Stream of Thought - Fantastic Mundanity

"Don't teachers realize that it's important to let students know about the hazards of cutting off hydra heads and how two will take the place of each one cut? What are they teaching, math?" - Dan Shive

BRAINSTORM/CRAZY THINKINGS TIME/WHATEVER

Okay, so in stuff like Harry Potter et al. The world they live in is magical, but the magic is only mundane to a select group, whereas the approach I'd like to go with is that the fantasticalities (if it's not a real word, it SHOULD be!) are ALL mundane. People are taught the riddles of the sphinx as much for personal safety as for fun, and lessons on irregular verbs may be delayed on account of some manner of beast breaching the walls, and where dungeons might indeed expand themselves under the earth, drawn towards populace. The idea of sentient or at the least living architecture is a lot of fun really.

At the moment we're kinda going for what, then? Magic and dungeons and beasts are mundane to everyone, but so is electricity and mechanics, as well as potential combinations thereof.
...That'd probably be somewhat difficult considering science and magic are like order and chaos.
Maybe you can "trick" magic? Like the whole thing where Mike and Jerry refuse to analyse Penny Arcade because they believe it shouldn't have worked, and that analysing it will dispel whatever IS keeping it aloft.

Magic's a tricksy thing at the best of times, it's probably fond of working when it's least likely to, entirely out of spite.

So, this is the sort of world we'd like to make to live in. How do we explore it?
The obvious route from the quote that set this off is of course to set it IN a school, but a) Harry Potter did it better and b) It's tacky, like how Airplane! seems tacky now because everyone else beat their style of comedy into the ground and then people forgot that they practically pioneered it. Like how things would go if people forgot who created Pythonesque humour. Luckily that one's built into the name. ANYWAY. We'll put "school" on the metaphorical docket anyway because it might be possible to eke something out of it with sufficient exploration of the concept.


This sprang to mind shortly after reading the original quote.

Another route could be to explore this world through the eyes of a family man (or woman? Maybe, though I've not tried writing a female protagonist...), but yeah. Then we could explore the perspective of an adult trying to make a living in this world. Problem is that a family man has a lot of ties, making it difficult to put him into any sort of adventure. Perhaps the severing of those ties is what drives him TO the adventure? *Docket++*

Hmm, who or where else might it be interesting to explore this from... a position of power MIGHT work, though that's inherently difficult due to it adding a need to explore the position as well as the world, and frankly with power comes politics, and writing political drama is one of the darker circles of hell.


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Will probably start writing and exploring this some later today, either blogging about it later or a day or two from now. In any case, this is a thought process, be afraid, be very afraid, etc etc

Also if anyone has ideas, tell me? It's fun playing around with a concept, especially when there's multiple people on the ball.

Chronicle - Dissonance of Values

Neon lights filter through the rain, each heavy droplet refracting a technicolor universe, as the rumbling of thunder announces to the blackened sky just how long it plans to stay. A lone figure, wearing garb from an era long passed even in our own time, steps dilatorily down a hard gray path, the echoing wooden clack of her gata smothered by the sky falling, an innumerable amount of drops all finding their natural resting state all at once. The park trees, once lush with sakura blossom, given away with such poetically charged abandon in these months, now lay bare, clutching jealously the few leaves that haven't flown the coop, thin delicate branches like so many clawing fingers. A thin smile crosses her face at the irony of something so beautiful looking so sinister once laid bare, as she tightens the grip on her umbrella, the pale domesticated wood striking contrast with the dark and free branches looming overhead. Her smile disappears as quickly as it arrived as the reminder that there is work to be done rumbles overhead.

She reaches a clearing, the clack of each step all but choked by splashing now as she looks to the moon, a comforting constant, as unchanging as she. An earth-shaking thud robs the sakura of the last of their leaves, and a roar that is altogether not thunder pierces the natural harmony.
There is work to be done, she repeats to herself, as the glint of steel between the halves of her umbrella reflects the looming neon so far above.

In which all the volumes are turned up.

Rally-Ho, all you pointy-hats out there, and time-specific salutations to the rest of you. Today's blogpost, following my Oh-So-Very-Fleeting attention span, may or may not cover what I've been playing recently, plans to do some D&D writing, and how rusty I am at programming. Possibly my thoughts on finally getting around to watching SatAM at an age that I can actually recall and appreciate things such as "plot".

Okay, because I've been playing a LOT recently we'll try space things out. First off the bat, I've been going back through Warioware: Touched! (I'm sorry, the Nintendo marketing department already beat you to EVERY "touch me" joke going years ago, deal with it.) and it's still as awesome as I remember. For those of you not hip to the gist of it, Wario, evil counterpart of Mario who somehow avoids being considered a recolour unlike Sonic's counterpart, Shadow (maybe because he practically predates colour, his debut being on the Game Boy, or maybe because he actually plays totally differently to Mario) sees the DS and decides that because it has two screens, making a game for it will net him twice as much money as a GBA game (the GBA Warioware game was also "made" by Wario) (Holy crap what's with all the brackets today? Geez) and puts out yet another collection with his friends and acquaintances. So it's an excuse plot. What this means for you is that you'll be playing a series of "microgames", short minigames, many of them taking less than 5 seconds each, with increasing difficulty and speed. It's madcap, and can get tough in places, especially when you're not sure what you're meant to do at first and end up losing as a result, but it's damn fun and the game never takes itself seriously. Ever. We're talking about a game where a "boss game" might have you moving the Earth around space dodging meteors and bullets before going toe-to-toe with several celestial bodies. It's totally worth picking up, if not this then the GBA title(s) or the Gamecube, or if you're pretty sure you'll like it/have the money to risk it/find it cheap, there's also WarioWare: Smooth Moves, though I've not played that personally and can't comment on whether or not the the Wiimote controls are painfully bad as usual.

Okay, next item on the agenda, D&D writing. I can't recall whether or not I've mentioned on here before that I'm into D&D... *checks*

Wow. I didn't. Huh. Well, I'm into D&D, there you go.

So, anyway. I got the 4E core rulebooks a while ago in anticipation for a friend's birthday party and though they didn't get put to use (PROTIP: when asking your sister for help, make sure the glue she offers for affixing maps to isn't dried up and lumpy. Urgh.) I've been considering doing some more writing ever since. Well, I've been reading Wil Wheaton's blog, messing around with D&D Online (actually pretty damn cool, though I think it still has a ways to go if it has aspirations of dethroning WoW) and playing a few games that've been giving me ideas (maybe I'll mention them lower down) and if I don't get SOMETHING out there soon I may simply explode. Which would be messy, and nobody wants to clean up a Philshroom cloud. Of course then I hafta find someone to actually PLAY with. I'm considering going into more detail about my D&D 4E experiences, but let's leave that for a time when I don't have a whole bunch of things on my to-mention list.

ANOTHER GAME! After I got all silvers on Warioware (you NEED them to go for gold, I'm not slacking :P) I turned my attention to Custom Robo Arena. I'm not all the way through yet, far from it, but so far it's pretty damn cool. I'm reminded of Sonic Battle (GBA) with the whole customisation element, but I think the key teaching here that Custom Robo succeeds at when Sonic Battle failed, is that battling is never a grind. At the start of Sonic Battle, when you have no "parts" to customise your character (Emerl, a sophisticated and ancient robot that may or may not have destroyed the civilization that created it), it SUCKS to play as him, which you are forced to do to advance the plot. And I'm not understating. I have a high tolerance for sucky gameplay, which may be why these reviews are usually so positive, and they were just a drag, a test I was forced to endure because super awesome character customisation is a form of crafting system. And it was awesome once you had lots of parts. Just not until then. Custom Robo, on the other hand, starts at awesome and works its way up. This makes you feel like the enemies ARE actually getting harder rather than you shaking your fist and saying "Oh, if only the Random Number Gods would bless me with an ability to walk more than half a pixel per second, I'd show you what for!". I've far from mastered the battle system, but it's pretty intense, both in combat speed and in terms of how much ballistics can fill the screen at any given time, and it's very satisfying to charge into an opponent, juggle him into the air and dash away before he has a chance to recover. I won't say whether it's worth getting or not because I've not finished the main game yet, but I'm having a lot of fun with it.


Speaking of Sonic-related stuff, I watched SatAM the other week while wracked with some sort of lurgy, which probably did reduce my appreciation a little, what with the flitting in and out of lucidity but nonetheless it was pretty damn awesome. It does have the nasty side effect of making me want to give Sonic X a fair go though, an affliction perhaps even more fatal than my lurgy, but I'm willing to pay that price. The show has a pretty heavy anti-industry message flowing through it, but then again the classic games do the same, just with a mute protagonist. That's not saying that the world of the games is the same as the SatAM world though, oh no. This is a Mobius, but not the one from any of the other media, with the exception of the Archie Sonic comics, which I'm pretty sure I'd have to pay through the nose to get over here (they're in Forbidden Planet, where I believe the de facto currency is appendages or similar paraphenalia) and as such what you see in the twentysomething episodes released is entirely what you get, no back catalog needed. It's also somewhat interesting how while Sonic is definitely in the protagonist role, his supporting cast are all well developed, and they even managed to fit a romance in there for the older audience, though since we're talking SONIC here I'm not sure WHAT audience they're looking for that isn't going to be screaming "cooties!" or "furries!".

I have more games to talk about, but I've got a scrollbar now so they can wait. Have fun y'all. I should write some actual FICTION on here again? Remember when this place was gonna be for FICTION? Wow that takes me back.

Rumours of my death weren't exaggerated, but luckily someone went back in time and stopped a dog being killed in a typhoon a year ago, so I got better

Ladies and gentlemen, good evening and welcome to the show. More apologies for my untimely posts, I've been at my girlfriend's the past week and as such have been somewhat distracted from coding and stuff due to awesome times. I could attempt to "review" the Royal Armouries in Leeds but she's the history buff, not me, and as such I'm not qualified to tell you how awesome it is. Was pretty good though. Moving on today's subject is a game for the DS called Time Hollow.

In Time Hollow you play a high school student named Ethan who finds his world completely turned upside-down, inside-out, and whatever 4th dimensional phrases would fit this sentence, because as you might've been able to tell from the title, Time Hollow features Time as a major element. Time travel, specifically, which is why I was interested in the first place, time travel being on that list of things that make me go "oooo" along with crafting systems. Even if my mind is slightly broken after trying to work out whether or not the game's plot is a stable time loop or not.

Gameplay-wise, it's like a rather simple visual novel or interactive fiction, with you going around town, piecing together clues and fixing things. Actual Game Over is fairly difficult and since I'm halfway competent about these things I didn't get to see if it's a reload-from-save situation or what. The gameplay is rather lackluster to be honest, a simple vehicle with some interesting twists in places, built to facilitate the story.

This post is probably going to be somewhat short, since most of the meat comes from the story and I have no intention of spoiling it, but I will say that it managed to keep me interested and playing in spite of the less than amazing gameplay, through about... maybe 12 hours of completing it. Graphically it's pretty much standard fare for a visual novel, with occasional anime style cutscenes at key moments in the plot.

There's not much depth to this game, which is probably why I stopped writing this for three hours, but it tells a story, and it tells it well. Or maybe that's my time travel adoration flaring up again.


...Incidentally, while we're here, Pokémon Global Link is up and nobody told me. I think I know what I'm gonna be playing this week.

Project: PHPJRPGoD - Part 1

Right, first day of going back to this, luckily most of my code is straightforward, even if it IS 1000 lines.

However, before any actual code, I figure I better make sure everything's in full working order and see if there's anything I had in a mental TODO list. The environment I've been developing this in has changed, so it's a good idea to make sure I've not had anything break on me while I wasn't looking. Right off the bat, my SQL seems to be missing three important tables, so I've reinserted those and added their SQL to the list to stop that happening again. I also found a small bug in one of my pre-existing forms. Nothing too exciting today, tomorrow night (hopefully!) we get onto coding, and I'll share some of the details of exactly what I'm doing.

Project: PHPJRPG... of DOOM!

Hey, sorry for the hiatus, personal stuff blah blah blah, anyway, after a night of reading nerdy software bloggage from 2000 and onwards (not atypical, possibly even called "my night" if I can find enough blogs, feel free to append anything cool in comments if I have anyone reading this that knows of any) I find myself feeling like digging up some old PHP and giving an old game project another shot. This may last for a day, or a while, we'll see.

Basically the gist is that it's a semi-classic JRPG system in a PHP/JavaScript cloak, Kinda like Kingdom of Loathing if you want something familar to relate to, but much more like an abstraction of the console RPG experience. Now I'm not a great artist, or an amazing writer, but I enjoy what I do and I also enjoy making things versatile, or modular. My super-long-term goal for this is to have outputs so clean you could design a frontend in any language that can play the game properly.

Now, I've done some tinkering, went on some tangents and broke many perfectly adorable pieces of code just throwing ideas around, and at the least, I think it's a cool idea that may be similarly cool in execution. If I get going to a point worth blogging about, you'll read about it here. Some of this stuff will probably seem plain to you guys though, so don't go expecting me to be like "And this function creates an ASCII representation of the Mona Lisa, using nothing but a JPG of a guy who kinda looked like Leonardo from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for input". If anyone knows of a program that does that, by the way, tell me. That'd be pretty shiny.

"Without you, there's nothing in this world to carry on."

"A Fantasy Harvest Moon." WELP, the game's done my work for me, have a nice day guys and gals, I'm going home, seeya!

Okay, maybe not, but you've gotta admit, it's a tad odd the way they put that in there, straight into the title. As you can imagine, both games are made by the same people (also smoothly explaining why they didn't get sued into oblivion for putting the original sales pitch right into the game name. You know, the one that normally goes "Like Grand Theft Auto, BUT-"?) so you know that the harvest moonery is gonna be done to a T. Or maybe an I, seeing as some parts have been simplified or made easier in the name of fitting both fantasyness and harvestmooniffication into a hair under 4 grams of cartridge. To briefly loop back to my original point, as it turns out the "A Fantasy Harvest Moon" subtitle got dumped in Japan after the first game in the series, to allow the game to stand alone. It's just the rest of the world that constantly paws for the familiar and gets all skittish around new concepts. I suppose that's not really fair. We are talking about Japan, home of Final Fantasy I-XIV (plus spin-offs, plus X-2, etc etc etc) and Mega Man... okay I'm leaving that at just saying Mega Man because I want to get this paragraph done now and I'll never get around to it if I try count all of THOSE.

...Actually, to go on a tangent briefly (you'll want to get used to these, and feel lucky about them, at least a tangent intersects with the curve at least once) I think there must be some sort of pushchair convention in town. Seriously! I had to dodge around them like it was some kind of gameshow. At one point I held a door open for one (one! I swear there were no more in sight at the time!) and suddenly dozens just burst through the void, a swarming hive of crying, gurgling and reprimands, which were of course issued to sproglets that don't understand English.

Aaaaanyway, Rune Factory 3. I've always had a soft spot for the Harvest Moon series, though eventually my attention span timed out when I realised I had no idea if there was an endgame, or if I could attain it within my own lifetime, an ironic reflection of the passing of the virtual farm that seemingly begins every game in the series. At least this, with the RPG DNA firmly encoded into the Harvest Moon genome, would hold me till the endgame, I decided. Plus, games with big crafting systems are my addiction. I played Mana Khemia non-stop for a few weeks, just trying to unlock every alchemic mix and every item. I mean, the game had a really awesome plot around it (WHICH IS WHY YOU NEED TO GO BACK TO IT AND PLAY IT, SAM.) but crafting systems are one of my favourite toys, and Rune Factory 3 has... four. I think. It also has enough stats to shake a stick at (and each time you shook the stick you'd gain a level in holding wooden objects, swinging things, and an extra stat for good measure) to the point that your character's level, while important, is nowhere near as important as getting these myriad stats up. Luckily, you'll get most of them up just doing things naturally. I didn't end up spending any time grinding, and trust me when I say I know an infinite experience loop when I see one. There was quite a few to be honest, I was just having fun without using them.

In terms of story, it has two main threads. The first thread is recovering from your amnesia, that staple of RPG plots that makes the genre savvy among us either roll our eyes or feel right at home. I fell into the second camp, seeing as the argument for cliches and tropes being bad is basically "ITS NOT NEW THEREFORE IT SUCKS ARGLEFARGLE", which considering that pretty much every idea in the last century is based on a combination of other ideas put together in interesting ways is basically saying "I will never be satisfied, please disregard my opinion.". This is done fairly solidly, though your character interacts with the people in the village without much cares in the world, despite finding himself in an unknown place with no idea who he is. He's a bit socially awkward, but then again the residents seem to have been pulled from an anime stereotype bag of tricks, with enough eccentrics, cloudcuckoolanders, tsundere and kuudere people to make anyone interested in anime or manga smile knowingly, and anyone else to just find the range of people just great. The second thread is getting to know these people of varying sanity, and after all, this IS a Harvest Moon game in a chocobo-flavoured wrapper, you just know you'll be marrying somebody before the game is through. This is actually one of the shining points of the game for me, as all the at-first-glance straightforward stereotypes become fleshed out into real characters that you may be surprised to notice yourself getting attached to.

Moving onto gameplay, since I have to finish this before it gets embarrassingly bigger than the Pokemon review, I found the gameplay to be pretty solid. The quests the townsfolk give you are generally plain, of the "escort me here", "make me one of these" or "there is a big mean something over there. Get rid of it" vein, but since every quest is plot-relevant, and as I've said I enjoy being told to do something I only stop doing to give the rest of the game a chance, I quite like them. I could see how they might fail to draw the attention of someone less plot-happy though. Combat-wise they've done a surprisingly deep job for what I assumed would be 90% Harvest Moon 10% RPG, with a wide choice of weapon categories, from swords to spears to hammers to magical staffs, all of which can be upgraded through the crafting system to give you additional stat boosts, or confer special effects. A rather entertaining side-note is that your farming tools can also be used as weapons, and yes, it is VERY entertaining defeating foes with a well timed sprinkle of your watering can. Talking about tools gives me an excuse to segue into the farming aspects, which is mostly what you've came to expect from Harvest Moon, though softened up a bit for those of us that were never quite sure how much damage standing on your seedlings did. A notable variant is that your farm animals are actually monsters in the field, tamed by giving them shiny things they want (and in the case of the grumpier beasties, giving them a few cautionary smacks so they realise your sickle is both stylish AND fashionable) and asking them to come home with you. Not all monsters give useful harvests, but all of them can go out into combat with you and fight alongside you, something they'll eagerly do the moment they decide that they could get used to eating oh-so-tasty red grass.

The music and graphics are pretty solid, causing me to promptly YouTube the opening song, though the singer's grasp of the letter "L" needs a little work, and the DS still doesn't seem able to pull off decent quality audio. The graphics are mostly sprites and are done quite nicely, with conversations being handled in a style somewhat similar to that of graphic novels. The only thing that really got on my nerves about them, and in fact made me stop playing for three days, was that no matter who you choose to marry, the cutscene always shows you being married to the obligatory flower girl. It just kinda felt like a slap in the face from the developers saying "What, you thought it was YOUR choice? Get your filthy hands off our canon, whelp!". Honestly though, I can forgive that transgression. Rune Factory 3 was an excellent week or so of game for me and anyone that's a fan of Harvest Moon will definitely find something to enjoy here, and maybe even discover they like the RPG way of life.

...Okay, my notepad screen now has a SCROLL BAR. I should've totally stuck with "A Fantasy Harvest Moon" and left it there... Till next time, when I'll be discussing... I have no idea. We'll see.