Fourth of July Weekend

This Fourth of July weekend, Sarah and I went up to my parent's cabin in Hardy, AR on the Spring River. We left Saturday at around 7:00pm and arrived there at around 9:30pm. We spent an hour or so just sitting on the front porch talking with my mom. The next day we went for a long walk with my dad down the river's edge and then we went up to Mammoth Springs to visit our family friend Glenda's cabin and check out the source of the river.

When we got back, we ate lunch and just sat on the porch for a while, watching the river. They kept pressuring us to go and canoe and swim in the river, but we didn't have swimsuits. So we instead went into town to check out the shops. It was Sunday, so some of them were closed, but there were several neat little shops, mostly filled with antiques. We did not get to go into the goth shop, the tattoo and piercing parlor or the book store.

When we got back from town, my mom insisted on teaching us how to play bridge, which is ultimately a pretty simple game, but the guidelines (not rules) for how you do the initial bidding are VERY complicated. Then there was dinner and we watched some fireworks. The next cabin over was launching the very large, loud fireworks from the road. That day my grandmother was also there, so Sarah and I spent the evening in a hotel.

The next morning we caught this show on TV called How the States Got Their Shapes. That show was way more interesting than it had any right being. We eventually had to stop watching it so we could check out. We got breakfast at The Corner Booth, which had some great, cheap breakfast food (served all day).

Then we took the hour-and-a-half drive to Mountain Home to check in on Sarah's dad. We visited him at the store and hung out with him for a while before he got off and we had some good grilled food. After being in Mountain Home for a couple hours, we drove back to Little Rock. We saw zero cops on the 3.5 hour drive home.

Parents Gone = Work Party

The events in question took place between high school and college, if I remember correctly. But that's not important.

I was working at the movie theater at the time and the manager (whose butt I had slapped once) was actually fairly young, in his mid 20s or so. I managed to let slip that my parents were going to be away one weekend. Now, what happens when you do this, kids? That's right, everyone decides that there needs to be a party at my place.

And a party there was. It was mostly just people hanging out and stuff. The manager did buy some alcohol for everyone (keep in mind that the employees were between the ages of 16 to 18). I honestly don't remember much. I didn't do much if any drinking, since I was worried about keeping the place in order. Eventually everybody left and I tidied up the place.

The next day I finished off the Smirnoff Ices that the 16 year old fellow employee left behind, for obvious reasons. Then in the evening I gathered up all the trash, loaded it into my car and dumped it in the dumpster at my other place of employment, a Mexican restaurant.

It was as if nothing had happened. Not like the time my parents left my brother home alone and came back to the beer cans everywhere and him passed out on his bed.

Companions: Storytelling in Team Ico games

Wrong kind of companion

People look at the Team Ico games and try to find connections to prove that they're all in the same universe. They'll talk about boys with horns, art style, etc. There is, however, a common thread in the gameplay which I feel is what makes the stories in these games so powerful, despite the lack of dialogue. Each game features a companion. In this instance, a companion is a character that stays by the main character's side throughout the majority of the game.

Why would they make all of their games this way? I think it's because it really has a powerful effect on the story. In ICO, your goal is to escape from the castle with Yorda, the daughter of the queen of the castle. The Queen plans to use Yorda to extend her own life. Yorda is mostly useless, only occasionally being able to help by magically activating certain doors. When plalying ICO, I felt a strong need to protect Yorda as if she were my younger sister. That's a bond that I never have with the main character of a game, who I'm used to seeing die. That's one reason that I, as a player, got pulled into ICO's story. Yorda's constant presence and vulnerability made me want to protect her, giving me a stronger connection to the universe and its events.

The Brother

I don't often talk about my brother. This is mostly because the things that are notable are painful. I love him, but he has been the major source of pain for my family.

When we were young we shared a room and he was a great older brother. He's three days shy of two years older than me. Playing together, hanging out, it was good times. I don't remember at what age, specifically, but I think that when I was in the second grade he moved out of our room and got his own. From that point we have done nothing but drift apart.

Backlog Update

I'm healthily making my way through  The Legend of Zelda. I'm seven dungeons in and I have the White Sword and the Blue Ring. It's been really fun, although I have to question how some of the items are supposed to be compelling.

Oh, look! It's a...ladder?

I dug some more into Super Meat Boy. I beat Hell. Now it's just getting stupid hard. I'm putting it in my, "I don't actively care about beating this game" bucket.

I really need to get back to work on Portable Ops.

Weird Dream: Shoulder People and Batman

I had another weird dream last night. I was the only skinny member of an obese family that lived out in the country. Everyone else in the family also had people growing out of their shoulders. I had gone off to go to a Batman Fair, which is much like a county fair, except everything is Batman Themed.

The fair was really cool but when the time came for me to go home I couldn't find my bike. I had to borrow someone's bike to get home in the dark down the country roads. I was worried that I'd get lost in the dark but my brother eventually found me on his motorcycle.

When we got home we had a nice big family moment, and my other family members decided to let their shoulder people get some fresh air.

Please Retweet (and don't RT)

Most people who use twitter regularly have encountered this situation in their twitter feed. You see a tweet from someone in your feed, and then you see someone else retweet it using the old RT @username style. I find this to be incredibly frustrating, since it's wasteful of my time. I am here so say, right now, "Stop all the RT'ing!"

First Reason: Redundancy
As I laid out above, when people use the RT, they run the risk of creating duplicate entries in the feeds of your followers. This becomes especially bad if multiple people in your feed RT the same thing.

Why I Love Smaller Games

Small Game

I love smaller games such as PSN downloads, indie titles, DS/PSP games, and mobile games. I've spent far more on these games in the past 5 years than I have on "full priced" games.

Some Demo Impressions and a story

I played some demos tonight, so here are my thoughts on them.

El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron
This is an action game that has absolutely stunning stylized visuals and is apparently based on a biblical story (although I'm not sure how THAT works). It's definitely strange. The combat was pretty good, but difficult. It's nice to know that dying isn't final, you can resurrect yourself with some button mashing.

It was a very strange experience for me. It could be a really good game, I just don't know. The gameplay was fun, even though the platforming parts were a little frustrating.

Spirit Tracks Thoughts

I beat Spirit Tracks last night, and it was actually really great. I felt like the game did a wonderful job of fully utilizing the touch aspect of the system that it was on. It was a wonderful improvement on the solid gameplay already found in it's predecessor, Phantom Hourglass.

One of the most welcome improvements was the fact that in the "central dungeon", in this game a tower, which is returned to several times during the game, previously completed portions of the tower do not have to be repeated. Many of the items in the game are variations on standard Zelda items: bombs, bow, boomerang, whip. There was also an item which let you blow gusts of wind (using the microphone) and a wand which let you do some really neat puzzle with sand. The wand would hard the sand and make it stand up as a raised platform, allowing link to create barriers or elevator himself.

Princess Zelda plays a more crucial role in this game since her spirit became disembodied. She follows you throughout the game, but not in an annoying way. As a spirit, she can possess certain armored enemies called Phantoms. The Phantoms only occur in the central dungeon and come in a few varieties. The co-op'esque gameplay provided by this mechanic allows for wonderful and interesting interactions with your items.

The boss battles were all wonderful, the ones at the end were especially great.

This game does feature extensive train travel as a core of the game in a way that is somewhat similar to Wind Waker and Phantom Hourglass, though in a more rigid way. There are some special gates that facilitate travel via teleportation, so overall, it's on par with the travel in the other two.

Overall, it was a wonderful game.