the script, clearly, had had a lot of work put into it. But in the end, it’s just really fucking stupid. If you asked Sun and Moon what it meant to them to be a Pokemon game, they would ramble on incoherently about Pokemon games bringing people together for ten minutes, and then point to an Alolan form Pokemon and say “Kanto, remember?” You can get your favorite Pokemon from the first games, but now they have a much more exotic penis.

And yet even with the shitty execution, I still felt the emotional climax at the end of the game. Which made it so hard for me to accept how much I hated it. By the end of the game, I wanted to love it, I really did. But now all I feel is the disappointment of how much better it could’ve been if they didn’t butcher it.

A Pokemon Sun and Moon where I get to explore all of the islands without cutscenes every couple steps. Where there aren’t ten different forms of point markers to tell you where you’re supposed to go at any given point, and I can play the game to its fullest without worrying about accidentally overpowering myself. Almost every cutscene ends with someone giving you ten Max Revives. And they heal your Pokemon for you on top of it. There was really no reason to ever use healing items or Pokemon Centers, which are now conveniently located on almost every route now instead of only towns, because everyone would heal you before every major battle anyway. There was a time where I actually used healing items, because I was towards the end of the game. But no, they were wasted. As soon as I approach this powerful, endgame trainer, someone steps in and pitches me an entire medicine cabinet and heals my Pokemon for me.

There’s a difference between “Oh, just turn the Exp. Share off, then it won’t be too easy” and “Oh, just don’t talk to anyone, don’t buy anything, don’t battle too much, don’t explore the miscellaneous side-quests on each route, don’t use the Poke Pelago, turn Exp. Share off, don’t look at your bottom screen, ignore all of the cutscene dialogue, and don’t do any of the StreetPass Festival Plaza shit or whatever. Come on, it’s not too easy”.

It’s like if they made a reality TV show where you have to live in the same house as 8 different grandmas, but try not to get fat from them stuffing you full of food. You can refuse all you want, but they’re gonna get you. Even if you eat only three times a day, you’re gonna die of cardiac arrest. And you’re only allowed to murder one, the rest have to go from natural causes. There’s no way you’ll take home the million-dollar prize. You have better chances of beating the robot from Jeopardy.

Even the obnoxious feature where Pokemon call for help doesn’t do anything to balance the game, it just makes it more of a drag.

“Too easy” or “for casuals” would be the cop out verdict. The truth is that the game is just miserably balanced, relying on an instant gratification-style of gameplay and a slow-paced narrative that makes the game intolerable. The point where things start actually getting good is the brief half hour before it cuts to the credits, and then the game is over before it even starts.

It’s like not being able to get your peepee up and then when it’s finally up you blast your load immediately.

I think a lot of people did not actually like Sun or Moon, despite the overwhelmingly positive reviews. I don’t think a lot of people played it all the way through, actually. It’s a lot like when No Man’s Sky launched, and everyone was pretending to love it until someone said something about it. Several people told me Sun and Moon was just fantastic, and then they’d say “yeah, I’m on the second island now” and then they’d just leave the game for something else.

I think a lot of people just watched all the leaks and then beat off to hentai of the new characters and then just pretended like they finished the game. Not saying that no one at all enjoyed the game, I’m sure a lot of people did. A lot of people could’ve looked past the glaring flaws and loved it for what it was.

That doesn’t stop the fact that it’s still the only Pokemon game I’ve ever played that I didn’t have fun with. And that will be a mark of shame that the game has to wear. I almost wish that all I did was watch the leaks and never play the game. I could’ve lived with the illusion that Pokemon could do no wrong.

But no. I had to be a gentleman and learn the names of all the trainers before looking up hentai of them.

This is why chivalry is fucking dead.

[gascon-en-exil]

The Not Really Definitive Ranking of the Zelda Series: #1

#11-19 (link to #11, with further links to each of the others)

#10 - Tri Force Heroes

#9 - The Wind Waker

#8 - The Minish Cap

#7 - A Link to the Past

#6 - Link’s Awakening

#5 - Ocarina of Time

#4 - Twilight Princess

#3 - A Link Between Worlds

#2 - Breath of the Wild

#1 The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask (including the 3DS remake)

I may say with a small degree of hipster-y pride that I liked Majora’s Mask before it was cool, that in fact this game has topped my personal Zelda ranking practically since it was first released. I’ve already written in exhaustive length about how much thought I’ve devoted to the most efficient means of fully tackling the game while working around its infamous time constraints, so none of that bears repeating. Even when MM was new I loved the fresh challenge the time limit represented for 100% completion, and I loved all the more that the game feels tailored specifically to reward that kind of playstyle. In addition to the usual item upgrades and extra hearts, there’s also the mask collection system, which culminates in a sequence of fairly challenging mini-dungeons that award the intentionally overpowered Fierce Deity’s Mask. What’s more, most of the masks unlock scenes in the credits montage that relate to their acquisition. My twelve-year-old self couldn’t get enough of this ode to complicated logistical projects.

In the years since I’ve also come to appreciate everything else that this game has to offer, including its profound and unique impact on the fandom. No other Zelda game has inspired such a curious combination of fanwork, ranging from creepypastas to fanmade remixes and reinterpretations of the soundtrack to extended philosophical essays on the game’s existential narrative and themes. It’s not difficult to understand how MM made the leap from cult classic to beloved mainline entry in the franchise when those of us who love it clearly love it so very much.

For a certain, rather complex definition of “love.”

At the same time however I can understand why all the attention MM has received in the past few years has come with a subsequent wave of backlash. Perhaps because of its separation from many of the key elements of the Zelda franchise this is a game that demands to be approached as a distinct entity. Players who come into MM expecting something resembling the typical Zelda experience (even on its initial release, when there were only five previous games to compare it to) will probably only come away with criticisms: it recycles the Ocarina of Time game engine and only occasionally does anything interestingly new with it, the main story is short and fairly easy, there are only four dungeons, and the time limit and restricted save system can feel too punishing unless you know exactly what you’re doing. That’s all it ever will be unless you bring something else to the experience, and for that reason I completely understand why opinions are divided over this game, and for reasons less easy to quickly identify than graphical style or gimmicky controls or linearity (or lack thereof) like all of the other controversial titles.

That demand for more from the player is one of the aspects of MM that makes it stand out so strongly from the rest of the series. From the moment Link passes through the door leading into Clock Town and the ominous “Dawn of The First Day: 72 Hours Remain” appears on the screen the game forces the player to engage with its world and its defining mechanic directly, in such a way that not even Breath of the Wild with its varied environmental demands has been able to match. With very few exceptions you are always on the clock from that point forward, which in addition to its obvious ramifications for gameplay plays perfectly into the tone and atmosphere of MM. The bright and outwardly cheerful world of Termina contrasts sharply with the mounting dread of its inhabitants as the moon looms ever larger in the sky above, and everything from lighting to music to NPC activity (in Clock Town and Romani Ranch, at least) builds on that feeling such that the player can’t help but feel it too. Link may have a Get Out of Apocalypse Free card in the Song of Time, but the terrible fate of Termina resonates powerfully nonetheless.

I could go on in that vein for quite a while, and in fact many people already have - reading deeply into anything and everything in this game, from the physical world of Termina to the overwhelming number of personal tragedies that play out over the course of the story and side quests to the ambiguous villains that are the Skull Kid and Majora’s Mask. This has been recently expanded upon even further with the revelation in the 30th anniversary Hyrule Encyclopedia that Termina is a creation of the Skull Kid, which adds further (disturbing) dimensions to his personality and helps to explain why this parallel world of Hyrule exists as it does. This is a game that encourages overthinking, or what some would refer to accusingly as “reading too deeply,” and as I’ve demonstrated myself that even extends to something as comparatively superficial as game progression. It is, in other words, a work of art, something that encourages thought beyond the surface level of entertainment. I’m not suggesting that none of the other Zelda games qualify as art, and indeed the question of the definition of art and how it applies to video games is far too large a subject to get into here. However, in my opinion no other Zelda game (with the possible exception of Link’s Awakening) delivers such a multilayered experience, and for that reason alone Majora’s Mask still takes the top prize.

And I’ll be honest - I have a literary academic background and years of experience reading into queer subtext for personal pleasure. Of course I’m going to love a game that gets me thinking on that level. I don’t even really feel the need to expound upon how I find MM enjoyable purely from a gaming perspective either; after all, a game with a great story and thought-provoking themes can still be ruined if it’s not fun to play. But for those curious:

There are no really frustrating side quests or minigames, which as I’ve mentioned several times before can really irk me in a Zelda game. Even the famed complexity of the Anju and Kafei side quest is somewhat overblown; it only consists of about half a dozen required events, and many of them are brief.

The dungeons all feel distinctive and cleverly designed. There may only be four, but there’s not a bad one in the bunch. (And while Great Bay Temple may not be my favorite water dungeon in the series, I will absolutely step up to defend it if necessary.)

The transformation masks are an amazing idea that demands gushing over. It’s like controlling four characters in one, to say nothing of the deeper implications inherent in the masks both collectively and individually. They all get a significant amount of use and excel in different areas, and they incorporate the abilities of several pieces of equipment held over from OoT, ex. the boomerang and iron boots for the Zora Mask, which helps streamline gameplay.

The experience of MM improves drastically once you learn to work with the clock rather than against it, which I suppose counts as this game’s biggest learning curve. The nice thing is that you don’t even have to master time management to complete the game; you can still make it to the end if you take fifty cycles or five (100% N64 version), four (100% 3DS version), or two (any% either version - I think).

There’s really little more I can say. MM was a phenomenal accomplishment of gaming that almost feels like a fluke. It was produced in under two years as the immediate follow-up to the most lauded game in history at that time, and yet it emerged as a wholly unique entity that still demands attention and analysis from fans even today. Like several others I’m now left to wonder if Nintendo will follow BotW with a similarly unusual and groundbreaking work. Given how thoroughly that game has shaken the foundations of this venerable franchise, the material is certainly there. I don’t know if any Zelda game will ever surpass this one for me, but I’m open to the possibility. I enjoy being pleasantly surprised (almost) as much as I enjoy obsessive scheduling.

[7r0773r]

The Braindead Megaphone: Essays by George Saunders

A disclaimer: it may be that, when you’re forty-six and pearl white and wearing a new bathing suit at a theme park on your first full day in Arabia, you’re especially prone to Big Naive Philosophical Realizations.

Be that as it may, in my tube at Wild Wadi, I have a mini-epiphany: given enough time, I realize, statistically, despite what it may look like at any given moment, we will all be brothers. All differences will be bred out. There will be no pure Arab, no pure Jew, no pure American American. The old dividers—nation, race, religion— will be overpowered by crossbreeding and by our mass media, our world Culture o’ Enjoyment. 

Look what just happened here: hatred and tension were defused by Sudden Fun.

Still bobbing around (three days before the resort bombings in Cairo, two weeks after the London bombings), I think-mumble a little prayer for the great homogenizing effect of pop culture: same us out, Lord MTV! Even if, in the process, we are left a little dumber, please proceed. Let us, brothers and sisters, leave the intolerant, the ideologues, the religious Islamist Bolsheviks, our own solvers-of-problems-with troops behind, fully clothed, on the banks of Wild Wadi. We, the New People, desire Fun and the Good Things of Life, and through Fun, we will be saved.

Then the logjam breaks, and we surge forward, down a mini-waterfall.

Without exception, regardless of nationality, each of us makes the same sound as we disappear: a thrilled little self-forgetting Whoop. (The New Mecca, pp. 28-29)

***

Man, it occurs to me, is a joyful, buying-and-selling piece of work. I have been wrong, dead wrong, when I’ve decried consumerism. Consumerism is what we are. It is, in a sense, a holy impulse. A human being is someone who joyfully goes in pursuit of things, brings them home, then immediately starts planning how to get more.

A human being is someone who wishes to improve his lot. (The New Mecca, pp. 30-31)

***

In all things, we are the victims of The Misconception From Afar. There is the idea of a city, and the city itself, too great to be held in the mind. And it is in this gap (between the conceptual and the real) that aggression begins. No place works any different than any other place, really, beyond mere details. The universal human laws—need, love for the beloved, fear, hunger, periodic exaltation, the kindness that rises up naturally in the absence of hunger/fear/pain—are constant, predictable, reliable, universal, and are merely ornamented with the details of local culture. What a powerful thing to know: that one’s own desires are mappable onto strangers; that what one finds in oneself will most certainly be found in The Other—perhaps muted, exaggerated, or distorted, yes, but there nonetheless, and thus a source of comfort.

Just before I doze off, I counsel myself grandiosely: Fuck concepts. Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen. (The New Mecca, p. 55)

***

The world, I started to see, was a different world, depending on what you said about it, and how you said it. By honing the sentences you used to describe the world, you changed the inflection of your mind, which changed your perceptions. (Thank You, Esther Forbes, p. 62)

***

I’d understood the function of art to be primarily descriptive: a book was a kind of scale model of life, intended to make the reader feel and hear and taste and think just what the writer had. Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what’s inside the box bears some linear resemblance to “real life”—he can put whatever he wants in there. What’s important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit. (Mr. Vonnegut in Sumatra, p. 78)

***

Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to. The comic is the truth stripped of the habitual, the cushioning, the easy consolation. An “auditorium filled with two thousand men and women eagerly awaiting a night’s entertainment” could also correctly be described as “two thousand smiling future moldering corpses” or “a mob of bodies that, only hours earlier, had, during the predressing phase, been standing scattered around town, in their underwear.” (Mr. Vonnegut in Sumatra, p. 80)

***

The countryside is so big, so gorgeous, that it outs human ideas for what they are: inventions, projections, approximations, delusions. In the face of all this Size, action seems pathetic and comic, and fearful, preemptive action seems most pathetic and comic of all. (The Great Divider, p. 161)

***

Einstein once said something along the lines of: “No worthy problem is ever solved within the plane of its original conception.” Touching on the same idea, a famous poet once said: “If you set out to write a poem about two dogs fucking, and you write a poem about two dogs fucking, then you’ve written a poem about two dogs fucking.”

What we want our ending to do is to do more than we could have dreamed it would do. (The Perfect Gerbil, p. 181)

***

Now, to extend this already rickety metaphor, let us say that what keeps the people mover moving is what we will call the Apparent Narrative Rationale. The Apparent Narrative Rationale is what the writer and the reader have tacitly agreed the book is “about.” In most cases, the Apparent Narrative Rationale is centered around simple curiosity: the reader understands that he is waiting to learn if Scrooge will repent, if Romeo will marry Juliet, if the crops will be saved, the widow rescued. While the reader waits for that answer, the writer gets a chance to create the Three Christmas Ghosts and compose the Balcony Speech, and in the end, the reader finds that this���the Dirt— is what he or she has wanted all along.

The Apparent Narrative Rationale, then, can be seen as the writer’s answer to his own question “what exactly is it that I am doing here?” (The United States of Huck, p. 189)

***

Art, at its best, is a kind of uncontrolled yet disciplined Yelp, made by one of us who, because of the brain he was born with and the experiences he has had and the training he has received, is able to emit a Yelp that contains all of the joys, miseries, and contradictions of life as it is actually lived. That Yelp, which is not a logical sound, does good for all of us. Chekhov said that the purpose of art is not to solve problems but to formulate them correctly, and in Huck Finn, Twain formulated our national problems in a joyful and madly funny and frightening Yelp that amounted to a national clearing of the throat. It is kind of insane, this book, but in the same way that tribal cultures immunize and strengthen themselves by sitting around watching some half-nutty shaman flail around spouting descriptions of his mad vision, we are improved by Twain’s great Yelp: it contains, in capsule form, all that is very right and very wrong with us, and amounts to a complex equation proving that our right and our wrong both proceed out of the same national energy. If the Yelp is a bit rough, off-pitch, and inconsistent in places, God bless him: at least he did it. (The United States of Huck, p. 209)

***

The story of life is the story of the same basic mind readdressing the same problems in the same already discredited ways. First order of business: Feed the trap. Work the hours to feed the trap. Having fed the trap, shit, piss, preparing to again feed the trap. Because it is your trap, defend it at all costs. 

Because we feel ourselves first and foremost as physical beings, the physical comes to dominate us: Beloved uncles die, parents are displaced, cousins go to war, children suffer misfortune, love becomes a trap. The deeper in you go, the more it hurts to get out. Disaster (sickness, death, loss) is guaranteed and in fact is already en route, and when it comes, it hurst and may even destroy us. 

We fight this by making ourselves less vulnerable, mastering the physical, becoming richer, making bigger safety nets, safer cars, better medicines.

But it’s nowhere near enough. (Buddha Boy, p. 243)

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Automobile Junk Yards

New Post has been published on https://myupdatesystems.com/automobile-junk-yards/

Automobile Junk Yards

We see run-out, decaying, junky cars in front yards, in fields, tow yards, auto auctions back yards, junk yards and dump areas set aside for this purpose. Hawaii, the Big Island we saw areas where the cars were just piled up. Well on an island it is a big problem because as the population expands so do the cars and if people buy new cars what about all the old ones? Well, they just pile up and then what do you do? It costs money to ship cars off the island, so you trade in your old car and let the dealership deal with it, but he doesn’t want it either.

We have seen in front yards of mobile homes years of junked cars rusting away in GA, AL, LA, MS, SC. We are talking total junk, not just undrivable but neighborhood rodents and varmints living in them. I can remember as a kid the local cities would have junk days where they would go tot he canyons and hit the streets to pickup abandoned vehicles and take them to a metal recycler or crusher. CA had a CRV-California Redemption value so you could get money for the metal in aluminum cans, old cars or plastic containers. Each year in this country vehicles are recycled, crushed, sent to the middle east in containers and of course recently in the last six years we have had a big push to donate to a church or synagogue or non-profit. Good idea, I can remember making money for one non-profit group allowing people to smash a baseball bat for $1.00 per hit, with a guaranteed uncorked bat. But suspension if you hit the safety glass. Later when OSHA standards came out as Senior Class President of the HS we started wearing goggles when we allowed the people to smash the car. Then a friend whose dad owned a tow company took it to Pick-Your-Part Junk Yard in the Valley, today totally wired with every make and model and part listed on the Internet and most hard to find stuff on eBay and all the junk yards are all interconnected on a trunk repeater Motorola Radio System. The junk yard business has really progressed over the years.

America has a love for the automobile and many of the old cars are fixed up. About a decade ago you may recall a program where oil companies in some states could buy old cars and get them off the streets and trade for pollution credits, of which El Paso and Enron both enjoyed trading. Enron traded everything from Lumber futures and pollution to energy and just about anything consumable that the Boys in Chicago had not yet created the market for. If it is not bolted to the floor and contracts were drawn for future use, you can bet it was on the potential list to be traded. Bandwidth, oil pipeline capacity, water you name it. Commoditizing the world has advantages and this is one way to control the junk and costs associated. This has always been a free enterprise theme to reduce pollution here in the US.

In the European Union 7.3 million cars per year are ELV’ed or ELV Treated, although there are 11 million total sent to the graveyard, furnace, junk yard or recycle crushers, but first plastics and other items are taken apart. In the US we just crush the crap out of them and deal with the entire pancake. Let’s face it this is a good start. Problem is that each Country in the EU has different guidlines, these countries can never make up their mind. For instance the debt borrowing of the Euro in Germany and France and the rest of the countries having to pay later for the hamburger today.

In the US we have the United States, although often act like the United Countries although we are not much better as in almost every industry we have a different set of laws. Even smaller states with little population bases have conflicting laws, states such as VT, ID, WY, MT, NM, NH, RI, WV, IA, NE, ND, SD. States like CA, OR, WA, MA act like socialist countries and obvious are paying for it now. Beware the socialists in their goal to make all things equal, they can ruin anything, ask Plato. The problem being making non-linear decisions for the best of the country is nearly impossible, for us to come to terms of our leadership role in the Americas we have a lot to be desired on many a front.

We can do better than this, but we fight over the means, why? There can be no excuse. No wonder we cannot come up with solutions to issues like the junked vehicles, which leak all kinds of things when they rot in fields and bleed iron oxides, heavy metals asbestos, and oil, fuel (turns to varnish), brake fluids, radiator fluids and obviously leach into the ground water pf the local farm and cause all kinds of cancers and problems with kidneys. There are issues. But also we see old farm implements and other equipment junked out back. You can see this on every back highway in America and every small town serviced or within 100 miles of a Wal-Mart. In other words every where in every small town. Starting in January of 2007 all European Cars sold will be the responsibility of the manufacturer no matter how long the vehicle is in service.

If a new Ford Mini-van is in a crash after only 2 months on the road it will be the Ford’s responsibility. If it is on the road for 40 years and then junked it will be Ford’s problem. Sounds a bit of a problem to me like our under funded pensions in this country of which the Big three are probably a good example of a serious problem with blue chip companies. Scary thought. You see as countries become more socialist the consumer will not be responsible for anything.

Right now 75% of vehicles in the EU are ELV’ed they wish to increase this to 85% by 2006 a noble cause. 95% by 2015. But we know this is absolutely the wrong way to do this after all the State of CA set and dictated a timeline for electric vehicles and that did not work, today in the Business News GM announced it was completely cutting the plug on all electric vehicles for the newer technology of Fuel Cell. And pursuing the Fuel Cell development project with UPD. Meanwhile with all the EPA deadlines un-met and all the passed costs to businesses by light, Medium and Heavy duty truck manufacturers, FedEx’s Fred Smith put out a challenge that he wanted 50% more fuel efficient units with 90% less emissions. Apparently these do-gooders do not understand entrepreneurship otherwise they would be solving the world’s problems by creating not accusing.

Renault adopted a plan on their own called LEM-Life-Cycle Management and found 13 key vendors to achieve this, a much better and well organized plan this was back in 1999. They made all components recyclable, well 90% including the plastics and other materials for their top selling cars; Laguna II, Mid Size Panel Vans (you have seen them in cops and robber movies in France chasing James Bond), Clio II and the Val Satis. Excellent achievement for the French Car Company. Similar to the 90% of their recycled story about the Oil for Arms Program with Iraq. Did I say Arms, no no FOOD, we we Food, yes food, silly me. Other ideas of the ELV program is to use easy to dis-assemble parts, like what Dell is doing with computer trade-ins, yes Michael is always leading edge, he deserves an award.

[http://www.dailytexanonline.com/vnews/disp…0/3e799ec270c1a]

You see when you take apart computers especially old ones they have gold plated components on the circuit boards and connections. Dell only charges $15.00 to recycle and they get at least $8-22 in gold out of each one. Once apart they can be 67% recycled. The EU wants certain things to no longer be used in the manufacturing of cars, such as mercury, hexavalent chromium, cadium and lead. Most US Manufacturers have already done this completely and the rest will soon be completed. Smaller companies such as MG Rover which use to produce millions of cars now only sells 200,000 per year in the UK, the UK likes the idea and are up with the compliance anyway seeing as they agree since they are on an island. But you can always drive the cars to Europe in the Chunnel and they do not want the reciprocate, the UK says we are not a junk yard.

The UK has it’s own plan called: ACORD-Automotive Consortium on Recycling and Disposal. They are proposing a cash incentive for turning in a vehicle, the Economist and the Futurists have both had articles on this thought and it is similar to the Oil Companies paying to get off the road those cars which would not run on Unleaded fuels and needed the lead additive. People were paid to dispose, in this case though people are paid to dispose properly and the UK would let the manufacturers off the hook and let the owner be responsible after all they own the car and there is no telling how many owners a car in Europe may have had during its life before it became an end of life vehicle like Logan in Logan’s Run and had to be renewed.

The UK’s Motor Vehicle Dismantlers Association agreed that the owner would be given the $75.00 equivalent in pounds as an incentive. Probably also would need to be based on inflation and the CPI-Consumer Price Index you know the Brits in their need to be exact, they are all wannabe economists. Failure to properly dispose and renew registration on the vehicle would mean that the fine penalty would be issued to their drivers license, they are more connected there. But the problem is inconsistencies for instance Greece had no shredding sites, while Germany has 42, Italy 16, France 42 and in the UK 37 total. Problem too is that those cars from others countries in Europe would not be able to take their cars to the UK, they only want to dispose of their own cars, not everyone else’s. Obviously they do not want to pay the $75.00 for every citizen in Europe who want their car melted and shredded.

In Austria which makes no cars, they want to be paid and have the other countries to come pick up the damn cars, Germany says we can do this since they will levy, guess what another TAX or they call it a LEVY of $100.00, but that levy is dry and Austria is saying that will be the day when I die, meaning Yah Right? Like you guys in Germany are so far in debt you will steal the money from Peter to pay Paul and we will never see a dime of that and we know it. Germany of course loves the upfront money. Ever since Hitler’s economic policy of collecting goods in trade up front and holding payments against those goods until they strung out vendors (countries) like Sears and then owned you. No one is fooling the Austrians and they could care less because they do not make cars anyway, figuring it is everyone elses problem so come get your cars and forget about us building any shredder plants in our beautiful country.

France and Spain are taking the approach that the manufacturer should pay the difference between the scrap that is collected value and the cost to scrap it. Good idea, but what about mergers of car companies or those succumbing to economic pressure of the low dollar today against the Euro. What about those who will not be here in 2015 when these cars are junked, who pays for that? Like all these manufacturers are going to be here tomorrow? And in a merger is the new company responsible? Lots of questions, the UK is still talking with industry and the cars well they keep piling up, in the United States we have more room, but many of these old automobiles have other issues and materials of yester year, just like the old aircraft in the desert are slowly decaying and aluminum in the water may cause the immune system to attack the brain such in Alzheimer’s. Still not proven yet.

Another issue is if the Germans collect upfront and a premature incident such as the Floods in Prague where cars were junked early the junkyards would sell the engines and other components. But also in accidents, theft recovery vehicles already paid on, small car fires, or terrorist’s being killed and bullet holes these vehicles are not sellable but parts can be taken off, why should the manufacturer have to pay, shouldn’t they get a refund? But Germany cannot pay everyone not to work and still have money left. These vehicles have gearboxes, engines, body parts, which may still be sellable.

In the US the Argonne National Laboratories have been studying

ASR-Auto Shredding Residue

About 10 million vehicles are scrapped in the us each year. Now remember the net gain of 7 million is the traffic you see. You see the 10 million vehicles crushed or shredded in the US each year contains about a million tons of polyurethane Foam and about 1,500,000,000 pounds of thermoplastics, which is trucked to the landfill or incinerated. We need to look at the options for ELV as the US has to come to grips with the problem as junked cars increase.

By recycling the ASR-Automotive Shredder Residue as per Argonne’s tested model, a reduction of 75% of the waste can stop on the way to the landfill. In the US we have discovered this can be resold to make other products, both in automotive and other fields. This is done by a two stage trummel, it is like a rotating screen, same principle as fishing for gold in Auburn, CA gold country. Or the Rock Crusher sifters in Sunlight goldmine in Butte, MT. The sifter splits up the debris into three parts, similar to the quarters, tokens and dimes sent into the coin-op car wash for processing into rolls for the bank and recycling of tokens back to the machine. In this process the University of Chicago was able to build the machine able to take out the dirty foam, oxides of less than 6 mm, like rust chips and also the glass chips, dirt. Also taken out of the ELV junk cars would be sand granulars, other metals and plastics. Smaller holes allow these materials to filter and the foam rises and is left. It is merely dumped over the side and collected in a huge bin and trucked away. Very efficiently however recovering nearly completely debris free dirty foam larger and lighter foam chips. Like the water, which weighs more than the gold.

Foam and we have studied it on this board previously, go ahead an look it up after you are completed with this topic. the Foam is then washed, rinsed, dried and then of course re-used. Foam when missed with chemical is easily dissolved and then the chemical precipitated out and the foam is reblown with gas and made into the next substance and preferable shape. Foam being 5% liquid and 95% gas until it hardens is cheap to make, but having the substance the 5% for free is also cool. The only issues are the same involved in bulky cardboard recycling and the economies of scale and mass production depend a lot on transportation issues, trains and trucks cost money to run and the stuff is bulky for it’s value. If the substance can be removed onsite it is much more feasible and the foam turned to liquid is reduced from 100 volume to 5% volume and now in liquid form and can easily be transported by CSX tanker car anywhere you want it and then shipped anywhere in the world in bulk. This is very cool.

Plastics can be easily separated by froth flotation and precipitates and therefore can be recycled cheaply, the Industries dealing with Mineral Separation use this method as well. The ABS-Acrorylontitrile-buta-diene-stryrene is abstracted by difference in density to the high-impact polystyrenes, which sinks faster. So you can separate the two types of plastic with 95 plus percentage accuracy. The recovered ABS can be used for a multitude of things in another automobile. There are a few issues also with the thin galvanized steel used to keep cars light which is used in modern cars, it is zinc coated and when your melt it, it gives off toxic clouds of dust.

The best idea is to strip the zinc before the process and there is a way to do this by using sodium hydroxide and electrolysis at room temperatures. To remove the zinc from solution use a centrifuge.

The Argonne is going to sell this entire process to Belgium, and the other EU countries are saying that for every 35 ELV cars just one engine can be sold, nearly 95% of all ELVs have negative value, yet the Argonne solution solves those issues. One issue with the recycling of steel is much is contaminated with copper, this could cause failure in steel frames on cars and especially with grain memory methods of manufacturing where the steel is trained to stay straight such as in steering rods, axles, truck frames, bridge components, buildings etc. if bent the steel returns to it’s intended design shape without worries of fatigue from torsion or other forces. The Japanese would by it after all they claim their stainless is the same, but when 5% nickel is really used it does not rust like the Japanese steel, no wonder we are upset with their imported steel. Even with 505 stainless for underground tanks if we use the Japanese stuff our tanks will corrode much faster leaving us with significant damage to environment and drinking well water and underground aquifer contamination although that was never discussed in the Kyoto treaty either.

You can recover about 50 lbs of zinc from a ton of steel and yes zinc has value such as undercoatings of bridges, use in pigments or marine or aircraft corrosion prevention. Plastics recovered is about half the cost to producing plastics from corn due to corn prices, with other plastics, eating and ethanol. Also in drought years plastics cost more due to oil companies getting more as less corn is produced for taco shells, Kellogg’s corn flakes and Tony the tiger. In all seriousness though this is correct along with the artificial manipulation of the commodity markets as margining players, market movers, farmers hedging their bet against the crop production and speculators let it all hang out. One issue still remains, window tint, laminated glass, antenna and heating element materials often embedded in the windshields, windscreens and rear windows.

In the EU there are also the same issues we have here, those old five-gallon flush toilets, refrigerators, washers and dryers, all an issue. I cannot tell you the amount of toilets traded in drought areas and the non-energy efficient refrigerators traded in, in nearly every city in America and this has helped America become more energy efficient, but the mountains of debris are unbelievable. Think about it.

Netherlands and Sweden have had auto disposal plans in affect for quite a while. I hope you learned something from this, because as used car prices fall and cars are worthless, there will be more scraped. As we sell more cars and newer more efficient vehicles their will be more scraped, as fuel cells come into play and we work out the bugs of technology problems we will see all those cars on the road end up scrapped. We need to have a plan and we are well on our way in the states, we can work better since we are in the same country and all on the same team, as long as the other states follow the BMP that fits the needs of the American People and do not try ot build some special program to pay off their over spending as their tax base dwindles from cutting off the hand of the businesses that fed them all these years.