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.
Tuesday, 26 April 2011
Sunday, 17 April 2011
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.
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.
Saturday, 16 April 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, 12 April 2011
"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.
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.
Monday, 11 April 2011
"You can't do this. I won't let you."
Today is a lovely sunny day outside, and any right-minded person would be out there enjoying it. Lucky for you, by which I mean maybe four people if I'm lucky, I don't fit the aforementioned categories and as such am scrabbling around for a blog topic. I'd review my Pandora but I'm saving THAT low-hanging fruit for when my back is to the wall, metaphorically speaking. That said, I'm moving onto the slightly higher fruit of talking about games I've played recently. Generally I'm a gamer by heart, unfortunately not by wallet, so I don't often have the most recent gaming news, but maybe something I'm into will grab your attention that you'd missed.
To contradict that last sentence, lets talk about Pokemon Black.
First and foremost: I like the Pokemon game series. I never really followed the anime terribly intently. I'd go back and look at it, but I did the maths and it'd take me the better part of a week with very little sleep to catch up, and I could be using that time to make snarky comments on the internet and read message boards. The games however, I've been playing since Silver, and have had a go of at least one game of each generation since, usually by another source due to my lack of funds... I think at this point I'm the designated completer of Pokemon games for my cousin. I wonder if he has White... ANYWAY to get back on topic I played Black to story's end in about three days, because it is Kryptonite for my attention span.
First and foremost, this is the Pokemon game with the strongest story so far, possibly excluding things not in the main series like Mystery Dungeon or Colosseum, and by the end I was actually quite sad to know the main plot was finished, even though there's a lot of afterplot content too. I can't elaborate much for obvious spoiler-flavoured reasons, but needless to say several insurmountable waist high fences are removed once you've completed the Pokemon League once, as well as the predictable moment when all the Pokemon from every other generation MYSTERIOUSLY APPEAR, as if people have been hiding them under a rug when your non-league-winning ass went past.
In terms of gameplay, the ingame battles have been smartened up quite nicely, with the first league battle being of opposite type to whatever your starter was, forcing you to find a decent countering type, and the intelligent choices go on from there. Of course by the 4th Gym or so my levels ended up in front of the level curve, which meant I could largely steamroller over whatever the leaders threw at me, but this generation has definitely resulted in the most even level distribution over my party pokemon of any generation so far, in my experience. You also have three people whom you might consider rivals this time, all of whom are rather well developed, though I am left wanting more information... hopefully I'll find that in the post-league content. Also changed from prior generations is how experience points are distributed, now beating a high-leveled pokemon with a low levelled pokemon yields more experience, and the amount of experience a given pokemon may yield has changed massively. I've gotta admit though, I was pretty disappointed to notice that your starter Pokemon all have a lower exp yield than Magikarp.
Yes, Magikarp.
I guess Splash > Water Gun.
The other upshot of all this is that grinding is now more profitable by finding areas with high-yield pokemon, and beating them until your own level becomes too high for it to be profitable. If there's any EV/IV trainers out there whining now, bite me. And some berries. Jeez, it's not like it's HARD to do EV training, just time-consuming.
The music is as always, excellent. There's not much I can say really, anyone that knows about Pokemon already knew that, and anyone that didn't know about Pokemon either doesn't have ears or can't feel happiness, so further elaboration is not needed. However, I will share this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-B2cnSqPy8 This isn't in the game, YET. I'm guessing it'll be an event at some point, at which point the whole world will know about it. Still, should be cool!
I was gonna talk about Rune Factory 3 here, but I've just realised how long I've went on about Pokemon for, so I'll leave that for another blog post. Until then, Brits: You have until April 27 to claim your Ticket to catch Victini. Hurry up and buy this before then.
To contradict that last sentence, lets talk about Pokemon Black.
First and foremost: I like the Pokemon game series. I never really followed the anime terribly intently. I'd go back and look at it, but I did the maths and it'd take me the better part of a week with very little sleep to catch up, and I could be using that time to make snarky comments on the internet and read message boards. The games however, I've been playing since Silver, and have had a go of at least one game of each generation since, usually by another source due to my lack of funds... I think at this point I'm the designated completer of Pokemon games for my cousin. I wonder if he has White... ANYWAY to get back on topic I played Black to story's end in about three days, because it is Kryptonite for my attention span.
First and foremost, this is the Pokemon game with the strongest story so far, possibly excluding things not in the main series like Mystery Dungeon or Colosseum, and by the end I was actually quite sad to know the main plot was finished, even though there's a lot of afterplot content too. I can't elaborate much for obvious spoiler-flavoured reasons, but needless to say several insurmountable waist high fences are removed once you've completed the Pokemon League once, as well as the predictable moment when all the Pokemon from every other generation MYSTERIOUSLY APPEAR, as if people have been hiding them under a rug when your non-league-winning ass went past.
In terms of gameplay, the ingame battles have been smartened up quite nicely, with the first league battle being of opposite type to whatever your starter was, forcing you to find a decent countering type, and the intelligent choices go on from there. Of course by the 4th Gym or so my levels ended up in front of the level curve, which meant I could largely steamroller over whatever the leaders threw at me, but this generation has definitely resulted in the most even level distribution over my party pokemon of any generation so far, in my experience. You also have three people whom you might consider rivals this time, all of whom are rather well developed, though I am left wanting more information... hopefully I'll find that in the post-league content. Also changed from prior generations is how experience points are distributed, now beating a high-leveled pokemon with a low levelled pokemon yields more experience, and the amount of experience a given pokemon may yield has changed massively. I've gotta admit though, I was pretty disappointed to notice that your starter Pokemon all have a lower exp yield than Magikarp.
Yes, Magikarp.
I guess Splash > Water Gun.
The other upshot of all this is that grinding is now more profitable by finding areas with high-yield pokemon, and beating them until your own level becomes too high for it to be profitable. If there's any EV/IV trainers out there whining now, bite me. And some berries. Jeez, it's not like it's HARD to do EV training, just time-consuming.
The music is as always, excellent. There's not much I can say really, anyone that knows about Pokemon already knew that, and anyone that didn't know about Pokemon either doesn't have ears or can't feel happiness, so further elaboration is not needed. However, I will share this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-B2cnSqPy8 This isn't in the game, YET. I'm guessing it'll be an event at some point, at which point the whole world will know about it. Still, should be cool!
I was gonna talk about Rune Factory 3 here, but I've just realised how long I've went on about Pokemon for, so I'll leave that for another blog post. Until then, Brits: You have until April 27 to claim your Ticket to catch Victini. Hurry up and buy this before then.
Chronicle - The Tapestry and the Inferno
He smiled to himself, a crazy sort of confidence in his eyes as he tightened his grip around the spoon.
"They said it couldn't be done," he muttered to himself, oblivious to the screams of the masses, or perhaps just used to them. "They said it would take more than I had and then some, but I've showed them all now. I've opened their eyes to the truth... it's almost a shame how briefly they'll be keeping those eyes."
The flames crawled upwards, searing all those in view of its radiance, but he stood strong, facing it, unafraid, knowing he was the master of this blazing baptism.
Maybe it was the madness, convincing him that his plan was special, that only he could understand the intricate interconnecting web of what his mind clearly told him was pure unbottled genius flowing freely from a fountain, but when another stepped through the inferno, seemingly apathetic to his scarcely singed auburn hair, the self-proclaimed master instinctively let out an ear-piercing shriek, the sound of the tapestry of his mind unravelling in the face of his plan doing the same.
How?, he asked himself, his scream subsiding. How? No. he closed his eyes, weaving the tatters together, linking threads anew. He knew in that moment what he had to do.
"No." he said, suddenly self-sure, tightening his grip further. If the scorching metal was making his nerves scream as it would normal men, he certainly wasn't giving it away.
Sudden movement. A lunge forward, unbalanced but forceful. The madman screamed in fury.
"They said it couldn't be done," he muttered to himself, oblivious to the screams of the masses, or perhaps just used to them. "They said it would take more than I had and then some, but I've showed them all now. I've opened their eyes to the truth... it's almost a shame how briefly they'll be keeping those eyes."
The flames crawled upwards, searing all those in view of its radiance, but he stood strong, facing it, unafraid, knowing he was the master of this blazing baptism.
Maybe it was the madness, convincing him that his plan was special, that only he could understand the intricate interconnecting web of what his mind clearly told him was pure unbottled genius flowing freely from a fountain, but when another stepped through the inferno, seemingly apathetic to his scarcely singed auburn hair, the self-proclaimed master instinctively let out an ear-piercing shriek, the sound of the tapestry of his mind unravelling in the face of his plan doing the same.
How?, he asked himself, his scream subsiding. How? No. he closed his eyes, weaving the tatters together, linking threads anew. He knew in that moment what he had to do.
"No." he said, suddenly self-sure, tightening his grip further. If the scorching metal was making his nerves scream as it would normal men, he certainly wasn't giving it away.
Sudden movement. A lunge forward, unbalanced but forceful. The madman screamed in fury.
Sunday, 10 April 2011
"In the distance you see them perched on a high rock, hair flowing freely as the world falls down around you."
The title of today's post comes from of the early Chronicles, quoted from my cohort-in-arms James, who I may attempt to drag into this flux from time to time. I'm going to link him to this once I'm done, so he'll be forewarned. The original Chronicles of the Unorganised were short, drabbley pieces with a faux-epic tone, that I and James used to write for our personal amusement, which is as good an excuse for something trite as any, I guess. This space may be home to similar, or not. We'll see. We'll all see! Muaha-*cough* Sorry, force of habit.
I may also post about games, game ideas, half-baked crazy thoughts, and/or why "Eighty-Six on the chicken!" was a hilarious line in The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. If you disagree, that's okay. As Five Iron Frenzy once sang, I can't be responsible for all that's wrong with this world.
So yeah, now that you've been appropriately traumatized, let's see what we can do with this thing.
I may also post about games, game ideas, half-baked crazy thoughts, and/or why "Eighty-Six on the chicken!" was a hilarious line in The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. If you disagree, that's okay. As Five Iron Frenzy once sang, I can't be responsible for all that's wrong with this world.
So yeah, now that you've been appropriately traumatized, let's see what we can do with this thing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)