Most of you post blog comments only on Christmas Day. Ha Ha say I, who visit Luddite parents in the hills of Tennessee every Christmas, somewhat bitterly. Ha Ha. I was involuntarily undergoing Internet Detox instead. Fortunately I brought my Gamecube so I was able to enjoy old video games while in withdrawal. The game I played the most was Wind Waker because (1) my sister liked the art style best and (2) unlike Smash Brothers, she didn’t have to play and lose. So we sat around looking at the art while I played.

Let’s start with the good parts of Wind Waker: the art style, and the controls. The controls are an improvement over the innovative but flawed controls of Ocarina of Time in two ways: (1) complete control of the camera with the C-stick and more importantly (2) TWO action buttons instead of ONE. It reduces the complexity of Ocarina’s control state machines* by about half, making it easier to get things done fast. The art style, while controversial, is at least coherent, recognisable and well-done.

On the other hand, the bad? There’s a lot of it. The game is half done, the graphics are terrible (intentionally?) and the navigation by boat is boring (also intentionally?**). It’s half done because the length is the same as Ocarina of Time, but the last half is mostly fetch quest instead of actual game. The last six dungeons should have been underwater in Old Hyrule, with the trademark Zelda world-switching to travel between them. Instead they’re just missing. What happened?

My theory is that Nintendo really flagged in the first half of the 00s. All their flagship games of that era are uncreative refinements of their innovative previous generation games. The exception is Metroid’, which was a 2nd party game developed by -gasp- Americans (well, actually Texans, but close enough). The others just borrow refinements from successors to their games and up the difficulty. Last month, playing non-Nintendo games for the first time in a long while really made this obvious to me. Many of the cool little touches in Wind Waker are stolen from Metal Gear, for example.

I promise that I’ll end all this game commentary soon. I finally got Haskell installed and will probably post something horribly complicated about Hungarian notation. The Haskell people have stopped distributing binaries to Macs and force you to compile everything which given their baroque compile process takes multiple hours. It might be in C++ anyway if I can figure out its automatic conversion rules.

*Finite state machines can also be called ‘flow charts’ if you are crass.
** Wind Waker is the only game that I can play at the same time as washing clothes downstairs.

Kaleb has a thought-provoking post up on love and romance. I don’t have anything helpful to add, so I just thought I’d echo what T-Rex says in Dinosaur Comics*.

Did I mention that I passed my 4th kyu test in Aikido? Now when you think of Nathan, you can say “What was Nathan going for? I can’t remember. I bet he’s happy to be a yonkyu in Aikido, though.”

*Dinosaur Comics: The comic strip with the same pictures every time.

A couple of updates from the PS2 post. The impossible mission in Jak 2 turned out to be optional. I did eventually beat it and was angry to find out that I got one Secret Object for it*.

My PSX memory card arrived and I played three hours of Megaman Legend. It’s absurdly fun. Part of the reason I like it is the stylised snap-together look of the game–it looks like it was built out of tiles, like a 2-D game; it reminds me of Zelda 3. The rest of it is the weird contrast between the mundane overworld with City Hall giving out digging licences and the underground maze of twisty corridors filled with malevolent alien technology. Also, it’s a Megaman Action RPG. How can it not be awesome??!

Psychonauts arrived too, though if you have Steam installed, I would recommend buying it that way. The PS2 version is inferior in a couple of ways, primarily because of the constant load screens. But I didn’t want to mess with Steam. The game itself is a weird combination of platform and adventure, like a spare action-adventure that was padded out with platforming to make it longer. Unfortunately that means the really good parts don’t start until after 2 hours or so of average platform game with a decent sense of humour. So stick with it–even if you don’t like platformers, the adventure part will be worth it.

*Platform games seem to have [1] Common Objects [2] Secret Objects [3] Mission Objects. Mario 64 is the only one I know of that doesn’t make this onerous: [1] coins [2] red coins [3] stars. This is partly because there are a fixed number of red coins per stage, and partly because the rest of Mario 64 is not onerous.
At any rate, Jak 2 is not much of a plaformer anymore because it doesn’t have Common or Mission Objects.

Here is a quick list of first impressions of the PS2 games I bought, while they’re still fresh (the package arrived yesterday). The PS2 still exudes high-tech charm even though it is old, but this is maybe because all the Nintendo games I have are old franchises with familiar characters. Annoyingly, the backward compatibility requires a PS1 memory card for PS1 games, and EBGames (that hive of scum and villainy) no longer carries PS1 stuff. So I had to order one from amazon for $5.

1. Ico – amazing. It’s like playing in a haunted Gormenghast. The eerie sense of loneliness is palpable. I’m about a quarter done. (By the way, if you haven’t read the Gormenghast trilogy, look it up now.)
2. Shadow of the Colossus – looks amazing. The creators evoke a sense of grandeur and size long before you reach a colossus. I died pretty fast upon reaching it, though. I climbed up and stabbed the magically weak spot on the calf, letting me jump up to the magically STRONG butt, whereupon I lost my grip and died.
3. Katamari Damacy – as weird as expected. The translation, however, is unexpectedly great. It’s also harder than I expected.
4. Prince of Persia – Meh. I picked it up for $10 and because it’s a remake of a classic. I got stuck trying to get the Dagger of Time and figured that I would figure it out later.
5. Metal Gear Solid 2 – Looks pretty cool so far. I am terrible at hiding, shooting, sneaking around…actually I’m just terrible at the game, period.
6. Jak and Daxter – a competent Disney-esque platformer. Better than Spyro. Not much else to say.
7. Jak 2 – very cool so far. The city setting works well. It is surprisingly hard, though. I got stuck last night on a “fly through the rings” mission. Normally I’m not so great at these anyway, but this one takes place in a city crowded with traffic, in a vehicle that takes damage. Argh!
8. Jak 3 – slightly less cool, but the story seems more interesting, so…? Unfortunately, this game has the racing problem in spades. Every two seconds somebody offers to race me. I did OK until I got into another “fly through the rings” race on Chocobo clones. Or maybe they’re giant lizards. It was at night and hard to see anything. I lost a lot.
9. Psychonauts – still in the mail. I didn’t want to install Steam so the PS2 version was the Only Way. I’ve heard bad things about Steam and I wasn’t even willing to risk my *virtual* machine.

10. (Plus Zelda DS since it was cheap) – Come on guys. You get an HOURGLASS in this game, the HOURGLASS of Time, right? It’s perfect. It’s makes WAY more sense than an “Ocarina of Time” or “Dagger of Time".

    Well, actually, not. Oh well, seems a lot like Wind Waker and Minish Cap: decent games but not as good as the old ones. The DS gimmicks are sometimes annoying. My landlord and landlady will think I’m crazy if they hear me shouting to myself! (They are deaf enough to miss the normal talking-to-myself.) I had to disguise it as a cough. Well, a real cough, used opportunely.

On the whole PS2 games seem harder than Nintendo ones, although they give you unlimited tries. This may just be my limited experience, or newness to the Playstation controller.

Making good on my threats during the St Louis LAN, I went out and bought a PS2 this week. The impetus was two-fold: [1] I can’t find a good Mac PSX emulator (surprise!) and I wanted to play my PSX games AND I haven’t fiddled with VMWare 1.1 to see if DirectX works better now (or worse, like the rest of the 1.1 update x:(. [2] I finally sat down and trawled through Gamespot’s list of best PS2 games ever. There are quite a few I didn’t want to miss and some others that I was curious about. So I sat down with Amazon and swung by the local Gamestop (that hive of scum and villainy). I ended up spending $300 for the system and 9 games. I think that’s the price of an XBox 360 with no games. End-of-life game-buying is a very good deal.

At the same time, I took a look at the XBox 360. I’m actually not *that* poor, and the 360 has a lot of appealing features: relatively developer friendly*, good online support system, friendly toward computer hardware (USB keyboard/mouse/HD, built-in VGA output, flash memory). The problem is the games. Look at this list: http://www.gamespot.com/games.html?type=top_rated&platform=1029&mode=all&sort=score&dlx_type=all&date_filter=all&sortdir=asc

This page goes from 10 to 8.3, which in Gamespot’s atrophied rating scale is more or less the games worth playing. Of that list, there are about 3 that look interesting: Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed and Castlevania. And I already own Castlevania! All the good games on the 360 are FPSs, RPGs**, sports or fighting. That leaves the 3 above, plus Kameo, a game by Rare, who hasn’t made a good game since, uh, Donkey Kong Country. Or maybe Killer Instinct.

Besides, call me a wimp, but I don’t have the heart or guts or something to make it through many M games. Mass Effect and Assassin’s Creed are both M, so that leaves Castlevania, which is barely T itself.

Here is the list of PS2 games I bought. So, yes, basically I like platform and adventure games, both of which are a sad minority in the modern world. I harbour latent interests in real-time strategy and Japanese strategy as well.

1. Ico
2. Shadow of the Colossus
3. Katamari Damacy
4. Prince of Persia
5. Metal Gear Solid 2
6. Jak and Daxter
7. Jak 2
8. Jak 3 (what can I say, I was curious and they were cheap)
9. Psychonauts
10. (Plus Zelda DS since it was cheap)

*You can even develop in F#, the .NET version of ML! So awesome!
**I still like RPGs pretty well, but I don’t have the stamina to finish them. I wonder if I ever did–I always ended up cheating to beat RPGs in the old days. Maybe if I lived with an RPG fanatic I’d at least watch them. I watched Rose beat FF9, at least.