#because i did it earlier but on a friends ps3 so | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

lavolamp · 5 months ago

Text

Too late to make a blog?

Hello. In a conversation with friends I decided to start using this Tumblr blog as a means of, well, blogging. I would use some website like Wordpress, Neocities or even Blogspot, because those tend to have features that make organizing blogs by tags a little easier, but I will admit I am a bit vain and don't want to feel like I'm screaming in to a void when I could instead reach out to the remains of Tumblr's userbase post-porn. This is absolutely the best website for it at the moment. And this would also make it easier for people to reach me for whatever reason. I kind of thought of blogs as outdated, because everybody's lives have become so consolidated in to websites like Twittex and Instagram and even this one that leave little room for larger scale personal thoughts and travels. I remember the Myspace or Geocities or Blogspot days where everyone had their own cute little website, and the internet was much smaller so it was easier to find people posting things that fit your interests. Nowadays things are just too huge, so apart of me thinks blogging might be a little ridiculous. But I think there is still a use for these, because I would ultimately like to use this blog to organize my thoughts on things and document my progress on my projects, mainly so that I don't just end up bothering my friends on Discord about stuff, because I'd feel bad. Maybe one of the goals of this blog is to find out if there is a reason to blog in 2024.

I suppose I should introduce myself. I've posted a few pieces of art on this blog before, so as you could guess I'm somewhat of an artist. The medium I primarily work with are comics, because not only are they a very accessible medium to work in but I also just have a deep appreciation for the medium. I'm working on many comics at any given time, but at the moment I'm focusing down on two. A comic made for the Webtoon platform and one that I would like to be published as a book. I'm more enthused about the book than the webtoon. Maybe I'll make a post about that later. Otherwise I'm big into cinema, animated cartoons and especially video games, and one of the two things I pretty much only think about is storytelling. Whenever I am not thinking about that and the other thing, everything in my life kind of feels like a dream. So I suppose this blog will primarily be focused on storytelling, but that's just a means about talking about my opinions on art in general. Otherwise, I think people would tend to describe me as very passionate in my beliefs, which is to say when I like something I really like it, and when I hate something I suddenly transform in to one of the world's leading professional haters. And I guess I'll make you know it. I'm bad about making impulse and useless purchases and I really like chocolate. Don't ask me how many video games I have on Steam or how many tubs of chocolate ice cream I've had stacked sitting in my room at some points.

Anyway, to kick things off I'd like to talk about the last thing I did, which is beat the game Alan Wake II from Remedy games. They've done a few things like the Max Payne games and the critically acclaimed Control, but the Alan Wake series in particular holds a special place in my heart. It was one of the first "triple a" games I ever played, because at that point I had mostly played Nintendo games on GBA, DS and Wii (I played Gamecube games too, don't worry) and adventure type games on my computer. Games outside of PC classics and Nintendo games were a new frontier for me. Earlier in 2010 I got an Xbox 360 in order to play Modern Warfare 2 with the other kids at school, in which afterwards I found out that they all had PS3's instead. But at least I could play Sonic and Sega All Stars Racing with Banjo Kazooie, whom I didn't even like or even ever had played his games but his design is fun so whatever. By the way, no spoilers for Alan Wake or it's sequel here aside from me saying how I felt about the ending.

The original Alan Wake game came out in mid May of 2010. I was about 11 at the time, but I was about to turn 12 as my birthday was at the end of the month. Around when the game came out I ended up catching a lot of press footage and playthroughs showing off the game, and I was just enchanted by it. It was a game that was really nothing like I'd ever seen before. It was dark, gritty, moody, realistic, and revolved around shooting but unlike other 360 games it had this incredibly unique and eerie vibe that pulled me in, and while I didn't really understand the story very much, I thought Alan was a really funny protagonist because he just kind of came across as a dick. Kid me's mind kind of rationalized it as Sonic but he's basically just in the real world. I also thought the main mechanic of the game was also really cool. I guess it sounds too convenient to be true, but I've always loved flashlights. It's a device that's just a beam you can turn on to dispel darkness. I feel like a detective. It's fun to wave them around and point at things, I always kind of thought of them like a really cool sword. I especially love the big ones because it feels like I'm holding a cannon in my hands.

But anyway, everything about the game was just really interesting to me, and in a way it also kind of made me feel a little more adult because of the graphics and tone. So with my birthday at the end of the month, you can imagine what I asked for. In the days leading up to my birthday, I was kind of obsessed with the game and I spoiled much of it for myself. But eventually my birthday came and I finally had the game in my hands! I've still got that copy next to me as I type this. It's in far better condition than my other 360 boxes too, cause my Sonic Unleashed box is in real bad condition. Maybe it's an object of power. Anyway, I played through the game, loved it, loved the twists, scares and turns, surprisingly hilarious characters and utterly beautiful music, and how unique of a protagonist Alan was. But then, I beat the game. I won't spoil the ending, but it's the kind of ending where I'm still not sure how it's designed to make you feel. It's basically a cliffhanger, (and while there eventually was DLC that continued the story I never got around to playing it and none of it really took the story anywhere) and it left a longing in me. I wanted more. I wanted to see what happened to Alan and the people in his life. But the game didn't provide any real closure. Afterwards I scoured the internet for answers, reading other people's theories and consuming all the lore in the game that I missed, obsessively trying to get a a straight answer, any kind of meaning. I desperately wanted someone to tell me anything so I could know how to feel. Nothing else before really left me like this! You know how a lot of people, especially in the past decade enjoy watching videos that explain the lore of their favourite games, like Dark Souls or Five Night's at Freddy's? That was me with this game. But it wasn't just for the sake of consuming content, I needed closure. But I couldn't find it. I guess like Alan I was left wandering in the darkness fruitlessly searching for a way out of this headspace this stupid game got me in. Sonic had fucking closure. I was happy I had the experience, but other games had closure!

By the way this is kind of irrelevant, but in case you're wondering why my parents would let me play games like this at a young age like that, I think my dad stopped caring after I had a little argument with him in 2008 when Super Smash Bros. Brawl came out and it had a T rating but then he saw the game was fine. Or maybe he just thought I could take it, or maybe he just didn't care. He let me play No More Heroes, which, for the uninitiated, is not a child's game.

Anyway, I eventually got bored of searching for answers and my interest in the game eventually faded into the background. As I grew older I didn't forget about the game. I still listened to the music from time to time, but it definitely became a second thought, and sometimes I felt it might have been because of the ending. Sometimes though, periodically, I would revisit the game. Watch the cutscenes, look at the ending again, try to formulate a theory. It was still a game I liked, but I couldn't kick the feeling of a giant blueballing. But as you grow up, you change, and experiences you just had become a nostalgic memory. I don't think you change as much as people say you do, I think it's more like you realize things about yourself as you're able to better articulate your feelings into words. As I grew up, and now I think I almost fully realize, is that I kind of love not knowing some things. Maybe not in like a, hell yeah I love not having answers kind of thing, but I find it's utterly intoxicating. Witnessing the rise of Dark Souls and Five Nights at Freddy's in the 2010s and also being able to think about storytelling on a deeper level, I realized something that seems kind of insane to me. Alan Wake is a video game with a definitive beginning and a definitive end. At some point, the game runs out of content to show you and you will have inevitably seen and done everything. But what if I told you there was a way to keep the game going even after it's exhausted it's digital limits?

You probably know where this is going, but I realized that it wasn't the fact that Alan Wake had an ending with a ton of closure that kept it going in my mind, it was the that it left a ton of things unanswered! There are so many pieces of media I've played, or watched where it just ends, and while I enjoy them I never really paid a second thought to them afterwards. They just fade. But Alan was a light that continued to burn bright in my mind. This feeling of longing that I had after beating it, in a way that's better than just a happy ending. Other works of fiction have used this to their advantage. I don't think it's any coincidence any time David Lynch gets his hands on Twin Peaks, which Alan Wake is teetering very close on being a ripoff of sometimes, it ends on things that leave you with a billion more questions than you came in with. Sam Lake and Lynch understand the power of planting a seed in your head. Because that not only lets the work of art live far past it's expiration, but that's where the imagination also flourishes. There are so many other people who come up with theories trying to interpret these works of art, and because of this I don't think they'll ever truly die. Now, I don't think every piece of art should do this, because I will admit, most of the time it is nice to just have a neat bow placed on something. But like every device in a story, it is merely a tool that is waiting for the right time to be used. Even in stories with closure we can use this to keep things going, the possibilities are never ending. It's so exciting to think about.

But like I said, as time passes other things take precedent. Other works of art and stuff, so these things, even Alan Wake will eventually fade in to the background. The game if I recall sold well and became a cult classic through word of mouth. Even some of my normie friends know about the game. But I never really thought it would continue. Mainly because of the open ended nature of the ending and the fact it isn't an uber popular game that exists in a gaming environment where the maximum amount of money needs to be pumped in to every game in order to make the maximum amount of money back, which is why to my absolute jaw dropping, during the Game Awards 2021, a fucking Alan Wake II was announced. When the trailer first came on, I had my suspicions it might be Alan Wake II, because even in my faded memory I could still recall the layout of the main town in the game. And then he showed up, it was fucking Alan Wake. Rocking a beard and looking very conspicuously a lot more like John Wick, but still, it was him. The title dropped and I couldn't believe it. It was actually happening. Now, this was already kind of insane year for me in games. Because it just so happened not one, but THREE other games I liked a ton as a kid got sequels I thought were utterly impossible earlier that year. In the same week no less, Psychonauts 2 and No More Heroes 3 came out! And then a couple of months later, a Metroid 5! Hell, Mega Man 11 also came out in 2018. What the hell was going on? Why are all these old ass games that I thought were just made for me getting sequels? Now, of all times? I guess nostalgia plays a big part in getting these made, but it's still kinda weird. Hell, even Shadow the Hedgehog is getting his own fucking game this year. If a Portal 3 happened, I think that might just be a sign of the end times. But, regardless, because of this, I also have to wonder if, just like starting a blog in 2024, if it's just kind of too late to make sequels to these kinds of games.

Admittedly, I don't think about this topic a ton, because at heart I'm a consumer of media and much of the time I like to see things I like get continued, but the adventures of Alan Wake is a weird one. This is a game that opened me up to the idea of never getting closure, but here we are with a sequel. It could either do two things, give us closure and kill the vibe or continue not giving us answers and leave us feeling the exact same way the original game did.

Because I'll finally cut to the chase, I think Alan Wake 2 is pretty much a perfect video game. The new survival horror gameplay that is apparently just ripping off Resident Evil 2 now was great, the puzzles were great, the scares were legitimately good, the music was still amazing, the game was funnier and had even more quirky characters and moments than the first one, and the story was very well thought out! I would recommend it instantly. Despite all the differences from the original game in gameplay, tone and even featuring a new protagonist, it still felt like a perfect followup. But I beat the game, got to the ending...and to what I suppose is not justified shock, I felt exactly the same completing Alan Wake 2 as I did completing Alan Wake 1 all those years ago. I feel a longing. Maybe not as painful, but it's still there. But for the record, I think this is a really cool thing, I think that just proves Sam Lake and the team at Remedy haven't lost it, that they can make a game that feels just like the original. But....is that even a good thing? It makes me feel good, on some kind of dopamine level to think that they haven't lost it, but do we actually want those exact same vibes? Is it healthy? Playing the game, I was ready for something different, something new, but instead I kind of just got exactly what I paid for...I got more Alan Wake. Like, you feel me, right? It's intoxicating to have a perfect recreation of those same feelings, but I'm also really conflicted here. From a consumer point of view, it's great that we just got more of what we like. And in a lot of cases, this is what a "good" sequel is considered to be. But here's my thing about that; I've never felt like that is sustainable. Assume a franchise keeps going forever with the same vibes, eventually it's just going to get stuck in it's own tropes and formulas and themes. You need to introduce new elements to the story to keep things exciting, I think that's just how it is. Some people might tell you that it's possible to do something new with a franchise while sticking to all the same things, but I think that's total bullshit.

Eventually, you will hit a wall where there isn't a new topic to be explored without introducing some kind of tonal shift or alien plot element. I think that's just how stories fundamentally work. Everything is a runner that eventually runs out of track to run when it reaches the end. Why do you think so many sequels to things end up so repetitious? I think many creatives at heart are aware of this, and in today's environment of nostalgia and IP centric mania we have people attempting to do new things with certain franchises, but sometimes that just ends up pissing old head consumers of those things off! But we're not allowed to make anything new so what else are we to do?? Everything these days like fucking Star Wars or Batman needs to be beholden to it's own internal logic and rules and established characters and themes to work, but if you don't do anything new it's just not interesting! But if you be different you'll just make people mad! It pleases nobody! Hell, an example is Psychonauts 2. I've seen several people complain about Psychonauts 2 (one of my all time favourite games for the record) because of the tonal shifts from the first game (granted, a few other things too, like not focusing on the previous game's characters more, but that's also another thing that contributes to my argument). It's an incredible game that I believe is a true work of art, but would it have just been better if it were a new IP rather than a sequel? Maybe so. I think it manages to build upon the established lore, themes and rules of the first game magnificently while still retaining the same twisted sense of humor, but for some people, they just wanted a goofy cartoon game with interesting looking levels and instead got a careful examination of several individual's deeply held personal trauma. It's just a like, a different thing!

We don't need new IPs...no, new worlds, NOT because of new characters, or even new storylines. We need them because we need new rules for stories to function under. We need them in order to elicit new, different feelings in us.

I'm conflicted. I think having the same vibes as the original thing is truly intoxicating, but I worry that it's not healthy. I worry that this definition of a "good" sequel just creates a negative trend where we just can't allow anything new to be done with established franchises. If we will just hit a point where any change is instantly disagreeable on the basis of not fitting some perceived version of the original product. Like, it gets even more insane when everyone just has their own version of something in their head, it all depends on taste. I could probably go on about what I think makes a sensible evolution of something, or if we should even respect the notion of evolution in favor of a new creation, but this post is already excessively long so I think the easiest way to put it is that I think we just need a healthy balance of the old and the new In both established series and new series, and in what the big slop corporations feed us. I look forward to the day this trend of sequels pass and companies seek out new stuff again. Despite my complicated feelings on Alan Wake 2, I think it is almost an exception to this, because I feel it is a true work of art that came from a place of passion and hard work. It thoughtfully takes elements from the original game and expands upon them in ways that are fresh and interesting while also introducing crazy new elements that make it feel fresh! But I guess this sentiment could also vary from person to person depending on what the work of art is.

The point is, Play Alan Wake and Alan Wake 2!

and uhh, Alan Wake's American Nightmare. You can play it, I think it's cool too. Anyway, as a reward for getting to the end of this post, here's an old sketch of the main character from the comic book I'm working on meeting Alan Wake. Your reward is more reading.

#blogging #blogpost #alan wake 2 #alan wake #remedy entertainment #childhood #psychonauts #video games #sequels

2 notes · View notes

angelic-guardienne · 10 months ago

Note

hii !!! i'd love to hear more about your ffxv oc story ! it sounds really cool ^^

THANK YOU!!! okay so let's start from the very beginning bc.... there's a LOT

so when i started writing this fic in 2017 it had a COMPLETELY different concept. those close to me know it as rwr, which is Real World Reader. it was meant to be a "someone from our world gets sucked into the ffxv verse. shenanigans" longfic. i wrote two chapters and there was a loooooooot of spitballing ideas with my friends and shoving almost everything into a doc so it wasn't lost (though. a LOT got lost anyway). I had a sequel planned before I even finished the first one. I daydreamed HARD about this fic. I was gonna call it Distant Worlds, like after the Final Fantasy symphony orchestra concerts. but in the end I couldn't come up with a cohesive timeline for the plot, so it stayed in development hell.

next, we have the fic that this idea merged with: my white mage au. again, started development in 2017, I wrote a prologue and started the first chapter, but I got way too caught up in the lore planning instead of planning the actual fic, so it never went anywhere. The basic premise was that my OC (named Eileen Lovarion bc last names suck) was a white mage that was meant to travel with the bros on their journey. I named it Soulseer, Starseeker. I MADE A WHOLE NEW MAGIC SYSTEM FOR THIS FIC 😭 (which i'll only get into if you're interested, otherwise i'd talk your ear off bc it's... a lot) but basically Eileen L. could see souls and create soul bonds n shit and it was gonna be a whole thing. but again, i got caught up in creating the lore and not the plot of the fic sooooooo development hell.

so about 2022/2023, i was reading back over the documents for rwr, and I was like wow, this was actually really good, I should start working on this again, but ✨️different✨️ so I took my OC from white mage AU, changed her last name (Eileen Harrison, which, i still lowkey hate that last name) and somewhat merged the two ideas and put a new spin on them. or like, the old ideas were sprinkles on an entirely new sundae? anyway.

Now, I looooove the other ff games, I have all the numbered ones except 11, 13 (which i own, but on my bricked ps3), 14, and 16. I have 12 on like 3 different platforms 💔 so i was playing ffiv and i was like... hm.... what if.... so then I did a deep dive into the ff wiki and read up on white magic/white mages and the magic/class systems in the earlier ff games. Came across the devout class from ffiii. fell in love.

Soooo Eileen Harrison is a devout from the ffiii world. Devouts are basically expert white mages. They know more advanced magic than regular white mages and their magic power/mp is higher. The only ones that are above them in terms of magic prowess are sages, who are masters of both black and white magic. White magic is primarily healing spells/status effect spells. the only really offensive power of white magic (in the ffiii game) is in the wind spells, negative status effects, and holy.

In some translations, devouts are also known as seers or shaman (shamen?). So i decided that devouts could rarely have prophetic dreams. so Eileen has one, and she goes to her village elders and they tell her she has to go on a pilgrimage to all the crystals around their world to receive more clarity on the dream. her village is home to the earth crystal (because the devout class is earned from the earth crystal in ffiii) and so she prays there first, and bc she, along with all the other devouts in her village, has a strong spiritual connection with the crystal, she's got a connection with Titan.

The idea is that here, Titan is more of a protector/defender than an aggressor. So you'd pray to Titan for protection on your journey, things like that.

Eileen leaves for her pilgrimage, off to (in no particular order since i can't remember what order i decided on) the water crystal, the fire crystal, and the wind crystal. on her way to the water crystal, she gets caught up in this CRAAAAAZY storm (which, unbeknownst to her at the time, is sort of like Leviathan's trial to see if you're worthy of approaching the water crystal.)

Well Eileen falls off the side of the moutain she's climbing to get to the water crystal, and she's falling to her death. and as she's falling, she's lamenting that she never got to figure out the prophetic dream and help her people/be of more use to the world. So basically, her dying wish is to help the world.

Due to their spiritual connection, Titan hears her crying out, and decides to save her for the future she was meant to save. But bc she's in Leviathan's domain, his powers aren't strong enough to like.... truly save her as she is from death (still working out the details on that). So Eileen goes into crystal stasis, and in the meantime, loses all her memories and a good chunk of her magical abilities.

Cut to ffxv, right after noctis and co are standing on that hill overlooking insomnia, watching the empire take over the city. Noctis feels a pull over to cartanica. The bros don't think much about it at first bc they were heading there anyway, but noctis insists it's something different; a magical er, "signature" as strong as this one could potentially be the ring or luna (or an astral, but i can't remember if he knows about them yet or not).

So him and the bros get to cartanica, see the empire doing that whole mining thing (to give them a reason to be there besides like, just being there for a cor/party fight). They get rid of all the goons and start looking around for what the empire was looking for, which turns out to be Eileen's crystal!! As soon as Noctis touches the crystal, his magic reacts with the magic of the crystal and lets Eileen out, 'cept she's unconscious. so they leave her with the hunters and go into cartanica as normal.

when they get back, they see eileen healing a wounded hunter, and then she asks to join their party. ignis and gladio have their reservations but noctis agrees pretty easily, like it's some kind of gut feeling or like. he knows that she's supposed to be with them.

thus starts their journey! i've already decided when eileen gets her memories back (she gets em back in 2 major parts), and she unlocks her magic alongside her memories. her main handicap is that her mp doesnt recharge over time like Noct's does, so she has to use ether/rest at a campsite to recover (just like in her home game) aaaand her comparatively low attack power.

I'm still deciding on like, what impact her presence is gonna have on the story, how she interacts with things like luna dying, ravus getting turned into a daemon, and noct dying, and how she interacts with the other bros, AND like. her character arc I guess? where will she grow besides getting her memories/magic back?

Sorry if I talked your ear off lmao, i've been thinking about this story a LOT but just haven't done a whole lot of actual writing bc again, it's been a long time since I played ffxv. I have it, and have full intentions to play it again, but my free time is practically nonexistent 🫠 so.

if you have any other questions, feel free to drop another ask!

#admin note #i'm still calling this one distant worlds btw #i just like that title a LOT #and it still fits 🤓#ffxv #final fantasy xv #distant worlds

0 notes

euphoniusowl · 1 year ago

Text

I wrote about Dragon Age Origins, which I first played 10 years ago, and how the game was and still is important to who I am and how I play games.

10 years ago today I played Dragon Age Origins for the first time. I only got a PS3 a month earlier and had played Brothers, Uncharted 3 (it came with the system), and Skyrim. Before that my gaming was limited to Wii games, Kingdom Hearts, the LEGO games, and whatever I could get to run on my white Macbook (Assassin’s Creed 2 with a terrible framerate). I don’t know how I heard about Dragon Age. I vaguely remember knowing that Mass Effect was good and this was like that, but fantasy!

My first playthrough was a disaster. This was my first RPG of this type and I didn’t know the conventions. I played a Dalish elf because hey elves are cool and these ones live in the forest! I missed recruiting Leliana because I didn’t go into the tavern in Lothering. I never really talked to anyone, so eventually Zevran betrayed me and I had to kill him. Alistair was the lone exception. I got him to like me (mostly by giving him every gift in the game) and I romanced him. Then I got to the Archdemon fight and… the game froze. I reloaded, and it froze again. And again, but in different places each time. Eventually I gave up. I’d basically made it to the end, right? Close enough.

I put it aside and played Mass Effect 1. I enjoyed it (it’s still my favourite Mass Effect game), but the whole time I felt an itch. I was reading about Origins online and learning about everything I’d missed. As soon as I finished ME1, I started Origins again, with the same character, the DLC downloaded, and the wiki open. It was so much better. I became friends with everyone, did their personal quests, did a bunch of side stuff, and the world opened up.

I’m one of those people who play games over and over again and make the same exact choices with the same character. Origins has six distinct character backgrounds and openings. I’ve played all six. I’ve finished a complete playthrough with two characters: Dalish elf and human noble (which I only did to get the “marry Alistair” ending. It was… fine). However, there are two big changes I’ve made since that first playthrough, and they’re related. The first is the Landsmeet. My first few times I kept Alistair as a Warden because that’s what he wanted. Then I grew to dislike Anora and made Alistair King with me as his mistress. Finally, I came back around on Anora (she’s great) and I’ve settled on having Alistair and Anora married. Once I was still Alistair’s mistress while they were married, but that changed when I made another big decision: I started romancing Leliana.

I’d always liked her, and as I began to question my sexuality, this was the natural place to try it out. Lo and behold, I adore her. I loved Alistair when I first played, but eventually his romance became grating. Now I am all in on my precious bard. Her comments about the Warden in Inquisition are so sweet and I’m so sorry that I have to make Divine so the two of you don’t get to retire together but you’re the Divine Thedas needs.

It’s hard to estimate the impact Dragon Age as a franchise has had on my life. This was the first thing I ever wrote fanfic for (although I haven’t posted any of it). Although I had been obsessed with the franchise-that-must-not-be-named when I was younger, this was my first adult iteration of it. I read the novels, the comics, watched the web series, combed the wiki, and absorbed anything and everything I could about the world. Even now, waiting for Dreadwolf, I consume everything Bioware releases and over-analyze it for clues. Dragon Age has shaped my life and who I am over the past decade and will continue to do so.

Dragon Age Origins is a great game. I know many people consider it the best Dragon Age game, and I can understand why. For me, however, it was Dragon Age 2 that cemented my obsession with this series and which vies with Persona 5 Royal for my favourite game of all time. But that’s a post for January 5.

#dragon age #dao #dragon age origins #blog post

1 note · View note

todayisafridaynight · 2 years ago

Text

I Went To AnimeNYC 2022 This Saturday So Here’s Highlights Cause It’s RGG Related :) Ft. Merch And Impulse Control :)

i cosplayed as daigo because of course i did and honestly i didn’t expect anyone to point me out cause Who Would BUT i took five steps into the convention center and someone picked me out immediately so that was fun :) another person also picked me out later in the day but anyway onto The Specific Shit

i was rummaging through old games trying to find any of the old yakuza games- Spoilers found yakuza 3 which would’ve been perfect if 1.) i had a ps3 2.) the game had its original boxart. i’m a big fan of collecting physical copies of things so that was a bummer HOWEVER the stroke i would have walking five feet ahead cause at animenyc there’s a segment entirely dedicated to japanese media like games, soundtracks, music- all that jazz and tbh i wasn’t expecting to find much but when i saw THIS??

i felt demons consume me and started looking around to see if i could find anymore shit AND THE FUCKING. MOTHERLOAD OF SHIT I FOUND.

it was illegal i felt so slighted and the worst part is i would have bought 90% of the these if i had a ps3 lowkey should have anyway for collection purposes but i had a budget to maintain so i regrettably continued walking

thought bout getting this and cracking my ps2 but after remembering i paid my friend $60 to crack my 3DS cause i have a bag of rocks for a brain i figured not

HOWEVER while i was hovering here i did run into other rgg cosplayers looking at the shit with me. got a pic of em buuut i feel weird postin pics of other people without tellin em. HOWEVER x2 i chatted with em a bit and they told me there was a second daigo at the con and it just lowkey became a mission to at least spot him (spoilers i did at the very end- wherein i also learned there was a proper RGG meetup earlier that day,, right when my sister was at a panel too,, depression was real but we got some neat pics together and he was chill so that was cool :) not posting cause i feel ugly since it had been a while since i touched up my look ☠)

MERCH I GOT WAS GREAT first i got these stickers from @/riadoodles because i was Legally required to and. i also thought bout gettin their zhao/joon-gi print however My Budget. still a major fan of their work so it was cool runnin into em !!

an i absolutely love this kiryu print i got from (to be updated please someone help me find the artist i would love to credit em an find more of their work i checked all the artist alley contributors and i scrolled through the kiryu tag for a while) and i had The Perfect Spot to hang it :)

closer look:

all in all fun day !! felt like i shoulda bought more stuff or at least attend that meet up*screaming* but there’s always next time ;)

#long post #personal post even #snap chats #SERIOUSLY SOMEONE HELP ME FIND THIS ARTIST I ☠☠☠#if i feel hot then maybe ill post a pic of my daigo cosplay but for now just take the knowledge I'm A Dweeb #we been knew tho #i feel like im missing some extra details bout the event that were rgg related buuuuuut i dont remember #rats in my brain are telling me to try a mine cosplay but ill never do that LMAO. wouldnt be the same without that nose of his so sad so tru #anyways byebye i have to make up time on being deranged

10 notes · View notes

theygotlost · 2 years ago

Text

TWENTY. YEARS. OF RATCHET AND CLANK. LOOKS AT YOU WITH BLOODSHOT EYES. i really wish i had the foresight to draw something for the anniversary but it just didnt happen. i think i still will draw something but it will just be late and thats ok. anyway I would like to share MY experience with the series ❤

my first ever rac game was tools of destruction. my dad brought it home one day and i had no idea what it was, I dont think HE knew what it was, I have no idea why he bought it. we never had a ps2, only a ps3, so nobody in my family had ever played the og trilogy. I didnt even know there were earlier games in the series for several more years. idk exactly how old I was, maybe 8 or 9, so this was a few years after tod's release (2009-10??). I watched my dad play it, and I thought it was the most awesome shit ever. I rarely actually played it myself cause I was bad at video games but I had such a huge crush on ratchet i wanted him to be my catboy bf so bad (some things never change 😑....) but my little brother became OBSESSED with it and played it over and over and over. he was only like 6 so he couldnt even read and didnt know the actual title of the game so he just called it "THE ROBOT GAME". i remember being so fucking confused and pissed off by the ending LOL. we had quest for booty pretty shortly after that and played that a million times too. i dont even think i registered that it was a separate game from tod and tbh i still think of it as tod dlc.

next was the acit demo, which again we played a million times, until finally our parents got us the full game (again a few years after release so probably around 2011-12). I distinctly remember my brother and i thought qwarks line in the opening cutscene "space. its big. so big in fact, that if you lost your car keys in it, they would be almost impossible to find" was the funniest shit ever and we quoted it constantly.

(and when I say "we played", i mostly mean i watched my le epic gamer brother play while I pissed him off with my backseat driving the entire time. sometimes this ended in physical violence.)

then we got all4one, and i remember my brother and I begging our dad and a family friend to play it with us so we would have a full party. our friend was like "idk guys, this is kinda wacky and quirky 🤨". I always insisted on playing as ratchet cause he was my specialest little boy and my brother mained nefarious. he LOVED nefarious he would run around screaming ANNIHILATE HIM!!!!!!!!!!

our parents got my brother into the nexus for christmas 2013, but at that point i had kind of lost interest and didnt care so i didnt play it (or just watch him play it like i did most of the time). for the next several years I really didnt give the series much thought. I might have played some of tod or acit again, i dont remember, but it was just something I used to like as kid.

and then well. spring 2020. I think a lot of people returned to things from their childhood after the pandemic started because all that fear and uncertainty makes you want to return to a seemingly simpler and safer time, especially if you were living away from your family and had to suddenly move back in with them like i did. so during quarantine I replayed all the rac games we had just for kicks, and it reignited my passion for these games and reminded me just how special they were to me. i became so intensely obsessed with them (especially acit). MY HORRIBLE SON DEX WAS BORN. (dexo is 2 years old now awwwwwwwwww) and ciro lent me his copy of the og trilogy ps3 port and I played the original games for the first ever time. and as luck would have it, rift apart was announced at e3 during that same period. kind of insane to think about. there was no way I was gonna get a ps5 so I just watch other peoples playthroughs 1 million times. i still wanna play it so bad 😭

ratchet and clank isnt even a game series its like a brother to me. its everything. its so important. learn your herstory. for some reason I was under the impression for a long time that rac was a super mainstream series that everyone has played. that a playstation and a copy of acit was made free for all americans by the president. but unfortunately the fandom is so so small with barely any active members on tumblr. there was a HUGE surge in content last year cause of rift apart, but 90% of people quickly forgot about it and moved on. i am eternally grateful to my rac mutuals and followers that continue to post and talk about it. o7

#its 1am so im scheduling this for a normal time

8 notes · View notes

silverthetheorist · 4 years ago

Text

The end of L’manburg was disappointing (and why rollercoasters and fun)

I really wanted to like this war. I really did. And I did like many things (Which I will go through don't worry) but... Look, the event was not bad by any means. But this is the first big event that I can say was mediocre at worst and good at best. A solid 6/10 maybe (All other story arcs and events are from a 8/10 to 10/10), specially after the marvelous festival from yesterday. So let’s see first the things that worked:

- FUNDY AND NICKY POPPED OFF. Them destroying the provisions before the start was great because it did not only made sense for their (Very tired of being sidelined and very tired of L’manberg’s bullshit) but it also had plot repercussion. In a story, for an action to be significant it has to have two things going for it: An emotional repercussion and a plot repercussion. This had both: Two og L’manburgian giving up on their nation and causing the L’maburg forces to be under-and I can’t stress this enough- very under prepared. In Eret’s case it is a lot harder to justify because her arc was never very consistent as I have said before.

-The villains were very smart and intimidating. First the chose to attack L’manberg the day after the festival giving them little to no time to prepare. Second, they attacked earlier and devised a plan to cause the most destruction possible. Dream and Techno are many times smarter than many movie villains.

-Tommy exposed Techno for the hypocrite and selfish pig he is. Good for him.

-Anything Ranboo does is gold of course. But, I think joining Phil is a bit of an iffy decision. For someone who doesn’t choose sides he surely chose the one that caused the most destruction and pain for all of his other friends. He is probably one of the most exciting people to watch in the future

-Tubbo jumping in front of Techno’s blast to protect Tommy (I do not want Tubbo to die because he is probs my favorite but that would have been a cool canon death). Tommy asking about Tubbo every 5 seconds. Both apologizing to each other and reuniting finally. Tubbo looking at everything he had built being destroyed, completely speechless. Tommy and Tubbo meeting Dream in the obsidian thing over L’manber. It had a weird final boss feel to it. I wish something had happened between the three there. Maybe a short fight or something. It was still cool.

So, yeah. There is a lot to like about the event. Now I have three main problems with this event:

My first problem is that it all felt a bit... pointless. This reminded me a lot of the movie Captain America: Civil War. It was a great movie, but it did not have almost any consequences. In today’s event L’MANBURG WAS DESTROYED FOR GOOD THIS TIME and... it doesn’t feel like anything has changed at all. Tommy is still on about the disks even after everything he’s been through. Quackity is still... honestly I never know what is going on with him. Techno and Phil are still assholes and have all the power along with Dream. The badlands still haven’t done a thing (A shame). You can say that Wilbur is going to be revived, and yes that is pretty big, but he has been alive before (I actually love that he is being resurrected surprisingly, I’ll talk about it later). You can also say that L’manburg is gone now but... was it really there ever since Tommy was exiled considering everyone basically left?

It feels like we could have skipped everything after Wilbur blew L’manberg and everything would be the same. Like everything in between did not matter. Think of it, is there any major differences (Besides minor character changes) between the end of the Manberg vs Pogtopia war and now? Probably not many. This goes back to what I said in my first post: History is repeating itself a little to much. Another exile, another festival, another execution, another time L’manburg is destroyed. At least there is not going to be another election anytime soon.

I think Tommy’s line to Techno that “You are repeating history but worse” is very ironic. The idea that history repeat itself is tempting and, when done efficiently can be amazing, but this was not the case. I cannot blame theme though, a “history repeats itself” story is very hard to write without feeling like you are repeating yourself. But they were so close. The Schlatt/Wilbur and Tommy/Tubbo parallels are a great example of it because it had the two things that a “History Repeats itself” plot needs: A new emotional background (The Tubbo/Tommy friendship breaking) and a final change (When both decide not to become like their predecessor). That’s right. You can argue that this war had a different emotional background but the end result was the seem. This type of stories are only satisfying if we see the change at the end, imagine how great it would have been if they managed to resolve their differences and truly unite against Dream and stop L’manburg from blowing up.

That is my second problem. I am not against the idea of L’manburg ending for good. But it happened at a very random part of the story. L’manburg, the place that started it all perished because a pig felt betrayed by a friend and Dream was being his usual self. Compare this to the last time it blew up: A fallen hero destroying what he built because he wouldn’t let anyone else have it. It just doesn’t compare. And honestly, we are mostly sad that it is gone because of the first war, the election and the manberg vs pogtopia arcs. If the end goal of three months of storytelling is to destroy L’manburg, why did they spend three months showing how shitty it has become and how everyone left? This last point sections nicely to my last problem

My third and final problem is that it all seems a little samey. Now listen to me on this one. Do you know why the Deadpool movies are so effective at making you laugh? Because it mixes dramatic moments with comedy very well, each dramatic moment elevates the next joke and vice versa. It is also why Tommy’s lore streams are so good, when you juxtapose both drama and comedy it works very well. Like a rollercoaster, the fun comes from all the ups and downs. But can you truly say there were any up moments since the manberg vs pogtopia war. Not really, maybe some but nowhere new as good as the up moments in previous arcs and nowhere near as present. That is why this past three months feel very samey. It has been just constant dread and sadness with very few good moments storywise. Compare this to before when Wilbur was the main writer: Eret betrayed everyone and Dream blew up some of L’manberg, but they won the war and got their independence. Pog 2020 lost the election but Techno joined them and most people were secretly helping from the shadows. They got back L’manburg from Schlatt but Wilbur and Techno betrayed them. See how it has a great mixtures of ups and downs? Today’s event would have benefited from at least one ray of sunshine at the end, maybe a new piece of information returns, or Tommy and Tubbo have a final talk and resolver everything, or something nice for a change. (Wilbur being resurrected does not count, he traumatised everyone, I would not say that is a very happy thing, more of a mixed bag)

But I don’t want come off as too negative. But now I am being cautious of the storyline. I think the next couple of stream are going to be key. There is still hope that some of these problems will be addressed. Even if they are not, the story will have suffered it’s first big dud (Which is a testament to how good and capable everyone is of telling a great story).

PS: English not my first language. You know the drill. I am once again not sending hate to anyone ever. There is nothing wrong with criticizing what you love, I think it is kind of necessary in a weird way.

PS2: I also have hope because I believe that Wilbur is coming back as a writer. On a stream (When he saw Matpat’s theory) he said the was “not currently writing the story” which I found as very suspicious wording. That and Alivebur returning I think makes a pretty compelling case for his return as a writer, I don’t see him as the type of guy that would just return so that someone else would write his character. On another note I hope the current writer don’t feel pressured to follow Matpat’s theory just because he is a big youtuber. While not a bad theory by all means (As soon as Ghostbur said he wanted to be alive my first thought was Quackity and Schlatt) but I would prefer it if they were not manipulated by outside sources to make the story a certain way.

PS3: I have other things I would like to cover. Mainly, I have three ideas for future essays: an analysis of the medium the smp storyline is being made and why it is harmful to it’s story (Specifically it’s eventual ending), a study of how Ranboo’s philosophy causes more harm than good and a “What if” essay of how many road the smp could have taken with it’s story after the manberg vs pogtopia war. I will probably do all three of them eventually but if anyone wants a specific one I can do it no problem. Also, if anyone wants to interact or give their opinions or criticize my ideas you are more than welcome to. I have no friends who are into mcyt and I love the back and forward of different opinions and ideas.

#tommyinnit #tubbo #ranboo #quackity #wilbur soot #wilbur #dream smp #dream #fundy #nicky #nihachu #philza #techno #technoblade #mcyt #eret #ghostbur #l'manberg #l'manburg #SapNap

114 notes · View notes

stardustskz · 4 years ago

Text

It Just Is

pairings: seungmin x reader

word count: 4.8k

warnings: mentions of anxiety, language, description loaded (i think?)

genre: fluff (?), angst

description: Han Jisung begged you to drive him to somewhere and you didn’t expect to see familiar faces that caused some of your ‘forbidden’ memories to resurface.

note: i don’t really know what this is but, it’ll be a waste to let it sit in my drafts forever. also, this may or may not have a second part

There are missing items in your life that you have longed to look for. The ocean blue cardigan that you used to wear frequently during seventh grade, which you don’t quite remember if you have misplaced it around the house or your mom already donated it somewhere else. That one decorative pen that you loved to use for your writings whether you take notes during class or cram your Petrarchan sonnet that is due the next day. The Minnie mouse keyring that your grade school best friend gave you as a present when their family visited Singapore that you valued a lot until one day it wasn’t hanging by the zipper of your backpack anymore. These things that you lost in a fraction of time without even knowing that they’ll be gone from your sight for the entirety of your life, they once became your comfort. The warmth of your cardigan whenever you’re cold from the harsh morning breeze on your way to your school. The grasp of that certain pen when you scribble your notes in a hurry before the teacher moves to the next slide of her presentation. The familiarity of seeing that pink dotted ribbon hanging on your backpack, indicating that it’s yours. They all have been a fabric of your being, a part of you. Well, that is until you lose them.

You scanned through the piles of paper on your desk, trying to find your sharpener to finally finish the title block of your plate. You mumbled a few series of curses as you glanced at the clock. It was already 9:51 in the evening and this plate that you’re currently doing is due at midnight. Screw your stupid alarm clock for not waking you up when you swore that you have set it at 1:00pm. You hurriedly sharpened your pencil a second after you found it underneath your history book as you heard an obnoxious knock from the door. You chose to ignore it and moments after, you hear it open following your brother’s annoying voice,

“Y/n!! Your plate looks wonderful!”

“What do you want, Jisung?” you groaned in annoyance as you already know that certain tone of his.

“Help me get to Hyunjin’s tonight” Jisung answered which made you turn around from your drafting to face him.

“It’s the third party this week, don’t you have any other stuff to do?” you asked him with a hint of concern, but your tone failed you as it sounded like your usual nagging.

“Well, first of all, we’re of the same age, you don’t have to scold me,” you glared at him for his a-matter-of-fact answer.

“Second, I’m not an architecture student like you.” He then stuck his tongue out in an attempt to annoy you even more.

“Well first of all, Han Jisung, that was so fucking mature of you,” you retorted mocking his dramatic voice and turning your head again to your desk before continuing,

“Second, I won’t help you–”

“Yeah? Then I’ll tell mom that you haven’t been doing the dishes for two nights now.” And that made you turn your gaze again to your brother who grinned as he successfully caught your attention, again.

“Screw you, we had a deal.” You told him as you faced your plate again, Han fucking Jisung can wait.

“Wait until I finish my plate then I’ll drive you there.” You heard Jisung celebrate in joy as he lied flat on your bed, patiently waiting for you to finish.

You see, even though you are twins and you practically share the same birthday, you grew up owning the title of being born a minute earlier than Jisung. This resulted in your parents seeing you as the more responsible one than your twin. It added up to the fact that you and Jisung are polar opposites when it came to your personalities. Let’s just say that he’s the more outgoing one and you’re more of the type to lock yourself up in your room all day.

“Is it a huge party?” you asked Jisung from the passenger seat of your mom’s beloved mini van that was now yours to drive around.

“Not really, it’s just the inner circle this time” he said as you stopped for a red traffic light.

“I’ll just wait for you in the car then.” You answered him with a nod of understanding.

“No, that will be horrible y/n, why would you wait in the car? It’s cold.”

You looked at him meaningfully before turning your gaze at the road again as the traffic light already turned green. Jisung immediately got why you were stern on staying inside of the car instead of bonding with him and your circle of friends, well, some of them.

“What’s wrong with being with him in the same room? It’s not like you’ll be forced to talk to him.” He explained, his voice laced with concern and worry that you may be upset with him for having this conversation.

“I don’t know Jisung…” you mumbled as you turned to the right corner, finally entering the village where Hyunjin lives.

“You are good friends y/n” Jisung whispered, looking outside of the window as the car passed by the familiar set of houses that he remembers by heart.

“We were good friends, Jisung” you answered, already pulling up in front of Hwang's porch.

“Then what went wrong?”

What went wrong? That question rang in your head with the consistent wave of various emotions as you took notice of the person by the house’s entrance.

Ever since you were a kid, you’ve always had this poor memory skills. This is the reason why you often misplace your things that leads to losing them. However, there’s this one kid that helped you with that problem.

It was during your fourth grade in middle school when you first met him. It was that one particular day that went totally wrong as you fought with your brother early in the morning because he’s being an annoying little prick and woke you up yelling your name, which you hated a lot by the way, and your day got even more sour when your teacher passed the module of mathematical problems and you seem to have lost your pen, seeing to it that it wasn’t inside your mustard yellow pencil case. You know that you’re screwed specially when 15 minutes into answering the module, you still have no pen to write and solve with. Because first, it may sound miserable, but you have no friends and second, your pride stood still, refusing to talk to Jisung even when you clearly needed help.

The moment that your teacher left your classroom, a boy with a raven hair, chubby cheeks and a cute mole by his left chubbier cheek approached you,

“Hey, you can use my spare one.” He said. And who are you to refuse the kind offer? So, you accepted it and muttered a whisper of thank you before your teacher came back.

By the time that all of your classes were finished, you decided to return the pen to the said boy. You slowly approached him even before your brother had reached you, earning a confused look from Jisung.

“Uh, hey thank you for earlier and uh… here’s your pen.” Your nine-year-old introverted ass managed to say out loud.

“Oh y/n! You’re welcome!” to say that you were shocked was an understatement. How did he know your name when you don’t even talk to anyone in class besides your brother? And you also felt shy, and a bit guilty because you clearly don’t know his name.

“I’m sorry but, I don’t know your name.” you shyly said, head hanging low and fingers fidgeting with the straps of your backpack. But then you looked up when you heard soft giggles coming from the boy.

“It’s Seungmin! And no worries y/n,” nine-year-old Seungmin said.

“By the way, I’m coming by your place later to play video games with Jisung. You can join us if you’d like!”

And this was the start of it. You and Seungmin became inseparable. Maybe it’s because seungmin helped you by letting you borrow his pen and his kindness touched one of the strings inside your heart or maybe it was how cute his chubby cheeks are with the left one a bit larger than the right or maybe it was how he included you in every conversations when you were hanging out with them by your house’s living room just to play left4dead with your brother’s ps3. But you’ve grown to be the best of friends from then on.

Every Saturday, you would alternately visit each other’s house studying your Sciences and Maths with the sides of playing video games and watching classic cartoons. Seungmin also helped with you misplacing things often. He suggested writing on a memo pad every single thing you wanted to remember later on, every day, but only those that are important. Seungmin is also quite observative with his surroundings. For he would always know that the pen you’re looking for is located between the locks of your hair which is tied in a bun and the scrunchie that you’re trying to find was inside your now amber pencil case that you love carrying around. You were so close that even both of your parents even tagged you as the ones who seem like twins than you and Jisung.

Ever since you were a kid you’ve always had this poor memory skill and you still wonder until now the reason how and why you can’t forget everything about a certain Kim Seungmin when he seems to have forgotten every inch of your existence.

You heard a loud knock coming from the window of the passenger's seat which interrupted you from your short trip down to memory lane. You squint your eyes to recognize the person despite the dark and obsidian night clouding your vision. Recognizing it to be Hyunjin, you unlocked the car doors for him.

“Seungmin told me that he saw you here,” he started as he sat comfortably now by the passenger seat.

“and Jisung fell asleep in the middle of a movie” he continued. You sighed, expecting nothing much of your brother that shared the same trait as yours when it came to enduring long hours of sitting in front of a tv and just watching.

“Can you help me bring him here?” You asked as you had an agreement with Jisung that you’ll both be home before sunrise.

“Why don’t you stay the night y/n? I mean, not here. You can join us inside.” Hyunjin asked even though he already knew the answer.

“It’s my responsibility to bring him home, Hyunjin,” you said, immediately dismissing his suggestion.

“Besides, if mom and dad come home and we’re out of sight, then we’ll be dead as meat” Hyunjin scoffed at your reply making you question him in silence.

“Jisung already told me that your parents won’t be back for the next two days.” Oh. Well, shit.

“Come on, y/n, let’s get you inside. It’s cold out here.” All your hopes of going home with Jisung tonight was shattered as Hyunjin was already pulling you outside of your car, putting the sketchbook on your lap inside of your bag, which was lying in the backseat of your car, and dragging you towards their house.

“Y/n’s here!!” Hyunjin clearly made sure that everyone knew your presence inside the house. Your eyes immediately tried to find a sleeping figure of your brother by the cushion but he’s not there.

“Oh? y/n! I made your favorite snacks” and there he was, standing by the kitchen counter with a bowl of strawberries and melted chocolate in his hands. You glared at Hyunjin at this and the latter only apologetically looked at you and mouthed a ‘sorry’. Stuck in the situation, you only sighed as you took a seat in one of the couches as you heard how Hyunjin broke down to Jisung the details of how he managed to force your ass here.

“Y/n! my little one!” a voice called out coming from the kitchen which you certainly recognize that belongs to Chan. He sat down beside you and immediately attacked you with one of his big and comfortable hugs.

“I really missed you” he whispered in your ear before pulling away.

Felix announced that the movie is about to start which made everyone get back to their places. Jisung handed you your strawberries before he sat down with felix by the couch opposite to yours. You scanned your eyes to the people around you as you took notice of everyone in here. Chan who was now sitting by the carpet in front of the couch you were on. Changbin and Jeongin who were cuddled like babies by the longest couch, Felix, Hyunjin and Jisung who were now arguing in whispers of who will be able to cuddle Hyunjin’s Ryan plush. Minho, who just came back from the restroom and sat in front of Changbin and Jeongin. And—

Your thoughts were cut when a blanket was softly draped by your shoulders. You glanced behind you only to see the person you’re trying to avoid who was also looking at you,

“It’s… cold.” He said, deciding to turn away before you even return a ‘thank you’. You took the blanket in your hands and realized that it’s his own personal blanket. The one that he carried around whenever he would sleepover at your place before.

The movie ended and it was no surprise that both you and Jisung had already fallen asleep. Well, more than half of you are already in a deep slumber. The only ones awake are Chan, Minho and Seungmin.

"Are we gonna let them sleep like that or….?" Minho asked as Chan already started cleaning up the place from empty snacks and cups.

"I think the boys can manage to sleep in here, just bring more pillows and blankets," Chan answered, his figure disappearing towards the kitchen.

"Oh! and bring y/n upstairs to Hyunjin's room!" Chan declared.

Seungmin only watched as Chan and Minho did their thing, elbow propped to the armchair of the single seated sofa he's in and eyes boring directly to you, seeping. Just as when Minho was about to carry you to Hyunjin's room as Chan instructed, Seungmin sat up straight from his slouching position.

"I'll take her," he said,

"... uh, upstairs." Minho only looked at him before heaving a sigh and letting Seungmin do it.

Seungmin then approached you, taking notice of how his blanket draped over your sleeping figure. He sighed heavily before placing his arms beneath your neck and knees, carrying you in the comfort of his arms. You shifted in your sleep and snuggled closer to Seungmin's neck unconsciously due to his warmth being in close proximity to your naturally cold body.

“Be careful” Minho instructed as Seungmin started to head for the stairs.

Seungmin successfully laid you down the bed and carefully tucked you in beneath the sheets, attempting to take his blanket from you. But you tugged on it and cuddled with it more in your unconscious state. Seungmin chuckled at how adorable you looked and decided to just let you have it. It also reminded him of that one precious memory with you.

"Seungmin, I'm really, really sorry. I thought that I placed it in here already." you said as you checked Seungmin’s duffle bag once more. You were so sure that you’ve included his blanket there, which he lent you the previous day. Your eyes started to water at the thought of misplacing Seungmin’s favorite blanket at the cabin, because you always lose things.

“Have you checked your bag?” Seungmin said as he opened your backpack that lies beside his. He scrambled through the pile of clothes inside and a minute later, he felt the familiar smoothness of the cotton of his blanket. He sighed in relief before bringing it out, showing it to you.

“Y/n, it’s in here” he chuckled as he held it in your vision. You let out a shaky breath before tears came running down from your eyes. All of the frustrations from earlier and the anxiety of losing something important to your best friend came crashing to you as your adrenaline finally settled down, resulting in letting it all out. Seungmin, with years of knowing that you have a shitty tolerance with how your lacrimal glands work, led you to the surface of the bed. Encircling his warm hands to your much colder ones as he rubs soothing circles at the back of it with his thumb. Just like what he always did whenever you needed someone’s comfort. One that you can’t just vocally ask someone of and one that only a certain Kim Seungmin can do.

It was one of Seungmin’s favorite memories of you. It wasn’t because you cried, god no, Seungmin hates seeing you cry. It was the level of intimacy that your friendship with him has. You weren’t in your best shape, but he saw how you cared for him and not just him but also the things that he owns and the sentiments that they hold. How you value your relationship with him that even a stupid blanket of made you bawl your eyes out. It was how special and dear he is to you, not the expensive, crystal, gems that you both always laugh at whenever you go online shopping, but it’s special like how you always wore this long, beige, soft-cottoned cardigan of yours, the one where you don’t want to lose it so you’ll just use it in every kind of opportunity there is, to keep it in your sight. And believe it or not, Seungmin regrets every decision he made when everything that he had with you came to an end. Because it took him a year in college, and an ample amount of avoiding you, to realize that you were more than just a best friend.

You suddenly woke up from your sleep, feeling quenched for water. Then you remembered that you haven't had any drop of water after the sweets that you consumed earlier. You made your way towards the kitchen from Hyunjin's room, knowing the directions well, based on your last memories from this house. Reaching the kitchen counter, you spotted a familiar figure sitting by the table. But you chose to ignore him as you made your way to the fridge after grabbing a glass of water by one of the cabinets.

"Hey… y/n," you choked on your glass of water as you heard him suddenly speak. You wiped your lips before turning around to face him.

"Can we perhaps, uh… talk?" You took a sharp breath in as you totally did not expect him to initiate a conversation with you.

Seungmin was beyond nervous. He can already hear his heart pounding in his chest as you slowly approached the table, taking your time to somehow process the questions in your head. You took the seat in front of him, the grazing of the chair's feet against the marble floor being the only sound that was heard in the dread of the night. You softly sighed before turning your gaze towards the boy's hazelnut orbs, which was a wrong decision as it reflected against the moonlight from the window behind you, effortlessly making you lost with how his eyes showcased faint sadness and longingness.

It was during your last December as a senior high school, you guess it was when everything went wrong.

You were watching Seungmin's baseball game, excitedly screaming his name when your phone rang obnoxiously from your pocket. At first you ignored it, thinking it was just Felix trying to convince you to accompany him at the bake sale, even though he's fully aware that you're with Seungmin. But then your phone did not stop ringing and by the third time, you answered. It was Jisung's number, but the voice doesn't belong to him. It was a call from the hospital, telling you that you must come immediately for your brother was caught in an accident. They told you to don't panic but here you are, quickly getting off from the bleachers while texting Seungmin about your sudden disappearance.

You reached the hospital with your anxiety rising in every step that you take. The nurse instructed you to wait outside as your brother was undergoing an operation. You were frightened, of course. Your parents at that time were both out of town and you can't call your friends knowing that they're still in the middle of their classes, but you settled on sending them a message. Hours went by as you painstakingly waited for the doctor to come out of the operating room. Chan arrived first out of your friend group and that's when you broke down. Weeping and bawling your eyes out as he engulfed you with his warm arms. Your friends slowly piled up in the white hallways of the hospital, but your best friend was still nowhere in sight. The doctor finally came out and told you about your brother's condition. Apparently, Jisung was caught in a car accident, the driver of the car was over speeding, but his breaks don’t work. Jisung will now be transferred in a separate room and you just have to wait for him to wake up.

“Where’s Seungmin?” Hyunjin pointed out as you all headed for the room Jisung was transferred to.

“His game wasn’t done yet when I received the call.” you said, a bit tired from crying due to the events of that day.

“But it’s been hours already. I’m sure his game wouldn’t last that long” Felix stated, clearly concerned because they all know how you and Seungmin treat each other and it was evident, by the way you search for the entrance of the hallway every now and then, that you’re looking for your best friend.

“He’ll come by.” you said, completely ignoring everyone else as you sat on a chair near Jisung’s bed and it wasn’t that long when you had fallen asleep, clutching your brother’s hand in yours.

Seungmin came by the next day, explaining that he had to stay after the game for some stuffs that their coach instructed him and you noticed that something is wrong. It bothers you how he can’t look directly in your eyes as he explained. Because Seungmin wasn’t like that. He would always look at you whenever he tells you something important but that day, he chose to avoid your gaze. And one of the things that you regretted doing was not asking him about it because after that, Seungmin became distant.

The first two months after the incident, it was still tolerable, after school hangouts slowly lessened, with Seungmin spending his extra time for baseball practices and you totally understand it, you still have lunch times together anyways. But then it didn’t last long, when you all came back to school, having to spend your last semester as senior high school students, Seungmin suddenly doesn’t sit with you during lunch anymore. He started to hang out with the jocks, his teammates. It doesn’t also help that he’s cancelled every road trip that you both scheduled way before the previous semester ended. Your weekly game nights with him became monthly ones, until he skipped one month, or maybe two... or three, and it became countless that you never cared anymore. Everything that you’ve been doing with Seungmin, you became used to doing them all alone now. And you can only bask in silence as you continue to question yourself, What happened?

You used to hate losing things that you value dearly, but you never knew that losing someone would hurt much more than the things you lost. And Seungmin, he was among those that you lost but the difference this time is that you knew. You knew that he was slowly slipping away from you but you just let him. Thinking it was okay, thinking maybe, he grew tired of you, of how he was always the one to look out for you but everyone including you, knew that it doesn't make a point. Seungmin won't just slip away like that or that's what you thought.

“I’m sorry,” Seungmin broke the endearing silence that surrounds the both of you.

“For everything.” You only stared at him which he took as a signal to go on.

“Remember the university that I always told you about before?” Of course you remember, he couldn’t stop talking about it, junior year. You nodded in response as he went on,

“The same day of Jisung’s accident, I got offered for a scholarship to study there and I didn’t know what to do. My parents kept bugging me to accept it and they are already planning for my future on their own. It was my dream school, y/n." you saw a stray tear that grazed seungmin’s left chubbier cheek that you love the most, making you want to wipe it but no, you have to keep yourself cool or all the walls that you built after him will be instantly destroyed.

"I was confused, because in every future plan that I had, prior to being offered that scholarship, you were already included," Seungmin continued, his voice cracking as he tried to suppress his sobs.

"y/n, I didn't want to lose you." he said before tears were rushing down his delicate features,

"You already did." you said, your now glassy eyes locked with his.

"y/n–"

"No, Seungmin, you had a choice to tell me everything before. You should've told me and I would understand the situation, but you did not. Instead you slowly left me. Do you even know how much I had gone through?" you cut him off.

"I– I'm sorry,"

Seungmin was scared, then and now, to see how you're drifting away from him. The only difference was that when he made that decision before, he was scared of his growing feelings for you, feeling more than what the title ‘best friend’ holds, which pushed him to do what he did. He knows, his defense mechanism was bullshit. But then now, he is scared of the possibility that you'll cut him off of your life, without him telling you what he truly felt just because he doesn't want to add more flame to the burning of your wounds.

"I was a coward, I know. So, please, let me make it up to you." you scoffed at his reply,

"Why now? It's been two years, Seungmin. It probably won't hurt you to have me completely out of your life because you clearly are doing well on your own"

"Han Jisung," he said which had taken you back,

"He won't let me near you after senior year." you sat there in silence, Jisung did what now?

"You can ask him." Seungmin added but you weren't paying attention as everything in your head is now in pure chaos. You know you can't think straight at this moment so you just sat there in silence, trying to organize the haywire in your brain.

"Did you accept the scholarship?" you asked, which startled Seungmin.

"I did."

"Good for you. I'd feel guilty if you haven't." you sighed as you glanced at the clock and noticed that it's already half past four in the morning. You stood up from your seat, preparing to go back to sleep.

"I'm going to sleep, you?" you asked him.

"I'll stay for a while." he said, looking up at you with slumped shoulders.

"I forgive you, Min, I already did a long time ago," you said, placing a hand on his shoulder.

"But I'm sorry, I don't think I can give you what you're looking for right now."

There are things in your life that you have longed to look for and in some instances, you tend to find them at the most random places, in the most unexpected times. But after not seeing them for a long period of time, you happen to forget the value that it holds, how important they were, and nothing will remain besides the nostalgic memories that it held. That’s what you felt with Seungmin right now. He was your best friend, until he wasn’t. You were inseparable until he slipped away from your bond. And now, every time you see him, you’ll be reminded of how he once left you and the possibilities of it repeating. Because you believe that losing something once can be a mistake but losing it twice means you’re not responsible enough to keep it.

#stray kids seungmin #stray kids #stray kids imagines #stray kids drabbles #stray kids angst #stray kids fluff #straykids au #stray kids au #stray kids oneshot #stray kids kim seungmin #seungmin #kim seungmin

64 notes · View notes

soyouareandrewdobson · 5 years ago

Text

There must be something in the water...

This comic by Dobson, is in my opinion one that really serves as one of the biggest self owns in his history, once you know a few things about the quote and are familiar with the work of the person who said it AND Dobson’s output .

See, the quote “My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. Everybody drinks water.“ is alluded to none other than one of America’s greatest writers in the 19th century. Samuel L. Clemens. Or as he is known to many people worldwide, Mark Twain.

Now let me admit, I have not really read much of Clemen’s work in my life, but I have read articles about him, saw quotes of him, read up on his life as well as his social opinions and thanks to popculture osmosis I am aware of the plot outlines of works like “The Prince and the Pauper” and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”. I say plot outlines, cause lets face it, those movie adaptations we all know and love obviously miss the point of Clemens social satire he either hid well in his work or was as subtle as a sledgehammer to the head about.

Clemens in a way was an anti-Dobson. He came from a privileged upbringing, but took on a rather “low class” job in his youth before becoming famous through his writing. Similar to Dobson he hated racism, was obviously against conservative Christianity and for his time a “woke” fellow. But unlike Dobson, I think he did not just do it for virtue signaling, he genuinely believed in the cause and if he felt he went too far, he also apologized. Like his takes on Christianity certainly became more mellow later on in life (at least as far as I know)

Additionally, Clemens was funny. He was critical of society and literature (I highly recommend you to read Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences to get just how brilliantly this man could dissect the work of others. Here is a link to it https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/FenimoreCoopersLiteraryOffences )

Both in a way he would use snark to mock them, but also get a valid point across.

And the water line up there? In a way it is both the greatest ego boost, but also self deprecation he could go for.

See, the line actually goes like this

„My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.“

The boost comes from the fact that he is essentially saying “everybody reads my books”. Which lets face it, was true. Clemens was read by many people, both scholars and people from the general public. He was legitimately popular, to the point that even 110 years after he died he is still well known. Not only his works, but the person himself has become an iconic figure in our cultural conscious. Or to focus on what was really important: Clemens: I make money through my writing, bitch!

Okay, he wouldn’t have said it like that, but he would have at least acknowledged that making good money through his work was a nice benefit.

But in the same way, the line is a bit of self deprecation and slightly humble. See, he says his books are water. Something basic, something not everyone can afford. While the books of great masters are like wine. Something not everyone can afford, but which is in a way “sophisticated” and will live on too, even in higher regards.

I bet that at times Clemens could be full of himself, but we have to understand, this was a man who could take criticism and give it. A man who understood also something about literature and had certain insights others did not have at his time. A deadpan snarker who when he got a positive review allegedly told one of his first critics something along the line of “You made me as happy as the white slave owner chick who realizes her kid was going to be white after all”.

So what I believe is that he was humble enough to see that there were also people better/more sophisticated than him, which he even looked up too and whose work he compared with wine. People by whom he as a creator was like water in comparison. But thankfully (or rather, fortunately) everyone drinks waters aka “reads” the stuff he writes and therefore guarantees his career.

Which honestly, I consider also something of a truth some content creator should go for. Look, I am not saying that we should stop trying to go for something meaningful when we create art or tell stories, but in a way if Clemens was alive today, he would consider his water statement just further confirmed in the way a lot of popcultur works nowadays. Best example, Marvel movies. Marvel movies, as entertaining as they are, are basically just water (or soda), compared to genuine artistic movies or movies with deeper social issues in them. And yet, those movies make money and seem to connect with people at times better than something more “sophisticated”. Go figure.

But, back to Dobson for a bit, okay?

See, for Clemens the water line made sense, because again, his works were popular and understandable for everyone, making them as accessible as water. But for Dobson? Oh boy… For starters, if we compare their achievements in life so far Clemens already wins. Cause by the time he was 39 (Dobson’s current age at the time this post is written) Clemens was successful under his pseudonym by writing multiple articles and short stories, including The Innocent Abroad, Roughin It and Tom Sawyer. He was also married and was involved in multiple businesses. Dobson meanwhile had attempted to create the following comic series Patti, Formera, Percy Phillips, Legens/Alex ze Pirate, Danny & Spots, Brentalfloss Comics and they all sunk faster than the Titanic. Okay, not the Brental Floss Comcis, those just ended because Brentalfloss thought it was time to end it, but still.

Four major stories he supposedly wanted to write abandoned because they did not earn him the reputation he wanted and one unpopular out of touch gaming comic strips where the punchline was that a rejected clone of Cubitus with the Marsupilami (go look them up) liked the Wii, while its owner/friend was a hardcore PS3 gamer who obviously always needed to be in the wrong because after all, only troglodytes play non nintento consoles.

All his major books got rejected by the public, because the writing was either not good or the artwork was at best mediocre at worst something people on manag forums could draw better when doing fanart.

And yet here we have Dobson, using another ones famous and funny line claiming “his books are like water. Everybody drinks water” indicating amongst other things “everyone reads my books and they are easily accessible”.

No, that is a freaking lie. No one read your books, most of them are not accessible to anyone because they are either out of print or you could not see them anywhere if you dig up as deep as possible online (see my paywall post earlier this week). And when people read your books common criticisms included how unoriginal and aimless your stories would feel (Formera), how derivative characters were from other fictional characters (Alex ze Pirate is e.g. just Lina from Slayers but with the bitchy temper of a Rumiko Takahashi character) and how unlikable most characters would just be (see everyone in Alex ze Pirate except the Ninja Girl and Sam).

Or to put it in Clemen’s work when describing the sins of Cooper’s Deerslayer, your works tend to break among other things the following rules:

- … A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the Deerslayer tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in the air.

- They require that the episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as the Deerslayer tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop.

- They require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the Deerslayer tale to the end of it.

- They require that crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as "the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest," by either the author or the people in the tale. But this rule is persistently violated in the Deerslayer tale.

- They require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable. But these rules are not respected in the Deerslayer tale.

- They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the Deerslayer tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.

And now replace the Deerslayer tale with Alex ze Pirate/Formera and tell me those rules are not broken.

I am sorry, I get Dobson just wanted to be more sophisticated and give himself a slight ego boost and trick his readers into thinking he is deeper in his thinking than he really is. But if Dobson’s books are like water, said water is somewhere in the desert in an almost empty well that has also been poisoned. Either it gets detoxed and filtrated for consumption or you are better off drinking your own piss. Which is Clemens code for “write fanfiction”.

#adobsonartworks #andrew dobson #syac #so you are a cartoonist #sjw #literature #mark twain #water #alex ze pirate #comics

11 notes · View notes

idk-loving-kpop · 5 years ago

Text

Hi! I saw you are doing written ships and, if you don't mind, I'd like to submit one for EXO and Super Junior please. Btw I love your writing and I hope you are doing well!

I am 5'3", kinda chubby, shoulder length brown hair (but I'm going to get a pixie cut soon), green eyes, full lips, and freckles all along my nose and upper cheeks. I have glasses, and I don't really like my smile. I don't really like my appearance, I think my face is fat but I'm trying to workout, diet, and lose some weight before going back to school. I'm very much a tomboy, my entire wardrobe consists of jeans, t-shirts, a couple pairs of sweatpants, nerdy sweaters, and sneakers (I'm working on getting more fashionable though!). And because I'm very self-conscious I often get upset and flustered when anyone points out something about me (for example, my friend pointed out I was wearing a tighter t-shirt and everyone looked over and I panicked😅)

I enjoy writing, playing video games (mostly PS3 games cause I'm saving up for a PS4), watching random YouTube videos, and listening to music (mostly Rock). My education is very important to me and I'm often up really late or stressed all day, but I do like to take breaks and just curl up somewhere and look at the ceiling or busy myself and clean my room.

I'm often really shy and quiet when you first meet me, people see me as very kind but unapproachable because of this. But if I feel comfortable with you I am very funny and happy. Some would say I'm emotionally closed-off, I don't cry and I don't talk about my feelings, but my friends see it as a bigger issue than I do, I really don't care. I do not like parties or being the center of attention, it makes me extremely shy and some people take it as me being ungrateful. But I am actually very appreciative of anything anyone gives or does for me. I'm pretty flexible when it comes to small issues or decisions, but if there is anything I'm passionate about or have a strong opinion on I can be very stubborn. (There's Taurus energy for you.) So yeah I'm a Taurus. I was born **/**/** (I don't know which part of my birthday you need so here's everything😂)

But thank you so much and I really appreciate it!💕❤️💕

Hi! I submitted a written ship request earlier and I forgot my MBIT, and wanted to give it to you just in case, it's INFP-T, sorry about that😅

HI!!!! YAAAY YOU ASK FOR SUPER JUNIOR!!! Becarefull with letting emotions build up, if you keep things bottle up it will blow up sooner or later. That is mentally unhealthy. If you ever need to vent, you can always do it via Anon. Sometimes strangers online help better than people in your normal life, it helped me a lot in the past. If you want to lose weight I recommend 2 things. Walk and portion control. Please don’t do extreme diets. Also people online are doing “Quarantine Routines” stuff you can do at home with out weights or gym equipment. Use those as ideas & just put kpop song to it.

I actually did a “boxing” routine to Knock Knock by Twice.

EXO - Kai

Taurus/Monkey you would match Baekhyun, Chen & D.O ... Kai, Chanyeol & Baekhyun like to play games. Kai seems to have similar hobbies & likings like you. Chanyeol since okay too ... Baekyun was the one that pop in my head originally, because he seems like he match well ... ISFP and INFP can be good friends .. Between Chanyeol, Baekhyun & Kai ... All of them could be a good match ..

SUPER JUNIOR -Kyuhyun

Kyuhyun like to play games. Shindong would be understanding about losing weight. Hmmm this was hard because no one really stood out to me .... Sorry.

#EXO #exo ships #exo written ships #super junior #super junior ships #super junior written ships #kpop #kpop ships #kpop written ships #submission

3 notes · View notes

jakeh2987 · 5 years ago

Text

We Found Each Other In The Dark: The Last of Us Retrospective

On Christmas Day in 2012, I was gifted two games by my cousin; I had just gotten my PS3 over that summer, and while I had a few games, my library was pretty limited at that time. Those two games were the first two Uncharted games, Drake's Fortune and Among Thieves. I played those games in very quick succession over the next month or so into 2013, and bought and finished the third game, Drake's Deception. To this day, the Uncharted series remains my favorite in gaming, but little did I know just how impactful that Christmas gift would end up being in my life, even nearly eight years later. At this time, I didn't really follow specific game developers or studios; I kinda just saw a game I was interested in, kept up with that particular game, and eventually bought it when I could. However, I knew I had to see what Naughty Dog, the company who developed the Uncharted series, was going to do next. It turns out they were working on a little game called The Last of Us that was going to be releasing later that year. I was all in on the marketing and diving into any coverage I could, and the anticipation kept building unlike any game I could really remember. Then, right before the game's June 14th release, the reviews hit, and my excitement hit its peak, because the reception was absolutely glowing in a way I hadn't really seen for a video game. I knew The Last of Us was going to be special, but I don't think I was prepared for how much impact it would have. A couple days after the game came out, I was able to go out and pick up a copy. I don't remember how long it took me to finish the game, but I do remember rolling credits on it at like 3 or 4 in the morning one day, just letting them play while I sat there in total awe at what I just played. The Last of Us is a game that truly blew me away in so many different ways, but the thing that has always stuck with me is the story and its characters. The Uncharted games had really fun stories and memorable characters, but Naughty Dog brought it to another level with this game. Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson as Joel and Ellie remain some of the most powerful performances I've ever seen in not just gaming, but in any medium. The storytelling, while on the surface a fairly typical post-apocalypse, zombie-like survival story, was told in a really grounded way that made it resonate more than a lot of other stories in the genre. Everything was centered around Joel and Ellie's journey and how their relationship progresses, and there are some truly poignant moments throughout the story that I still get emotional watching when I replay it or watch someone else play it. This was a story about love and how far you're willing to go to protect it, or find it again, and it's also a story about resilience and finding hope in a world that doesn't have much of it, to say the least. I often find something new to take away from it every time I play it again, which I've done every year since I got my PS4 and the Remastered version in 2015. I can certainly say that playing it this year to get ready for its sequel in the midst of a global pandemic in real life added another layer in the back of my mind. But ultimately, The Last of Us is a game that's about two people finding each other in darkness and helping each other navigate it into, hopefully, the light, and that has stuck with me from day one. There's a reason this piece is named after the song by City & Colour, but more on that in a bit. The Last of Us is an amazing game on its own, but there's also a personal reason this game means even more to me now than it did even when I first played it. One of my very best friends Patches and I met on Twitter in December 2017 because of our mutual love of the game. Funny thing is, it was totally by chance; she had attended that year's Playstation Experience, and she got the opportunity to meet Neil Druckmann, creative director/writer for the games and now-Vice President of Naughty Dog, basically the creative face of the game. Neil had retweeted photos of a tattoo Patches had gotten and a photo of the two of them meeting, and I happened to see them and decided to give her a follow. I was just starting to get my footing in online gaming communities after listening to the Kinda Funny crew and other places throughout that year, and I was looking for more people to follow who were in the same spaces. The tattoo, which is a replica of Ellie's tattoo from Part II, was also just really cool. Anyway, Patches and I interacted a bit throughout the next year or so, but it wasn't until late summer/early fall last year that we actually became friends and grew to be really close. I won't go into personal details here, obviously, but we were both in some rather dark places, and I think we were able to dust each other off and help pull each other out of that darkness. We became life-long friends because of that experience, and now we have a really strong bond over this game, and I'm just so eternally grateful for that. Like I said earlier, this game is about two people who find each other in the darkness and helped pull each other out of it, and because of this game, Patches and I were able to do that for each other. And for a video game to have an impact like that is truly special. As I write this, we're just about a week away from the release of The Last of Us Part II. I know this game is going to destroy me emotionally, but I couldn't be any more excited for it. The first game changed the way I looked at video games and it led me to a life-long friendship I'll cherish forever, so I cannot wait to see what Part II has in store.

#the last of us #the last of us part 2 #naughty dog #playstation #ps4 #video games

1 note · View note

daleisgreat · 5 years ago

Text

25 Years of Sega Saturn & Virtual Boy - Flashback Special!

After the deluge of wrestling-themed entries for WrestleMania month this past 30 days, I have been pining to do another videogame anniversary special. Looking up which platforms have major milestone anniversaries this year, I noted six that stuck out. Four of the platforms (NES, Xbox 360, PSone, PS2) I have an extensive history with and they will get their own respective flashback treatment from me when their anniversaries draw nearer later this year. The other two platforms have all had lackluster or outright abysmal degrees of retail success and both I have only had limited histories with and never played on a consistent basis. Nevertheless, the time I did have with them I considered unique and I do have some fond memories of my experiences with each platform. So let us get on with this flashback special as I celebrate the 25th anniversaries of two consoles that each hit in 1995: Sega’s Saturn and Nintendo’s Virtual Boy.

I want to begin with the platform I have played the least of these two, the Saturn. Yes, I played my Virtual Boy and its daunting 14 game library more than the Saturn. In 1995 I was still lagging a generation behind on the latest consoles. All my family had was an NES at this point and I recently got a GameBoy for Christmas of 1993 so in 1995 I was getting a lot of mileage out of my GameBoy and my parents were still hitting up garage sales for bargain price NES game for me. By the time the Saturn and PSone hit in mid-1995, I was a year away from getting a SNES which I desired more so the Saturn and PSone were not even close to making my wish list. I read about them looming in magazines like Game Players and Electronic Gaming Monthly, but truth be told I was not all that excited for the future of disc-based platforms and the advent of polygonal graphics that were about to come into fruition with 32-bit consoles. As a naïve 12-year old, the first major 3D polygonal games that hit on SNES and Genesis in the early 90s like Star Fox and Virtua Racer looked butt-ugly to me, and from trying out demo kiosks of PSone and Saturn at stores the impatient kid I was back then was furious at this newfound ‘feature’ of the latest systems having loading times. Combine that with my family having no desire to chunk down several hundred dollars for another gaming system and I was left with no cravings for the Saturn and PSone when they both hit in 1995. I had no clue of Sega’s surprise Saturn launch announced at the first E3 in May of 1995. For the unfamiliar, it was when going into that E3 it was known that both the Saturn and PSone were slated to launch within days of each other in September of 1995, but at Sega’s press conference they said right then and there the Saturn is out right now at a handful of select retailers. In 1995 the Internet was only around for a few years and not even the slightest bit ubiquitous. Computers were still a couple years away from coming down to more reasonable family friendly prices, so at this time I got all my gaming news from my monthly subscription to Game Players.

youtube

Here is the podcast special on the Saturn I originally recorded way back in 2008. Check it out if you want to know even more about the history of the Saturn and its games. I wound up largely ignoring both the Saturn and PSone for the first few years they were out, maybe occasionally trying out an occasional store kiosk demo and that was about it. I remember the magazines at the time putting a lot of hype into Sega’s arcade ports, and console exclusives like Panzer Dragoon getting cover stories of having mind-shattering graphics, but I was not buying it at the time and stubbornly remained loyal to my 2D sprites. For the Saturn, I finally got my first real experience with it in April of 1997. I remember shortly before this time the Saturn was being pushed aggressively on TV with a special 1996 holiday bundle packaging it with Daytona USA, Virtua Fighter 2 and Virtua Cop for $199. I had no idea at the time why this ridiculous deal happened was because Sega was getting killed in sales at this point in the PSone/Saturn/N64 era and they were desperately trying to play catch-up with a hell of a value considering several months earlier in 1996 it was clinging onto its dooming launch price of $399.

Flash forward a few months later in April of 1997 and my hometown got hit with a huge flood that forced a mandatory evacuation of the entire town for a couple weeks until the waters receded. For a couple days our family stayed at a nearby air base hangar. I believe we were planning on hunkering down there for several days until a couple days in my uncle from St. Paul surprised us and showed up and ‘volunteered’ on taking us in and refused to leave without us coming with him. My siblings and I were delighted to get out of the crowded hangar and spend time with our cousins for what ended up being a week before we were able to get back home. My cousin Royce, who was within a year of my age at the time wound up getting that Saturn three game bundle for Christmas a few months earlier and we played those three games along with the demo disc that came with the system almost every day. We must have played through Virtua Cop at least a few times, and I remember finding it a big step up from previous light gun games I was accustomed to. Daytona USA at the time did not really click with me, and while I was impressed with the graphics at the time I did not come around to checkpoint-racing games yet and was more turned off by their enforced time limits back then. On the demo disc our family got a lot of fun competing against each other in the home run derby mode available in World Series Baseball. The standout game of the pack was easily Virtua Fighter 2. It blew me away and for me it was the first game that proved not only for fighting games, but for games all together that 3D polygonal graphics and gameplay could be viable and damn fun. I knew I was a couple years late to the party by this point, but by 1997 polygonal graphics were no longer the crude, non-textured blocks and rectangles on the SNES and Genesis, but actually had some depth and style to them. I loved Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat at this point, but Virtua Fighter 2 proved to me that 3D fighters could coexist with 2D ones.

That week with my cousin was my proper introduction to the 32/64-bit era. It would be over a decade though before I got more serious hand-on time with the Saturn. Not many friends of mine had the Saturn back home, or if they did we rarely busted it out. My friend and former podcast co-host, Matt has a mammoth collection, and I only recall us turning to the system once or twice all these years to play the charming platformer SCUD. Another friend and podcast co-host of mine, Chris also has a Saturn in his equally mammoth game collection, and until 2008 I only recall us powering it on a couple of times to play the fun co-op action platformer, Three Dirty Dwarves, which had a nonsensical, grungy vibe to its destruction. In 2008, we were a couple years into doing our videogame podcast and we loved doing console retrospectives, so we decided it was time to do one on the Saturn. I just uploaded it to YouTube and integrated it into this article for your listening pleasure! Chris knew about my limited Saturn hands-on time at this point so we decided to spend literally a whole afternoon, about four to five hours of ‘research’ playing a good chunk of his Saturn collection. About 10-15 minutes for each game for a quick refresher for what each game brought to the table. There was one though we played for about two hours straight. That was the rare Panzer Dragoon Saga Chris had a copy of. I knew about it being a collectible at this point and heard the acclaim for it being an ahead of its time RPG and professed to Chris to hope to spend a little more time with it to see what the hype was all about. I remember digging its rail-shooter action the first two games established while simultaneously mixing in RPG style mechanics and exploration. I think we both got wrapped up in it, and stuck with it a bit longer than anticipated. Suffice it to say, those opening hours stood out to me all these years later and I can see why Panzer Dragoon Saga became a hot commodity.

youtube

Jeremy Parish did an excellent line of videos with deep dives on every individual Virtual Boy game released, including Japanese exclusives. Here is his take on the Wario's exclusive Virtual Boy game as of yet to be re-released, Wario Land. In my TurboGrafX-16 flashback, I wrote about how I procured the system at a gaming community meet-up event. At that same event there were several gaming systems hooked up for play throughout the night, and one of them was the Saturn. One of the highlights of that night was someone bringing enough multi-taps and controllers that we were able to get plenty of rounds of eight player Saturn Bomberman in. I am a fan of classic multiplayer Bomberman, but never played more than four players before, and was surprised to see the Saturn pull off an eight player version with a micro-sized map and characters in order to fit everyone on screen. It was a Bomberman experience that nothing will likely ever stack up to. I dug up a photo from the event of all of us gathered around the TV so you call can see the tech in action!

Sadly, I never got anymore hands on time with the Saturn after this. It is one of the few major consoles that I do not own. For years I remember seeing the system for sale at our local retro games shop for around $30, but I always hesitated on it. The games I enjoyed on there Sega released better sequels on other systems, and I later got to check out some of its top ranked games like the Capcom fighting games, Guardian Heroes, Nights Into Dreams... and acclaimed shmups like Radiant Silvergun on enhanced re-releases on the Xbox 360 and PS3. There remains games exclusive to the Saturn that I always wanted to try like Die Hard Arcade, World Series Baseball ‘98, Fighters MegaMix, Burning Rangers and Shining Force III, but with retro game prices continuously going up, the time to start a Saturn collection has come and gone in my book unless I happen to stumble upon a steal of a deal. I do have one Saturn game in my collection however, and I will give props to Matt once again who gifted me his extra copy of Bug!. While Sega pulled the plug early in America on the Saturn, it comparatively fared much better than Nintendo with the Virtual Boy. It launched in America in August of 1995, and sold so poor right out of the gate that Nintendo could not have abandoned the platform any faster. Its last game, 3D Tetris, hit North America in March of 1996, only seven months after it launched and with a total of a meager 14 games officially releasing stateside. I remember seeing the hype leading up to the Virtual Boy’s launch in the magazines, and like with the initial wave of polygonal graphics, I was not sold on the concept of virtual reality. However, a couple months after that same flood hit in 1997 our local Wal-Mart had unsold Virtual Boy inventory it was desperate to get rid of by selling the system itself for $20, and games for $5 each. This was one of the first times as a kid I recall my dad abstaining from his garage sales-only videogame rule and realized the steal the system was going for. We walked out of that Wal-Mart with the system and the copy of Mario’s Tennis it came bundled with, along with copies of Golf, Mario Clash and Nester’s Funky Bowling.

I was in the midst of spending summers on a farm at this point in my childhood for several years, and that was the summer of Virtual Boy with my siblings. I played the crap out of all four of those games. I abided by the recommended break alerts that popped up every 15-30 minutes seriously because I recall the gaming mags at the time reporting on the Virtual Boy causing eye strain after consistent use. Even with all that heavy duty play of the Virtual Boy that summer, somehow I am the only one in my family that does not have glasses. All four games we had were solid, but not mind blowing. Mario Clash I thought was a nice, fully-featured take on the classic original Mario Bros. arcade game that fleshed out that style of gameplay with about 100 stages and got so difficult early on I did not come close to finishing it. Golf was a good simulation of the sport, but it only had one course so I did not revisit it that often. I remember enjoying Mario’s Tennis a lot, but this being the debut version of that game it was more of a tennis sim with Mario characters, and had less of the wacky mini-games and power-up attacks associated with the franchise today. My siblings and I played a ton of competitive Nester’s Funky Bowling. There was not anything that funky about it other than the occasional cheerful animation from Nester and his twin sister Hester whenever you scored a strike or spare, but it was a functional enough bowling game that we had plenty of fierce rounds of over that summer. After that summer we and I got our fill of those four games and the Virtual Boy found itself in the closet for many years. Eventually I randomly dug it out and found the tripod busted, and the pack that hooked up to the back of the controller that contained the plug-in for the AC adaptor was missing. With no means of powering on the Virtual Boy, it sat in a bag forgotten in my closet for well over a decade. I will thank one Jeremy Parish for renewing my interest in Virtual Boy with his excellent line of Virtual Boy Works videos. For those that are unfamiliar with him, Parish is one of most credible members of the retro gaming press, with him hosting the renowned retro-game podcast, Retronauts since 2006 and going on to write countless books and producing chronological video series on nearly every 20th century Nintendo platform. He averages one video a week, which usually highlights one or two games and does a deep dive into its development history and then proceeds to review the game. A few years in he has already covered almost all the games released from the first years of the SNES and the first two years of NES and GameBoy.

Throughout 2019 Parish took a detour from those three systems to focus on going through the entire VirtualBoy library, including its several Japanese exclusives. His surprise love for the platform shined through his thorough coverage for each game. It is a well-produced series and fantastic history lesson for this blink-and-miss-it platform that I highly recommend checking out by click or pressing here, especially now to learn about the first major attempt at a virtual reality platform with VR now having a modicum of success with the PlayStation VR and the Oculus Rift having made legit waves these past few years. Virtual Boy Works inspired me to track down a few more Virtual Boy games to my collection which were surprisingly going for not that much on eBay. I wound up getting Galactic Pinball, TeleroBoxer, Virtual League Baseball, Vertical Force and Wario Land. I also tracked down a replacement AC Adaptor hub and tripod stand which resulted in my Virtual Boy powering on once again! I tested out all these games briefly. I love me some videogame pinball, and Galactic Pinball has some nifty 3D tricks up its sleeve. TeleroBoxer is like Punch-Out meets Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots or Real Steel for the younger readers who need a more contemporary reference. Vertical Force is a competent shmup, and I wish I put more than a few minutes into Wario Land because it is a legit top notch platformer and went down as one of the few highly rated games on the system. I swear to one day make it through Wario Land! Thank you for joining me on this two part 25th anniversary special for the Saturn and Virtual Boy! Got a favorite Virtual Boy or Saturn memory of your own? I would like to hear how it compares to my tale so shoot me a line on Twitter over @Gruel. If you enjoyed this journal-style flashback special, than I encourage you to check out the links below to the specials I wrote for the Dreamcast, GameBoy, Genesis, TurboGrafX-16 and yes, even the 32-X. Thank you all once again for indulging me!

My Other Gaming Flashbacks Dreamcast 20th Anniversary GameBoy 30th Anniversary Genesis 30th Anniversary TurboGrafX-16 30th Anniversary and 32-X 25th Anniversary

#videogames #saturn #virtual boy #virtua fighter #panzer dragoon #nester #wario land #three dirty dwarves #teleroboxer

2 notes · View notes

familyvisionis2020 · 5 years ago

Text

Day 6 - The Drive Home

Today was the last day of tour. I wake up in the morning feeling guilty because I have a groggy memory of waking up around 8 to go to the bathroom, Paul was waiting to go, but when the person came out I just fronted him (a word I just now remember from elementary school, cut in line, but southern), used the bathroom and went back to bed. Rude. I am wiping the cold from my eye, taking in the undecorated walls of the apartment, and Jeremy comes from down the hall and says ‘Did you get the memo? Louisville cancelled. Tour’s over.” I said ‘fuck’ and processed it. I feel sad for Jeremy and John and Kabir because I know they wanted to play this last show in Kentucky. It’s not that I didn’t, but also for the last three months and for especially the last month I have been feeling a tremendous amount of anxiety about this tour, about feeling out-of-control, about being away from loved ones at home, about being available to show up for people in my life, about completing regular routines of hygiene and spirituality and task completion that make me feel boring and comfortable, both. Touring stirs up dredges of the tea leaves that I had let settle into a fine filmy sediment at the bottom of me. I manufactured a jello mold two years ago and poured myself into it: regular 9-5 in the legal field as a means and precursor to law school, then diligent study for 3 years, then a professional career, abandoning the party life, abandoning trespassing in abandoned buildings, abondoning the luxury of resentment and unproductive time, trying to cool and firm into something reliable, serviceable, dependable, available, a resource people could draw from for once, rather than a leech or slug. And when I go on tour I take that jello mold out of the fridge and it holds its shape but also it warms and the longer I’m out the more liquidy it gets and sloshes over the sides and so forth. So I’m ambivalent because I like what I have to offer to this band, I like the physical process of drumming and expressing myself in the context of music and being a member of a band, but also I feel like I’ve kind of chilled enough and it’s time to settle down. And I’m at a way different point in my life than the other guys in the band it seems like, for the most part. So anyways all this to contextualize the fact that the news of tour ending even earlier than early honestly makes me feel relieved, if not happy, and so then I work to temper that boosted mood for the sake of grim decorum befitting a tour taken before its time.

All our stuff is locked in the venue from last night and we learn we won’t be able to pick it up until 1pm and so we have about 4 hours to kill in the apartment. Phillip puts on a pot of coffee that will turn out to be some of the wateriest on record, but still, a super kind gesture, and then he also puts on The Wire on HBO Go and we just settle in on the couch and watch for awhile. Some of the scenes are familiar, there’s something seductive about this show, and it brings me back to the precise moment of Summer of 2013 right before I moved to Philadelphia right after I got evicted from the squat/music venue I had been living in that winter and spring, I watched all episodes of The Wire on DVD on Matt Martin’s couch at 3 Pomroy and felt deeply depressed. It ranks up there with when I watched all released episodes of The Office in bed in the winter of 2009 after my girlfriend broke up with me, in terms of memorably devestating life phases offset by the amniotic fluid of full-series of TV. So we watch The Wire and I find myself not too inclined to sit and watch and I want to write so I sit at my laptop on the table nearby and write an email to a female (sorry) but I actually do and its purpose is to make her smile and bring some levity and play and purple prose to a moment in her life that, from how she tells it to me, is just so heavy, nightmares and waking horror and a future that feels like it hangs by a thread. so I’m glad to spend time showing up for her in this small way rather than watching The Wire, and also I write yesterday’s blog post, another activity that feels sort of like a pittance but also like: doing-writing is something I have been putting off, in phases and seasons, for my entire adult life, because to me nothing ever matters enough to write about, or if it does my perspective is deficient, or my research inadequate, or my skill incommensurate with the subject matter, or it won’t properly reflect my feelings, or any number of self-sabotaging excuses to not do this thing I so love doing, and love sharing. So for me, writing this blog is a very meaningful and special act of reclamation of a personal mode of expression that constitutes a break in my winter’s depression and what feels like a new phase of happiness, of believing-i-have-a-future, of feeling more authoratative and qualified to know and describe my own experience in a lifetime marred and dampened by dissociation, oblivion, amnesia, and fugue. So it feels like nourishment to get some paragraphs done and to move slow through my days, get them onto the page.

The Wire grows tiresome at some point and Jeremy fires up the PS4 and then the PS3 looking for games but none are multiplayer and so eventually he settles on Skyrim and starts from a new file. Me personally I love watching let’s plays and this is as good as TV. There was a moment last tour when we were in this strange small town in Connecticut called Torrington (the town all touring bands are required to go to, we also joked), in this town Jeremy was describing the sort of surrealness he experienced there and he said he felt like the townspeople in Torrington were like NPCs in a FPS RPG like Skyrim wherein you would go up to people and press A to talk, say ‘What news?” and that I thought was really funny then, I like his sense of humor. Really Kabir and Jeremy and Royal represent this sort of humor that is to me equal parts razor wit, cleverness, timing, accents, absurdity, and broad conceptual placticity, all for the most part very clean too, never or at least rarely blue (you’re gonna inevitably make a D’s nuts joke and that’s just that). And during happy times I am so grateful to be nearby this humor and during less happy times I get self conscious about how great their humor is and how I sometimes feel like I don’t measure up. But that feeling doesn’t weigh for long. Skyrim is fun to watch, it kills some time, we all take turns trying to kill wolves with swords before Jeremy finally does it, there’s a dragon, we loot corpses, discuss Bloodborne and Dark Souls and comparable games. A lot of the main media activity in this group is discussing how a given media relates to another media, Kabir and Jeremy and John know it seems like everything between the three of them when it comes to record labels, band narratives, artist’s hometowns, etc. So we play Skyrim for awhile, and then eventually it’s time to go to the venue and we drive back to The Salty Nut, load in all our gear, do a final sweep, and say our goodbyes and thankyous to Phillip. We return to the Bandido place one last time for one last round of free local Taco Bell which we absolutely scarf and are very vocally grateful to the people for giving it to us for free again, it’s clear they really put effort into being hospitable to touring bands here, at least through Phillip. His band, Thomas Function, was signed on Fat Possum Records, which also had bigger indie acts like Jay Reatard (who Phillip tells a story about him demanding $50,000 in cash for a show fee to feed his coke and heroin habit, Reatard died at age 29 from cocaine toxicity with alcohol also), The Black Keys, Andrew Bird, Wavves and Soccer Mommy, but which Kabir postulates has most of its success due to having signed octogenarian southern blues legends like R.L. Burnside and King Ernest and raking in royalties from what Kabir speculates is due to poor management of the estates of these dead leagends who each had more than a dozen children. It’s truly fascinating for me to hear how deep and complex the analysis of music these guys have is. When I feel insecure, which is often, I tend to veneer these sorts of expertises and shibboleths among music-heads as snobby, elitist, exclusionary, petty and asinine. But I think most of that comes from a fear that I lack the insight, cognitive absorbency, and passionate research skills to collate and catalog data about artists in the way these people do, the way my bandmates do. I feel inspired to take time to dig deeper into the musicans I love, to make them real to me, to get a sense of their story, their lived experience, for the sake of corroding the mediation between us somewhat, or at least polishing the media membrane.

I volunteer to drive for the first half of what will end up being about a 10-hour drive back from Huntsville to Chapel Hill. We go to a Whole Foods in Huntsville upon Kabir’s insistence where I purchase a nootropic snakeoil energy affair in beverage form, Kabir gets hot coffee and a La Colombe Draft can of latte, Jeremy gets a kombucha made from yerba mate (“best of both worlds” he says), John black coffee as per, and Kabir also buys a slice of Tres Leches cake in a clear plastic to-go clamshell: “they can take away my tour, but they can’t take away my tres leches.” Later he’s eating it in the van and he accidentally spills some on himself and he says “shit…spilled some on myself. oh good, it was only one leche” which to me is so funny and perfect humor and just like kind of a paragon of the kind of joke I so treasure from this friend group. Another is when Jeremy and Kabir are recalling a favorite running joke from two tours ago, wherein they were in Philly, home to the famous Schuykill River (pronounced skoo-kill, at least when i lived there, at least around the non-indigenous people i knew), and while there they would affect this blaring Brooklyn accent, deployed heavily on this trip as well for basically any purpose, but back then they would say “UGH MY SKOYKL IS KILLING ME” like Schuykill was lombago or sciatica and also would say “YEAH LET ME GET A KWATA POUND OF SKOYKL ON RYE” like it was a deli meat, and they laughed and laughed. Also they liked doing rhyming jokes like last night there was a chair nearby the combo amp Tired Frontier was going to use for their set and Kabir goes ‘amp on the chair, tone everywhere’ and then I say ‘amp on the ground, makes a bad sound’ and then I tell Jeremy later how Kabir would put me in good spirits whenever I was describing to someone how my LSAT score is very competitive but my checkered past makes the acceptance process a little less than straightforward, and Kabir would see I was getting kinda down and anxious, and he would say ‘You gotta break the law before you make the law,’ and we all laugh and I love that, the function of humor as balm, salve. I want to wield my humor like that.

The drive back is fine, some sprinkles, nothing major, clear traffic for the most part, I feel like I have a good command of the van, keep it around 75 for most of the trip, feel smoth and confident switching lanes, passing, etc. We do another two NYT Wednesday classic crosswords together, Kabir is getting probably 40% of the clues, me maybe 30% Jeremy and John the other 30%, Kabir will just to YEAHHHHHHHH after getting a clue and I start doing that too after Jeremy says “X down, ‘on the table’ 15 letters,” and I say UPFORDISCUSSION after only a couple seconds and it fits and is correct and I feel like a damn genius and we’re all laughing and kind of praising each other half-jokingly for being strong beautiful geniuses who also we know songs. This is a great passtime and the drive flies by and before I know it we’re in Western NC just outside of Asheville and we make a stop to refuel the tank and get dinner. We decide on a Waffle House across the street, not wanting to venture too deep into Asheville for something healthier and better because of the time and money it would likely eat up, Kabir says that FEMA uses the closing of Waffle Houses as a bellweather to indicate the severity of a given natural disaster. We go inside, the waitress says ‘ya’ll aren’t from around here are you?’ in a way that I take to be hostile and I suggest that to the guys and they seem like maybe slightly offput but not very much and we decide not to abort and I later feel foolish because I think I am doing this thing where I become excessively vigilant or sensitive to a perceived slight to a friend who is brown for the putative purpose of interceding on their behalf against racism but what’s actually happening is if someone was racist to them they could just stand up for themselves and make their own call regarding their own comfort or lack thereof and I would do better to act less motivated by white guilt when avoidable. That passes, it’s fine, we eat hash browns and waffles and eggs and grits and toast and cover everything in tobasco and tip well and get back on the road, John takes over for the final stretch.

I return a call from Marty and catch him up about tour being cancelled and we discuss our fears and hysteria and cancellations and reaction and so forth. Marty remarks that he is a gravedigger during the plague, which is the best possible job to have. It’s not a joke because he actually drives a backhoe working for a cemetary and digs actual graves, super weird and eminently punk/goth and kind of a curiosity but really perfect for the lead singer of one of the South’s premiere punk bands, especially after his being fired from the swish cafe he worked at in Richmond before that. I love Marty and catching up and it feels good to hear his voice. After I get off the phone it sort of becomes campfire spooky story time in the van with everyone proffering their take on the panic, market failure, the likelihood of Capitalism as a superstructure to require perpetual growth even at the peril or death of its working class, the superior response to covid that South Korea and Norway seem to have mounted, a lot of fear of financial insecurity. Eventually this digresses to talk of touring, and the guys discuss all manner of various routes throught the South, Midwest, Northeast, plains states, PNW, Mexico City, Jeremy says ‘I can get us a show in Colombia’ which he can, Argentina or Venezuela through a mutual friend, then Europe so long as the label foots the bill for the plane ticket, then Japan, setting up camp on Honshu would make it easy to hit TOkyo, Kyoto, Osaka and Nagoya no problem, except where exactly are people playing shows? there’s gotta be somewhere all these Japanese Noise and Hardcore bands are getting gigs, and then from there of course it’s not hard to get to Australia, John knows a band there, and they go all around the world and this is stressing me out a little bit, only because I wonder about how much they think I would be involved or want to go on such a theoretical tour, and the answer is I don’t 100% know. Part of me wants to say this is my last tour, lean all the way in to law school and leave behind this chapter. Part of me feels like it’s better not to make a hard and fast statement like that because what if the economy collapses and for some reason school is a no-go but being in the band becomes the most plausible source of income or something. I get anxious and psych myself out and quiet down and feel foolish and wish to be home. I fantasize about my future life of stability, but I second guess myself because I just don’t know for sure how my life will be, and want to be careful to work toward the goals I think will be the most fulfilling, self-actualizing, spiritually nourishing, healthy for me; I also want to not forsake the friendships and bonds I’ve forged in these weird intimate moments in the van with the guys. I have the wherewithal to know that nobody is requiring me to make a decision right this second, and that as time passes it’s likely that the best course of action will be revealed one way or another if I can keep from panicking. So I watch videos of the 2019 Classic Tetris World Championships on my phone, eat two candy bars, watch videos of a streamer named Wumbotize play the latest Tetris game, Tetris Effect (2018, PS4, PC), and am pleasantly awed by how crazily far the skill curve of that game has shot up. I have some time ahead of me that is completely free, which is so nice. Before I know it I’m back home in my clean apartment which is tidy like a tetris field at the beginning of a new game and I get into my bed and lay down flat and if my bed is the well than the line of me clears and the well is clean, smooth, primed, for whatever falls tomorrow.

1 note · View note

ginnyzero · 5 years ago

Text

Not All Powerful Female Characters are Warriors: Okami

Okami is a video game that I was exposed to back in college. (My friends were computer game majors.) And I was introduced to it by my roommate who had been following the development of the game for a long time. She adored the game since it featured a wolf as the lead. (For once, a reason for the silent lead to actually be silent! Woof!) We were both lovers of all things Japan and the game's art style was in Japanese ink painting. Which, if you know anything about gaming, 3D realistic was the way to go even back then. Clover studios tried it and didn't like the results. (To put this friend into perspective, she also loved SMT: Digital Devil Saga, the RPG where you play part demons that can eat enemies. Yes. EAT. But that was also based on Bhuddism and Hindu Mythology sooo..)

Okami was about Okami Amaterasu and her fight against the minions of Yame in order to cleanse and defend Nippon. The story line too many of the stories and legends of ancient Nippon (and before) and wove them into a cohesive story about Amaterasu and the people she was helping. The goal of the story was to earn praise of the locals by helping them, cleanse the land of cursed zone and solve logic puzzles, oh and fight monsters. Lots, and lots, and lots of monsters. As Amaterasu progressed through the game and overcame challenges or inspired the people of Nippon, she would regain her 13 powers of the brush.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evRYEFzAY8w

With the brush, you could 'draw' on the screen using your controller to do magic spells. These magic spells ranged from restoring/mending objects, growing plants, moving water/fire/lightning/ice, walking on walls and slowing down time. This was a really innovative style of game play at that time and inspired other games.

I always felt that Okami was a game that not only would appeal to boys (most game studio's target demo) because of the fights and the bosses, and also to girls because of well, the pretty graphics, the style of game play (at least the first half of it) and the multiple female characters. Though it's not for children. (Sake, bouncing boobs, and so on and so forth.)

Amaterasu, the silent wolf lead, is well, a female, based on the Japanese Goddess of the Sun, Amaterasu with her divine mirror and beads. (The third divine weapon was the sword, which also had significance to Amaterasu in Japanese Mythology.) There were also several major female characters throughout the game that were important, even if they weren't all warriors. Female characters don't have to be warriors to be strong characters and strong women.

Kushi's bravery to face Orochi and her sake brewing helped Amaterasu and Susano (a male warrior) defeat the 8 headed dragon. Himiko and Otohime were two Queens whose bravery, abilities and willingness to sacrifice themselves for a cause they believed in, helped find Oni Island and allowed Amaterasu to actually get there. (Otohime did this while pregnant too. Multiple props to her badassery.) There was a female villainess and despite the fact the game has been out for 10 years or so now, I don't want to spoil it for you! Just to say, that she is there and man does the game keep you guessing. Then Kai and Lika in the last arc are important in helping Amaterasu navigate the forest of confusion and keeping Nippon from turning into a frozen wasteland. Plus, there were other female characters that Amaterasu helped too, Princess Fuse, Moon Maiden Kaguya, the Sasa Sanctuary daughter and so on and so forth.

Yes, they were all supporting players. Without their help, and prayers, and belief, Amaterasu wouldn't have been able to succeed in her quest.

The end of the game in the fight against Yame (who was a big ball, sigh, what is it with the Japanese...) there was a large emotional pay out because of the structure of the game and all the work and help Amaterasu had provided to the people. (In order to level Ammy up, you had to get praise to increase health, ink pots for magic, lives and increase the money pouch.)

I was really sad and upset when Capcom closed Clover Studios in favor of making another Resident Evil rather than Okami 2 that they'd clearly set up in the end of the first game! Because, I wanted more cleansing, helping people and earning praise shenanigans.

That's the upside of Okami.

But there is a downside to the game. It's long. I mean, it's long. Don't start unless you've got 40 to 60 hours to put into it. There are a lot of side quests and a whole bunch of collectibles to find. And yeah, you need a lot of money in order to get some of the higher level magic spells and divine instruments and fighting techniques, so you will be doing a large amount of fishing and minion fighting.

And because it's long and because they spaced out getting the brush techniques. It's A) easy to forget the earlier techniques and when you need to use them. And B) the later techniques and even some of the middle techniques aren't explored to their full potential. Ice in particular and even Wind falls into this category.

The second half of the game also becomes less about restoring the land and more about dungeons and monster fighting which makes it less innovative and more like every other platformer game out there ever. In fact, the last third of the game, the Northern arc after Ninetails and before going into the Ark of Yamato, is mostly exposition. I mean lots of boring, repetitive, exposition, where they tell you the same things at least three times. The first 2/3 of the game, they spend that time having you "relive" the story and hand holding your way on what to do next in Sei-an City. (Kusa Village is also unmemorable despite being between Kamiki and Sei-an.) The last 1/3 of the game, forget hand holding (trying to figure out what to do next can be a bit of a chore and it's a bit jarring) and the tale of the Ark of Yamato gets told, over, and over, and over. ENOUGH ALREADY. I GET IT.

I mean, sure the stump city of the Poncles was great and going back in time was sort of fun? (Except this means you defeat Orochi 3 times in the game. And let me tell you, he's not that interesting of a boss.)

Thus, I tend to forget the second half of the game. It's annoying. It's boring. I dislike dungeons and racing clocks. I spend too much time facing bosses that I've already defeated. Can I please go back to clearing cursed zones and making cherry trees BLOOM?

Despite this, I do love the game. I think it had a lot of potential and really did break some boundaries of the way games were made and stories were told. It was also beautiful. Don't let the video fool you. The PS2 version wasn't that fuzzy. If it had been that fuzzy, it would have been unplayable.

They did make a digital HD download of Okami for PS3, which is too bad because I prefer hard copies of my games. (Just a quirk.) Otherwise, in order to play it again, I will have to open and set up my PS2. Fortunately, the let's play on Youtube reminded me why I won't be bothering anytime soon. (Even if I did yell at the screen a lot at the player.)

If you have the time for it, love Japanese legends and lore and enjoy platformers. I do recommend Okami.

6 notes · View notes

yeonchi · 5 years ago

Text

Thinking about the future of EDGN

I’ve never asked a lot out of my fans over the years, but to some of my close fans (you know who you are), I’d really appreciate some helpful advice because this is an important decision I’m making that will affect both you, the fans, and myself.

To cut a long story short for a tl;dr, I no longer enjoy posting about the voice languages in localised Japanese games because of some recent events and realisations and I want to retire from the English Dubbed Game News page altogether.

It’s been about five years since I started all this with the Koei Warriors Rant Series and since then, everything I’ve done that’s related to English dub has brought me nothing but hate. I know it’s a bit of an exaggeration and some of my close fans may have something to say to the contrary, but I’ve been feeling quite negative lately and because of that, I think it’s a brutally honest summary.

After ending the Dub Logistics series, I thought the one thing I could do to repay my fans for their support over the years was to continue posting on EDGN. Personally, I think I’ve done enough already and also, as I said in a post back in August, I’ve been having doubts about the future of the page and what I want to do with it given my current interests. There are several factors that led to me having these doubts, which I’ll be outlining after the break. (I can’t even put horizontal lines in my posts with the rich text editor now, thanks Tumblr)

1. I was never interested in any game outside of the Koei Warriors series or any game I played in the past (eg. Dissidia Final Fantasy).

This really shouldn’t be a surprise to my fans because in the past, I’ve rarely posted anything outside of the series I was interested in, including the aforementioned series. If I came across something by chance and liked it, then I would do some investigation into it, but these days, the spark just doesn’t want to light up anymore.

I’ve never really taken the chance to buy new games because my family doesn’t believe in buying things that aren’t important and as such, I took that mantra to heart. While I never brought a PS3, I did get a Nintendo Wii, but I traded it in later for a Wii U and not a PS4, which I still regret to this day. I pirated my PSP, DS and PC games (let’s face it, who doesn’t) and played with emulators on my computer. I only got a Steam account to play Team Fortress 2 (laggy though it was on my shitty computer) and I never brought anything from it, which made it difficult for me to add friends on there (not that they really cared in the end).

By extension, this applies to anime as well, which is the reason why I never post anything outside of the same few animes on the Waifu Network or on my Facebook pages. My belief on sexism in anime has also contributed to this disinterest; the only reason why I’m still posting the same few animes is because I’m still somewhat interested in them and I’m grateful for how they inspired some personal projects of mine.

2. Various factors have led me to lose interest in video games, including the Koei Warriors Series.

The reason why I started my dub crusade in the first place was because of Warriors Orochi 3 (Ultimate) and Samurai Warriors 4 not being dubbed. The reason why I decided to jump ship was because of Dynasty Warriors 9 being dubbed, just not with the same cast I had grown to love. I know that there were extenuating circumstances for the latter, but given everything that happened between that time, my hope that the old English voice cast (since Dynasty Warriors 4-6/Warriors Orochi 1-2) would return to voice that game (and other future games) was gone.

In addition to the previous factor, I started to find myself with more commitments than I had in past years, along with some different interests that I picked up along the way. At first, I didn’t feel like playing games because of my commitments, but eventually, it got to the point where I didn’t want to play most video games again because of the disappointment I’ve experienced from Koei Tecmo. Learning about all the things that AAA gaming companies do to reduce expenditure and increase revenue turned me off from video games as well. In my opinion, it wasn’t so much a boycott (per se) than it was a loss of interest.

3. The original group of people who inspired me to start writing these rants are now gone.

I know I’ve had other fans since the start of all this, but the original group had a special place in all this because of it. There were four people in the original group, who I met on Koei’s original Facebook page, and they were as follows:

The first one did comment on my older stuff, but he left quite early, possibly since DW8E’s release. I saw that he deactivated his account some time in 2017.

The second one had a YouTube channel and he was an admin on one of my Facebook pages for some time, but then he left after a period of inactivity without any explanation.

The third one was the more prominent because of his LGBT status and mental health issues. In the middle of 2015, he announced to everyone that he was deactivating his Facebook account because it was a burden on his mental health. He reactivated his account some time later, but he deactivated it again in September 2017 and hasn’t come back since. During that time, I saw a post from him stating that he was going to take a lot of pills and commit suicide. I reported it to Facebook in the hope that it might encourage him to find some help, even though I remember him stating that nothing works for him anymore. When I noticed that he hadn’t come back to Facebook months after he deactivated his account the second time, I assumed the worst.

The fourth one, also known as the family man or “the last one standing”, deactivated his account in June this year. We never really talked much, but as I said in this post, I’m still grateful to him for helping me find the new weapon and Musou information in DW8E when the Koei Wiki didn’t have it yet (because the game was just released at the time).

4. The impact of the feud’s aftermath still haunts me to this day.

When I agreed to end the feud on a mutual understanding a couple of years back, I promised myself that I would quickly move on from the troll behind it and not keep reminding myself of everything that happened. However, I’m a person that’s prone to anxiety when I think of worst-case-scenarios and at times, I found myself thinking about what would have happened had my Facebook account been deleted just because a troll couldn’t take the L when he got owned by someone half his age (compare that to Leafy who made terrible criticisms of people who are older than him, then claimed that he can hide behind the fact that he is younger than them). Him coming back out of nowhere earlier this year didn’t do any favours for anyone either. Regardless of that, I’ve got my bottom ground and I’ll continue to live on it regardless of what anyone else thinks of me.

I’d like to take a moment to digress and talk about cancel culture and political censorship. Because both parties in the feud weren’t exactly that popular (we had our own little fanbases, but that’s it), me and the other party “cancelling” each other (admittedly) didn’t seem to have as much an effect as we had hoped. Other factors that contributed to this could be that cancel culture (an extension to call-out culture) wasn’t that much of a thing two years ago and when the other party tried to cancel me, he made no attempt to spread the word to his fans. It was likely that he was trying to show mercy, but that doesn’t explain why he kept reporting my posts relating to him and current events in Hong Kong, knowing that I would eventually get banned if I didn’t call him out on it. I was as much a victim than I admittedly was an offender of cancel culture.

Following the feud, I’ve become wary of social media censorship because I experienced what it was like for someone to get petty and get people deplatformed by mass reporting them. Other pages like meme pages have suffered the same fate in the past (mostly because people take certain jokes too seriously), but despite my hopes, it didn’t seem like Facebook was going to do anything about the petty mass-reporting of those pages. Recently, however, I’ve been seeing news on tech companies being grilled over the censorship of conservatives and President Trump criticising them for the same thing. I’m not saying that I’m supporting Trump backing the pages that are being censored (conservative, far-right, alt-right, you name it), but I hope that this can hopefully extend to random meme pages being reported for petty reasons.

5. Ever since I decided to stop being toxic, I found myself conflicted when confronted with more toxic comments to the point that I’ve started to become paranoid over negative criticism.

When I decided to change the #NoDubNoBuy page to EDGN, I hoped that the hate towards my page would be reduced somewhat, but I never expected that it would be gone entirely. Since then, three people have made negative comments on the page; one was a girl who saw one of my posts being shared on a private group, misunderstood the (new) purpose of the page and despite her attitude, was still somewhat respectful, one was a Europoor dub hater from Spain (from what I’ve seen and learnt, Europeans tend to be sub fans and/or dub haters because of their English comprehension and ability to read subtitles) and one was an Americuck soyboy dub hater who pointed out about “crybaby fans” (”fans” as in the gatekeeping term “fake fans”, never mind my theory that people, especially men, who call other people, especially other men, “crybabies” are actually spreading toxic masculinity) who liked stuff to be Americanised but didn’t acknowledge the Japanese origins.

I’m gonna go off on a tangent and do a bit of an ad-homimem here (but it’s alright because I’m going to rebut his point next) and point out that I called the Americuck a soyboy because he had quite a long beard, but to be honest, if I called everyone who had beards “soyboys”, that would make people like Count Dankula and Sargon of Akkad “soyboys” as well, so it’d be a pretty slippery slope if I didn’t clarify who I was talking about.

Now, I’m going to move back on another tangent and rebut the soyboy’s point, because I think this is a pretty important point to address. No one is saying outright that they want Japanese games to be Americanised in terms of cultural references (if 4Kids has taught us anything). Saying that Americanisation is responsible for bad dubbing is a bit like blaming video games for causing violence. If someone says that they would like a game to be dubbed into English in localisation, then it is presumed that they want the dialogue to be dubbed in addition to the text being translated (or “dublated”). Any cultural changes made to the game or the dialogue are entirely the responsibility of those who made those changes, like the gaming companies who censor stuff for Western audiences, so if you’re complaining about a Japanese game being too “Americanised”, don’t take it out on dub fans because chances are that they didn’t want the dub to be too “Americanised” either.

Completing the square and going back to the original tangent, I didn’t post any of their comments to the dub hater comments album because I had deleted it after the feud in the hope that I wouldn’t be as toxic as I had been before. You can probably already see how toxic I would probably be if the above responses were posted on the page and directed back at them, which would mean that I’m not upholding myself to the standards I wanted to follow.

6. I’m becoming more and more concerned about current events to worry about things like English dubbing in video games.

If you’re someone who has unironically thought that I was making a big deal over something you thought was minor, then this is going to sound very ironic for you. From all these years of learning and research, I’ve attained an expansive world view and while I have made jokes about current events in the past to lighten the mood or express my anger, deep down I’m actually concerned about these things, particularly in regards to Hong Kong during this politically sensitive time.

For some reason, my desire to make posts has decreased because in addition to the above factors, I’ve been getting more and more worried about current affairs. Granted, the point of things like anime and video games and the Internet is to provide an escape from reality, but in the end, I guess that you have to face it whether you like it or not.

Making the decision to stop posting on EDGN hasn’t been an easy one, but all the factors I described above have gradually made it easier. Like the Undub page did, I had considered changing the focus of my page to merely report on the voice languages of games without saying whether we approve or reject it because it isn’t dubbed in English/Japanese; that is, we report on them with an unbiased viewpoint. Not adding excessively biased pro-dub comments on our posts has made it more neutral, but in the end, it didn’t stop the dub hater cucks. I should point out that one of the reasons why I wanted to change the #NoDubNoBuy page to EDGN was so that we could reduce the amount of hate we were getting.

What was the original goal of me starting this dub crusade? If you have read my rants in the past, then you will have picked up my hopes that Japanese games would be localised to the West with full Japanese and English dubbing and that if game companies couldn’t achieve that, then they should apologise and explain why. Would I say that I achieved or failed to achieve this goal? Not really, because over the years, I learnt a lot about the video game and voiceover industries and gradually realised that it’s not as straightforward as I had initially hoped. To be honest, it was kind of stupid of me to hope that gaming companies would say anything straightforward about this, but on the other hand, I learnt that gaming companies are like politicians as well; they say the things they want to say and not the things people want to hear.

To my fans, particularly my close fans, feel free to send me your opinions about my decision, however if you’re trying to change my mind, then I’m not sure if it can be changed so easily. If you think that I haven’t lived up to what you expect from me, then I’m sorry, but in the end, I have to think of myself as well.

If I could say one thing to the dub fanbase, I want to ask why no one else has ever tried to do something like EDGN. You have your groups and pages on social media and yet, it had to take two people pissed off with the dubbing direction of gaming companies to do it. Granted, that was how the Undub page started, with the lack of Japanese voices in localised games, and yet they didn’t get as much hate as my page did.

If there is anyone out there who wants to follow in my footsteps and make a page like EDGN, let me be the first to give you my blessing because I’m not going to be like the Undub page when they discovered us and point fingers for copying their posts when in the end, games are the same to everyone. While transparency regarding voice languages has increased over the years, there was never a place where dub fans could know about what games were dubbed in English. You don’t have to be like me and make a series of rants about why some games aren’t dubbed, because I’ve already done it, but instead, I suggest going the unbiased route as I stated earlier. Of course, you don’t have to follow my advice - it’s your page, after all.

My plan is to retire from EDGN at the end of the year. I have 12 more games in the backlog, all with English voices, and I’m hoping to post them all on the page before then. I probably won’t remove myself as an admin (because I think there’ll be some petty, obsessed cuck who’ll dig out my posts and make a rant series on me or something), but I’ll probably have it so that I can forget about the page as time goes on.

With this, my dub crusade has come to an end. Once again, to the fans, I’m sorry and I thank you for your support. As always, it is your choice as to whether you wish to continue following me, whether on Facebook or Tumblr, after my retirement.

#english dub #video games #japanese games #japanese voices

1 note · View note

weshallneverrevolt · 6 years ago

Text

B&C Behind the Scenes: Retro Video Capture On a Budget

People who follow Bread and Circuses know that the blog is dedicated almost entirely to pop culture analysis. But people who are my friends also know that I’m a huge geek for computer hardware. So today, you’ll get you a man who can do both. This is my first behind the scenes feature, where I talk about crazy learning experiences in being a small-time YouTuber. This piece will be very technical, so I don’t blame you for skipping it.

The next project for Bread and Circuses is a full documentary and retrospective on Final Fantasy IX (2000, PlayStation), maybe the most important game in my life and one of the best RPGs ever made. Due to the scope of the video, I’m replaying all the original Final Fantasy games for the original PlayStation to jog my memory and give context for the less researchy parts. I am doing this on original hardware and a tube TV, without resorting to emulation or the re-releases. And I’ll be recording the entire game.

The choice for original hardware came for a few reasons. For one, the newer ports of Final Fantasy games are…mixed, at best. IX’s updated ports feature higher quality models and cutscenes, but the backgrounds are blurry, the new fonts and interface are hideous, and the overall “feel” of the original game is somewhat lost. As inspiration for writing the script, I also want the nostalgic experience of how I first experienced the game.

With that being said, I had a major hurdle to overcome: how do I record 50+ hours of gameplay from a 1995 console?

Step 1: Capture Setup

Most game capture these days is done in two ways: via the device playing the game, or via a capture card. The first method is quite easy on PC: you just fire up Open Broadcaster Suite, use a quick setup guide and you’re good to go. This is what I’ve done for all my videos thus far.

For modern consoles, you can use an HDMI capture card like the Elgato HD60. The cards aren’t exactly cheap, but they’re affordable enough for most streamers and let’s players.

But there’s one problem: both the original PlayStation and PlayStation 2 do not have HDMI output. The early model PS3s can play PS1 games and have native HDMI, but they are rare, expensive, and often break.

While you can buy HDMI adapters for the OG PlayStation, they are spotty in quality and present yet another challenge: such adapters often introduce noticeable input lag. Though FFIX is not a fast-paced game, the lag is still bothersome. They also don’t work with my tube TV, which is critical for my desired creative process.

That leaves me with two capture options: composite or S-Video. Composite video is the little yellow guy you used to plug into your tube TV. It looks decent on those, but when captured digitally, the blurriness and drab colors are immediately apparent. It’s for this reason that I purchased S-video cables; without going into boring technical detail, S-Video delivers far richer colors. Because the adapter includes both, I can output to my TV and computer at the same time with no additional equipment!

Speaking of adapters, the PS2 also has the option to output component video, arguably the best analog video available. While capture solutions exist for component video, my tube TV does not accept it. So to use component, I would need a system of complicated adapters and converters to both record on my computer and play on my TV at the same time. It’s too much hassle for not enough results.

So instead, I did some research and bought this little guy: the Hauppauge USB Live-2. There are many adapters like it, but Hauppauge has brand recognition in this area. This adapter also uses 4:2:2 chroma subsampling, meaning that it sacrifices very little in color depth compared to some cheaper models. It plugs into any USB port.

My tube TV only supports mono sound, which means it only needs one audio cable. I hooked up the left channel (white cable) to my TV, and the right channel (red cable) to my capture card. When outputting FFIX in mono mode, both devices receive the same sounds, and the music doesn’t suffer from missing stereo effects. Perfection.

Step 2: PS1 or PS2?

So as most people know, the PlayStation 2 is backwards compatible with original PlayStation games. The method by which this is done, however, differs based on the model.

Early PS2s have an actual PS1 processor on their motherboard. For the PS2 it’s used for sound and input/output, but when playing a PS1 game this CPU is instead, providing nearly perfect PS1 support. Sony actually did the same thing with the first PS3, but soon realized it was very expensive and scrapped it.

For later models of the PS2 – the slimlines – Sony switched to software emulation to save costs and space. The software emulation works very well, but it is just that: emulation. It is very rare for emulators to be literally perfect replications of the original experience, and Sony’s for the PS2 – called POPS – is not 100% accurate. I also don’t have a slim, so there’s that.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I first dug out my old PlayStation 1, purchased new in 1998. While the system itself still works shockingly well (despite some skipping during movies), I quickly ran into a problem: the PS1 outputs at 240p. For the uninitiated, video nomenclature like 240p refers to the number of lines in the image along with the scan type. So 240p means there are 240 lines of pixels in the image, and they are updated progressively, meaning all at once.

Older tube TVs can accept 240p input, but output it in interlaced form. This means that the TV quickly updates every other line of the image, rather than the entire image at once. It works pretty good for this type of TV, but on a modern monitor introduces some problems…which I’ll get to in a bit.

Image from dummies.com. Fitting.

However, this was a problem for me because my new capture card did not accept 240p input. I tried countless times to get it to accept PS1 video, and it just didn’t work. However, I noticed that my PS2 did. That’s because the PS2 outputs by default at 480i, an interlaced mode that my capture card accepted.

So I opted to use my “fat” PS2 instead, which is a SCPH-30001 model, purchased new in 2001. It includes the original PlayStation chip, and – to my enormous surprise – read my original Final Fantasy IX CDs perfectly. Because the PS2 accepts PS1 controllers and PS1 memory cards, it was an almost flawless version of the original PS1 experience. Awesome!

Step 3: Recording

With setup out of the way, I got to the final step of the project: actually recording digital video.

I use Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) for all my video and streaming projects. It’s free, powerful, and pretty fast. My capture device was immediately detected by OBS, but there was one immediate problem.

Remember the interlacing I mentioned earlier? When you display interlaced video on a progressive screen – AKA any modern flat-panel monitor – you get a horribly ugly effect where the video seems to be ripping itself apart. This is called combing, and it sucks. Thankfully, OBS supports native deinterlacing, so I was able to fix it right up.

That being said, let’s break down the different parts of recording with OBS:

Resolution: the PS2 outputs in 720x480 pixels, but my videos are at 1920x1080. However, recording at 1080p requires more hardware power, so I get more definition at the expense of less overall quality. I chose instead to record at 720p, which is closer to the PS2’s native resolution and allows me to capture better colors with less blur.

Framerate: this is where things got interesting. I master all of my videos at 60 frames per second. Very, very few PS1/2 games (FFIX included) hit 60fps, because the hardware of the time just wasn’t capable of rendering graphics that fast. However, they do output at a 60 hertz refresh rate, meaning that the image updates 60 times per second even if the console doesn’t actually produce new frames that fast. So if you record at under 60fps, you get noticeable judder in your footage. That being said, 60fps was a requirement.

Encoding: I wanted to get the highest possible quality picture. My computer has a Ryzen 5 1600 processor – a capable mid-range CPU – and is excellent at software video encoding. I used the OBS x264 encoder running at medium quality. Any higher than medium and I started experiencing skipping footage as my CPU went to 100% utilization. I gotta admit, it’s pretty cool hearing my computer fans kick into overdrive as the CPU is pushed to its limits.

Bitrate: I’m recording a lot of footage here, so while I needed high quality, I also have to keep storage limitations in mind. I did some experimenting and decided on a bitrate of 9000kbps, still above YouTube quality while also saving space. This also means that each hour of footage is about 4GB; given that FFIX is about 40 hours long, that means roughly 160GB of footage for the game. Not bad, considering.

Deinterlacing: OBS presents a slew of options for deinterlacing your footage, and the differences can be tough to spot. The only option that gave me zero trouble – no juddering or excessive blur – was Yasif 2x. I also increased the brightness and saturation to make up for some of the analog video deficiencies.

I’ve included sample footage below, along with pictures of my setup. If you’re an aspiring retro YouTuber or streamer, feel free to PM me with any questions. This stuff was kinda intimidating to figure out and I’m happy to help!

Until then, I’ll be in Gaia. Or Terra, once I hit Disc 3.

Jon

Full Setup

Cable Routing Detail

The TV inputs run through this old AV hub I dug up from my teenage bedroom. This lets me run the cables behind my desk to keep things a bit neater. I say a bit because you can still see the cables back there, but that’s showbiz, baby.

Sample Footage

youtube

#ff9 #ffix #final fantasy ix #retro #gaming #ps1 #ps2 #playstation #capture #hauppauge #video #editing #project #documentary #video essay #criticism #games #2000s

10 notes · View notes