I have just finished a 23 year old console RPG - Phantasy Star III: Generations of Doom. Also known as the black sheep of the family. I have beaten the original Phantasy Star, Phantasy Star II and Phantasy Star IV, back in the day, on the original hardware, but I just couldn't get myself to play part three all the way to the end. It wasn't a horrible game by any stretch of the imagination, but it was pretty flawed and it simply wasn't up there with the other games of the series.
Yes, sometimes you fight a signpost.
But in a day and age where dungeon maps are all over the internet (we had to draw that shit by hand back then!) and emulators allow you to quick-save pretty much anytime you want, finishing these old games has become a lot quicker and easier. And I finally wanted to finish that one game of the four titles, which I could never get myself to play all the way to the end.
"So why didn't you finish Phantasy Star III back in the day" you interrupt me like a total cunt. Imagine this: The game puts you in the role of a prince on his wedding day. You're on your way to the altar when suddenly a dragon appears and flies away with your would-be bride. Naturally, you throw a bit of a tantrum, so your father, the king, throws you into the dungeon to "cool off". Some parenting.
Assorted dungeon monsters.
And because it would be a pretty short game if it just ended there, some random girl shows up and frees you. How did she get there? Why is she helping you? The game never tells you, but there you go - enjoy freedom. I don't know whether the English version simply didn't get a very good translation or whether huge parts of the story were just left out, but weird shit like this keeps happening.
A little while later you need to go cross a lake, but the ferryman refuses to take you unless you find a cyborg. Because cyborgs are a token of good luck, he says. And what do you know, you'll run into a cyborg five minutes later, who says she's been waiting for you for a thousand years. Your character is in his early twenties at best, so god knows how she knew about you a millenium ago. Also, if she's the only cyborg around and she's not followed anyone else in over a thousand years, why the fuck does that town even have a ferryman? How the hell does he know about Cyborgs? Why does he insist you bring one?
Full 1st gen party.
You meet your next companion in the middle of a cave. Basically, he tells you that he stole a rare gem, but he doesn't really want it, so he passes it on to you. Cool. So why steal it in the first place if you don't want it? You spend the next couple of hours trying to figure out what the gem does until you find some sealed cave, which can be opened up with the gem. There is probably one NPC hidden somewhere who tells you about this, but the game is deliberately vague about where you should go or what you need to do. Because back in the day, games were expensive and people didn't want to finish them within just a day or two. Enjoy entire weeks worth of backtracking and guessing!
Gem thief guy joins your group until you finally bump into that girl again who let you out of your prison cell at the beginning of the game. But the thief won't let you talk to her until you fight him. "Let's see how tough you really are!" You have to beat him solo or it's game over. When you win, he just says you're tougher than he thought and lets you talk to the girl, who then joins your group. Thief guy rejoins the group as well, right after trying to kill you.
Those dungeon graphics were considered pretty badass back then.
Could these NPCs be any more random? First he hands you a stolen gem for absolutely no reason, then he attacks you for no reason and teams up with you again the next second. If I had to guess, I'd say the guy was either jealous, because he didn't want the main character to hook up with prison chick or he was testing whether he's really worthy. And guess is all I can do, as the game sure as fuck won't tell me what's going on. And it only gets weirder from here.
Eventually, you find and rescue your abducted bride and you're presented with a message: "You have completed your destiny! Choose your bride!" And you have to choose whether you want to marry your originally intended bride or the girl who freed you from your cell in the dungeon. Again, no context, no story, none of this makes sense. Think about it:
You want to get married to a girl, so you're probably in love, right? Especially since you completely lose your shit when she gets stolen by a dragon. So you go on this epic quest to bring her back and then you can go all: "Aaaactually, I think I wanna marry that other girl, because she's way hotter. Sorry, no hard feelings. It's good to be the prince!"
Good thing they don't get a say in this.
What's weirder is how that second girl has no personality whatsoever. She has one line of text when she opens your cell door and that's it. Apparently she's a princess. Oookay... so I should marry you, because...?
I went and married the original bride, but it's entirely possible to go for the other girl. And it doesn't end there - either bride will give you a son, who will then become your main character. Depending on the girl you've picked, your next-generation hero will have different looks and abilities and a different name. And then you play your "son", which also means you'll lose all of your daddy's badass gear and get stuck with whatever starting items the game decides you should have. Great.
...and then decided to marry a complete stranger instead.
Somewhere towards the end of that second generation you bump into an aged jewel thief guy, who fought against and alongside your "father" at the first stage of the game. He reveals to you that he can turn into a dragon and it was in fact him who abducted your "mother" at the beginning of the game. "Please don't tell him", he says. And then he dies. I'm not making this up. Look:
"And then he died. The end."
So, let's try and recap, shall we? Some guy you've never even met turns into a dragon to steal your girl on your wedding day. Then he hangs out with you in his human form and becomes your friend until he tries to murder you over yet another girl. Only to become your friend again if you defeat him. Your 2nd generation character can even marry jewel thief's daughter, which essentially means you'll end up boning your cousin, but let's not get any deeper into the confusing plot here.
By the end of the 2nd generation, you're presented with more awesome wedding options. In my case, I could choose from either gem thief's daughter, who also doesn't talk and throws bladed boomerangs in combat ("slicers") or I could get married to some chick who fights using daggers. She challenges you in the middle of a dungeon, then joins your group if you defeat her. And that's all you'll ever know about these two girls. I got married to dungeon girl and once again, she ended up giving me a son, who then became the new main character. Are you starting to see why I eventually gave up on the whole thing?
Characters change over the three generations. Except Edward Scissorhands and Jessica Rabbit, they're immortal cyborgs.
Mind you, the idea is pretty unique and it's not awful. Depending on your wedding choices you end up with one of four different main characters by the time you reach 3rd generation, you will meet different group members and companions and even get one of four endings with slightly varying levels of WTFness. I'm not even gonna try to describe how I feel about that one ending where a black hole transports you through time and space and directly to planet earth (where it turns out that everyone in the universe speaks perfect English).
This character will attempt to murder you, then instantly join your group and later become a wedding option.
The game tried to innovate in other areas, as well. For instance, it's one of the first ever games to use interactive music, which attempts to fit the situation in combat. The music will get darker and scarier or ever more cheerful depending on whether you or the monsters have the upper hand. The overworld theme gets more and more audio channels and extra instruments added as you add more companions to your group. You can check it out in this video, where it starts with the very simple tune featuring only one character and slowly "evolves" to the full overworld theme, drums and everything:
The monsters are easily the most fucked up bunch of creatures you'll fight in any RPG. Some of them might look more impressive than they really are on the screenshots, but their attack "animations" usually consist of them wiggling a single finger or flexing their pecs at you. I'm not making this up, I'm not exaggerating to sound funny - this shit really happens.
I'll choose the girl who tried to kill me... I... think?
I'm glad I finally gave this game a complete playthrough. The story is completely stupid in places, practically non-existent in others. The whole plot of the two warring kingdoms in this game gets resolved when you find some old amulet, which is just sitting around in a chest in some old castle, which tells you (yes, a voice speaks when you pick it up), that the war was just a set up by some evil power, which manipulated both sides into fighting each other. So if they already knew that a millenium ago - why didn't they stop? Did they just forget? Didn't they care to go after that evil power and chose to fight each other instead? I don't get it.
You chose poorly. Did I mention the main character is supposed to be 15 years old at this point in the game?
Again - much of the story either never made it into the game or was lost in translation. And many of the game's features, while bold, innovative and unusual for its day, don't really work that well. Having to choose a bride and playing as your own son is a neat idea. An RPG where people age, have children and die? From the early 90s? How cool is that? Not that cool, if you know absolutely nothing about your potential spouses.
They kill you by slightly twitching their rock-hard man-boobs.
Well then. I've finished that one. Now it's time to take a close look at Diablo (1) HD. Yes, some crazy person has modified that game to look absolutely glorious, with seamless mousewheel zoom options, truckloads of new quests, monsters, bosses and set items, which allow you to dual-wield, transform into the skeleton king and other such crazy shit. But that's a story for another day.
Now enjoy some more random bullshit monsters.
He vaguely looks like a robotic pedobear.
This is where the game tells you that your homeworld is actually a traveling space colony.
Each former main character immediately grows a mustache after their wedding. Again, no joke.
I'm getting attacked by T-Rex and some... starfish?
Clearly, these monsters all had different designers. Why is one of them just... fire?
Compared to this shit, 8/16bit Final Fantasy is historically and scientifically accurate.
Some character names in Phantasy Star games: Myau, Mieu, Miun.
Most taller enemies had to squat in order to fit on the screen.
"And then she died."
It's not very effective.
One of these enemies is just the super-enlarged top portion of...
...this character. Whose attack animation is flipping you the bird.
Getting to the final boss requires you to beat two dungeons and one previous boss, all without saving or resting.
All Sega games had to end this way. Hello, Shining Force!
Depending on your wedding choices, this planet may turn out to be earth.
Being a parent is hard. My son has found my youtube channel and subscribed to it. And there's a certain amount of swearing and (virtual) decapitation and dismemberment happening in many of my videos. I was about nine years old when I played Doom for the first time and I don't think that footage of Warframe or Space Marines will induce nightmares in kids. I also don't believe in censorship and I like to swear. And let's face it - no matter how many times we tell our kids not to cuss and swear like pirates, they're gonna do it among their friends, anyway. I know I did. And once you reach a certain age you just stop giving a fuck, so why make such a big deal out of it? Swearing is a big and important part of my job, it makes my column what it is and pays my bills, so I shouldn't be too worried when my kid hears me swearing about stuff on Youtube, right? Then again, I'm not sure his mother would agree with me here - or his teachers, for that matter. I never gave much of a fuck about these things (I've interviewed the lead producer of Star Trek Online about tribble urethras), but things change when you're supposed to be a role model. Swearing and not worrying about how people react to it works for me, but maybe it isn't such a good idea to pass on this kind of attitude. I find it fun and strangely liberating, but... hm, complicated stuff, really.
I'm beating tier 30 rifts in Diablo 3 now.
Custom build, no FotM, holy shotgun, stampede spam, or any of that crap everyone is using right now. I'm quite pleased with the success you can have on there even when you ignore the most popular builds and just do your own thing. Just a few days ago this would have put me into the European top 1000 list of crusaders, but now I'm about 3 levels behind and my dick just doesn't feel small enough to make me want to prove anything.
The thing is, I know I can dedicate another two or three days to grinding paragon-levels, optimizing enchantments and getting those extra levels out of my build to play among Europe's finest, but so what? You get nothing for it, they just keep on grinding and leveling on and on and on and the placement on the leaderboard would only exist for a few hours and my life isn't that sad and empty enough for that. I could do it if I wanted to, I'm already way ahead of all of my friends and that's good enough for me. I want Diablo 3 to be something I do for fun, not for life. I'm no longer 16 years old and I don't need to compare myself to random strangers on the internet to boost my ego. Or prevent it from deflating.
So, instead of spending another 20+ hours on Diablo this weekend, I've gone and watched some TV for women. Since, you know, people are oh so fucking crazy about Orange is the new Black. Things I've noticed during the first season of that show:
- There are about five minutes of orange prison wear. Tan is the new black. White is the new black. Maybe grey. There's no fucking orange.
- All men are evil, despicable assholes. All women, even murderers, are warm, caring and lovable if you give them a chance.
- "Based on a true story" where a sadistic (male, duh) prison guard threatens, molests and insults the inmates and (literally) pisses on their dinner. Try that in a real prison. I fucking dare you.
- Women know absolutely nothing about their vaginas.
- Lots of tits everywhere, but only if the actress is young, slim and attractive. Meth zombie hillbillies can go naked in flashback sequences where they're still pleasant to look at.
Criticism aside, the show is watchable and gives me something to do whilst waiting for more Vikings and Game of Thrones.
Regarding my interview with the lead dev guy on Star Trek Online, I'm actually pretty fucking thrilled they'd let me even talk to guys like that, get some fun new details on upcoming content and features, but I can't help but feel a little sad that it could have been Jeri Ryan instead. I've told the publisher that I was interested in previewing the new expansion and they offered interviews with some of the actors from Voyager, who have lent their voices to their respective characters in the game. So of course I was hoping to interview Seven of Nine.
In the end, it turned out none of the actors were really available and they might have baited me a bit. Of course it makes a lot more sense for the article to interview the guys who actually create the game, but man... an interview with Jeri Ryan would have been the coolest thing I've ever done in this job. Oh well, maybe next time. Apparently, Robert Picardo is a pretty funny guy, too. He's been with buffed before, if you want to check out the outtakes (20:58) and listen to him sing in German. That's one of those rare moments where I regret being a Freelancer, who doesn't actually get to sit in their editing office.
Oh well. A long, stressful day full of news posts (Blizzard's Titan has been declared dead just now and I'm still not sure if it really ever was a thing) and PR-chat comes to an end, there's some Chinese food on the table and the stupid cats are locked up in the kitchen, so we can eat in peace.
My cat has picked up the habit of bringing me all her toys. Plastic mice, toy balls, little plushie fish and frogs - she comes running with that stuff, sits in front of me with these items stuck in her face and meows her head off. And I have no idea what she wants from me. I thought maybe she wants to play fetch, but she doesn't seem too happy when I throw away whatever toy she brings me. Piling them up doesn't make her happy, either. She just meows in frustration. Maybe she just thinks I'm really shit at being a cat and I need to display my hunting and killing skills on her toys or something. Maybe she just likes to meow at me with toys stuck to her face. Who knows.
It has finally happened. I'm officially old. I never tried to fit in, I never did what everyone else did for the sake of fitting in. Never gave a fuck about that. But now I've reached a point where I'm so out of touch with the world, I just don't understand it anymore. Seriously.
Posting gaming-related news is part of my job. And writing about games is something that should be more on the funny side, right? Entertainment. I mean, I grew up reading gaming magazines full of comics and puns and all that sort of thing. So I posted an article about the impending pet buff on Diablo 3, saying that the life expectancy of these ingame pets on the higher difficulty levels is anout as slim as that of a chocolate cake in a camp for fat kids. Wich is fairly accurate, mind.
What followed was this wave of outrage, because how dare I make fun of poor (completely made-up) kids, who are trying so hard to fight their disease? Yes, a fat ass is now officially a disease and apparently you now deserve pity for stuffing your face with junk food until your ass grows its own zipcode.
You poor, misunderstood, precious little flower.
I have never been slim in my life. I know the fat jokes, the insults and all the crap that goes with it, but I can look at the joke I made up there without starting to cry or feeling personally insulted. I don't feel like I'm suffering from some kind of disease, like I'm a victim. I'm fat because I like to eat. But people posted their life stories, talking about how it's their parents' fault they're fat, how their childhood sucked because they grew up as little fatties and apparently it's no longer okay in these day and age to joke about chocolate cake and fat kids. I didn't name and shame anyone, it was an innocent joke and people still lost their shit. All of it.
And to the surprise of absolutely no one, the same thing happened when I compared Ragnarok Online 2 to ebola in the comments section. I said if I had to choose between catching ebola and having to play Ragnarok, I'd need a few minutes to think. And people freaked out, because how dare I make fun of ebola, a disease, which kills more than 90% of all the people suffering from it?
Idiots. How the fuck am I making fun of ebola when I compare a shitty Korean MMO to that deadly disease? If anything, I'm making fun of the stupid game! I know I was being a bit harsh on ebola there when I put it on the same level as Ragnarok Online 2, but I stand by what I said.
I'll just stop having fun at work and only post dead-serious articles from now on. Maybe add a few bible quotes or talk about how vegans are better people.
Speaking of stupid internet shit I feel too old to put up with: dear leaders of MMO guilds - please stop making Teamspeak fucking mandatory! Yes, I can see how playing difficult, complex content becomes easier when you can communicate with your team mates via voice chat. I'd be an idiot to deny that. But when we're not actually playing together, stop trying to force me into your goddam voice chat!
I don't give a shit about anything you have to say.
I actually enjoy listening to the ingame audio in my games. Sometimes I like to play loud music. Sometimes I like to sit and chat with my girlfriend, because I've moved out of my mother's basement and and I don't wanna sit on my ass blabbing into a fucking headset all night long while my partner is sitting in the exact same room. And sometimes I'm just not in the mood to listen to your personal life stories, about what happened to you in school or what the fuck ever is happening in your life. Just because you come to my blog to read about my stupid life for some inexplicable reason doesn't mean I give a crap about anything you have to say. And if I do, you can tell me in text chat.
Diablo 3, a game, which genuinely put me to sleep not too long ago, is now taking up most of my spare time these days. Torment VI no longer poses a challenge, so it's greater rifts from here. I'm uploading a happy fun casual T VI farming video on my youtube channel right now. The game is a lot of fun right now and I can't stop playing it, which means Borderlands, Divinity and all the rest are gonna have to wait a bit longer.
In other news, our pets are assholes. Well, most of them. Not this one:
Coolest snake I've ever known.
The cats and the lizard are playing hide and seek in the living room all day. The lizard would hide under the sofa, wait for the cats to come close, then poke his head out. And sometimes he'll try to eat them.
It sounds like it's all fun and games, but it usually ends with one of the cats climbing up the curtains (and fucking them up in the process), the lizard disconnecting various game consoles and the tv box and when stuff gets too boring, my cat will go and steal random shit out of the trashcan or from one of the tables. Candy wrappers, hairbands, she'll steal whatever she can find. Apparently, it's a strange trait shared by many Birman cats.
The real fun time begins when I'm trying to cook dinner. Put anything in a pan that remotely resembles chicken, bacon or cheese and the hordes start invading. And the daily war around the food bowls is stressful enough as it is.
I wanna see Gordon Ramsey handle this shit.
Pets are fun, don't get me wrong. I wouldn't get rid of ours no matter how much they get on my nuts at times. But if you ever consider starting your own home office or a personal zoo, go for one of the two, not both.
All's fair in love and war. And last time I checked, this wasn't fucking Lovehammer.
Ah crap. I've spent waaaaaay too much time on Star Trek Online over the last few days, bought too many new ships and upgrades and weapons and ALL THE THINGS. Destroyed noobs, made videos, happy stuff. The fleet is still fun and it's obvious that Star Trek Online attracts a pretty unusual crowd of players. Well, nerds, trekkies, that kinda stuff, obviously. And the atmosphere in fleet chat is always very fun, friendly and everyone is surprisingly helpful and supportive whenever somebody needs a hand with a mission or is a few credits short of a new item. I haven't seen anything quite like it since Final Fantasy XI - and that one had a lot more drama among players than STO does.
You still get the usual bunch of weirdos, of course. Captain SOULGOTH aboard the USS SOULDEVOURER of the Fleet Angels Apocalypse. Yeeeeah... that's totally Star Trek, alright. There's also a "Star Mistress Dragoon Raven" and I'm not entirely sure whether that player is just trying super hard to look cool or whether they typed out random words because they couldn't think of a real name.
The next expansion, Delta Rising, is on the horizon and will potentially turn every high level player's gear into shit, which is frustrating, because most of that stuff required countless hours and/or a mountain of real money to obtain. I'm not sure how to feel about that. On the one hand, it'll be annoying going from best of the best to utter crap in one update, on the other hand, there's my motivation to play. You know, do stuff. Work towards new items.
Meanwhile, it's still fun to be #1
My friends are going a bit insane over patch 2.1 for Diablo 3 right now. It adds a handful of new features, most of which only entertained me for a few hours, but I'll admit it's a pretty epic time killer when you wanna switch your brain off and just hack your way through thousands of zombies and demons. A semi-educated chimp could successfully play the game, which is probably why today's Blizzard games are so hugely popular. And to be fair, I'm pretty sure our hypothetical chimp would enjoy himself during the experiment. I know I did.
What's making the game so much fun is how an expression like "build diversity" isn't just some kind of fancy buzzword, which many game developers throw around, but they're actually offering various fun, interesting setups and play styles for each class. And they do that by changing the way certain core abilities work through legendary items. Rather than just adding higher and higher damage stats and attribute bonuses or yet another proc, many legendary items make your character's abilities more powerful and more fun to use. A skill that summons a bunch of guys to fight for you might suddenly summon twice as many guys. A spell that fires a powerful projectile might suddenly fire three projectiles instead. A powerful special attack might suddenly come without a cooldown or it might no longer cost any resources to cast. And then you start building your character around these items and the abilities they enhance.
I'm fighting rather comfortably on Torment IV right now and I'm now receiving Level 23 rift keystones, which are somewhere between Torment V and VI in difficulty. And I'm handling them okay. You can see a video of it right here:
This is a whole new situation. I usually focus on only one or two games at a time and play them till they bore the crap out of me, but right now I want to play at least four or five titles simultaneously. I'm having fun on STO, Diablo 3 is nice in short sessions, I still have to finish the story on Borderlands 2, Warframe is getting some fun new content and then there's Divinity and our co-op playthrough on Baldur's Gate. And friends are trying to drag me into Hazard Ops, which appears to be another fun, cooperative shooter, which is basically Gears of War 3 on PC. And then there's a new Dragon Age on the horizon...
I'm used to being frustrated, because I have a million games and nothing seems fun. Right now, however, way too many of them seem fun. Argh!
