So before I went into campus for a day of System Administration and Experiment Running, I dropped by the local Best Buy to buy a Wii. The real reason is that I want to play my Gamecube games at 480p, but I was going to buy one eventually and besides Gamecube component cables are no longer for sale. And the Wii is projected to be scarce until after Christmas 2008 so the date won’t make much difference; there’s no price drop coming while demand is this high.

After talking to Best Buy on the phone, I decided to get there 10 minutes early—the employee said that they’d sell out in about 5 minutes. I also read a blog post about 30-40 people showing up last Sunday for a Wii. So I went and waited for about 15 minutes. Sure enough, five minutes after opening, all the Wiis were gone. There wasn’t much line, though; about six people total.

If you think it’s bizarre that people still have to line up to buy a Wii after a a year and a half, you’re not alone. I thought it was bizarre, even as I stood there. I had to keep a bemused self-deprecating smirk off my face lest the other people think I was crazy (a farmer, a couple of teenagers, a soccer mom and another 20-something guy).

In regards to System Administration, I’m trying to get a subversion server running on our corpus server, and to get apache fixed so that it listens on port 80 by default instead of 16080. Or maybe that’s just for CGI.

Meanwhile I’m Running an Experiment in the background. It’s really one that I’ve run before, but it’s been six months and I realised that I left the code in disarray. The Joel test should really be applied to research (in a modified form), so I put the whole directory under version control (darcs, since I haven’t got subversion running yet), then committed to generating everything from a single build script. I’ve got it generating just about everything except the annotated map of England at the end.

In the process I swore off bash for the last time (I hope) and wrote the script in Python. My thought process was as follows: if your task is fit for bash, why not do it in Perl, which is basically an improvement of bash, awk and sed combined? But I hate Perl. So why not do the task in Python, which is marginally wordier but much cleaner. So Python should (logically) be pretty close to bash, but cleaner and marginally wordier.

I missed the time when Konami was selling Metal Gear Solid 3 with Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2 bundled. This period of time was exactly 3 weeks, if it was the standard shelf-time for re-releases. Contrast this to music, which is at least digitally distributed now, if not in an enlightened way for the most part. You have a better chance of finding an old song than an old game.

Anyway. Videogames! Games are just now starting to be sold like music, except that it looks like there is an exclusivity war on. That means that Metal Gear 1 and 2 may someday show up online, but for now they are effectively out of print. If we want to use an ancient term. So I scrounged around on the internet and found the ROMs and an MSX emulator that (shock) works on a Mac. Actually, because of Linux and SDL (a cross-platform graphics library), most games older than 10 years work on the Mac because it’s fairly trivial to port emulators.

That doesn’t mean that an open source emulator is easy to use, though. Oh, no! It means that it’s accurate. For the MSX, that means learning about the 100 models of MSX machines, the difference between MSX, MSX2, MSX2+, which models support tapes, which ones support disk drives, then downloading the correct files for the one you decide on. Then you get to learn how to (virtually) format a tape or a disk, (virtually) rewind it and (virtually) record your save data. And the emulator is so accurate that while you load a saved file from tape, it plays the tape data at a low volume. That’s because the tapes are just saved as WAV files. So you could (in fact) encode your save files to MP3 and listen to them.

I didn’t do that. I just played the first quarter or so of Metal Gear and first stage of Metal Gear 2. The graphics are the main difference from the later 3D games–they are somewhere above NES-level, probably about SMS, but the animation gets choppy when the graphics get better.

Actually, Metal Gear is a little more primitive than later games–guards look in a straight line instead of a cone, and the game seems less focussed on evasion than on stealthily knocking off guards in the right order. A big contributor is that there are more guards, and you can’t crawl under things. The story is staccato and brief beyond comprehensibility. This is partly because of translation issues. Among the items in my inventory, I count: CIGAL, L-MAIN, RATIO, P-BOMB. That’s cigarettes, land-mines, rations and plastic explosives in English.

On the other hand, in terms of gameplay, Metal Gear 2 is sort of a mix of all three Metal Gear Solid games. The tech is kind of old, like MGS3, and the switch from 3D to 2D makes it feel like the guards are all-seeing. Plus they chase you from screen to screen, unlike MGS2 (which was I think one of the demerits of MGS2). There are few elements of MGS2 like squeaky floors that I don’t remember in MGS1. However, the first few minutes of gameplay are a lot like MGS1 except not set in Alaska, and Snake and the Colonel both look a lot younger.

In all, both games are decent. Metal Gear 2 is more fun, probably because it’s more like the later games in the series.

I downloaded and beat ZZT this week. It plays like an ancient, low-fi, irreverent version of Zelda. The reason I wanted to play is because I am SO much better at games than when I was 11 that I can actually beat it now. And get most of the jokes.

The reason that *you* might be interested in playing is that ZZT is the game that gave Tim Sweeney of Epic his start. He used the money from ZZT to write Jill of the Jungle. And the rest is history. Actually, I just read more history of Epic on Wikipedia. Apparently these are the guys behind Gears of War and Jazz Jackrabbit. Tim Sweeney is also famous in programming language circles for his predictions of where game programming will go after C++.

ZZT’s history, in fact, continues after the original game. Part of the reason the graphics are simple ASCII is that the game runs an “OO” scripting language and the engine is a lot beefier than it looks. 17 years later, people apparently are still making a trickle of ZZT games.

You’ll almost certainly need DOSbox unless you have an old 386 connected to the internet.

Japanese RPGs are the opera of video games.

Both take themselves way too seriously. Both have a story that is not an afterthought, but is not primary, in that it is filled out with the meat of the package–the battles/levelling of RPGs or the music/singing of opera. The story just never holds weight because it’s a facade designed to hold the filling in–the characters that are supposed to be real are secondary to their skills, whether it’s black magic or baritone. Don’t get me wrong, though. The story is important, just like the crust of a pot pie is important. Take off the crust and you get a completely linear American RPG. That’s boring.

But you’re always thinking, “man, that beggar is so close to dying, yet here he is singing about the fate of Mother Russia. how does he DO it?". Or “how come every town has some dark secret that turns out to be a boss monster? even this burning building was the result of a fire monster.”

Also like opera, 90% of us are just along for the ride because we find it vaguely interesting, and the associated culture is fun. We’re not sure if we like the cheesy, illogical story or the filling in between. The other 10% are intensely involved in the filling and may not even notice the story.

Mmm…cheesy crust turkey pot pie. Is there any analogy it can’t handle?

I gave up on Final Fantasy after watching Jose Rose sink 50+ hours into FF9 trying to collect all the cards and Chocobos during my first year of college. But I figured since I finally bought a PS2 I should probably buy at least Final Fantasy 10 simply because of its fame–at least as long as I could find it in the range of $5-8 used. I’ll probably never play it all the way through, but still.

Here’s where you come in. Go do a search on Amazon for “Final Fantasy". Notice something?

That’s right, Square still publishes all of the Final Fantasy games, whether in original form or in ported form. You can buy them new. That’s great news. More publishers should do this. To play most of the games you only need a PS2. (You’ll need a DS for FF3 and a PSP for FFT.)

Except one. Final Fantasy 7. Remember that one? The most popular Final Fantasy? The one that made RPGs saleable in America? The reason that Japanese games now have decent English translations*? Square must want to inflate the market for their FF7 gaidens, which, upon investigation, are *not* RPGs. Or maybe they want to support the people who are selling used copies at $55 “disc 1 and 2 are original, 3 is from greatest hits version".

*For comparison, go back and play Final Fantasy Tactics. Actually, FF7’s translation isn’t even *that* great, but its popularity meant that subsequent games had a bigger budget.