Cheap Geek: Game Prices

I promised myself that I would never spend $60 on a video game ever again.

When Final Fantasy 13 came out, I got it on launch day from Target. They were offering a $10 gift card with the purchase of the game, thus offsetting the price slightly, even if I still had to hand over that $60 up front. Overall, I liked the game; the combat was great, but the storytelling wasn’t very good (the foundations of a good story were there, but the execution sucked).

Months later, I purchased Mass Effect 2 on sale for $24 on Steam. I loved it. Mass Effect 2 is one of the best Video Games I have ever played. What’s more, simply by waiting 6 months before purchasing it, I spent less than half what I did on Final Fantasy 13. This experience of spending less money on a game, and liking it more than the $60 game I bought previously has happened to me many times before. Mass Effect 2 was the last straw. I promised myself I’d never spend $60 on a game again. Given that nearly all video games drop in price over time, there’s no reason to spend $60 on one as long as I’m willing to wait for a better price.

However, that also means I’m not going to play StarCraft II for a while. I have loved every game Blizzard has made for the past decade and a half, and while I have no doubt that StarCraft II is a phenomenal game, I refuse to pay $60 for it. That’s just over my limit.

In the meantime, I installed the original StarCraft on my Ubuntu partition under Wine. It runs flawlessly, and even after all these years it’s still a good game. More importantly, playing the old game also helps to quell my desire for the new game. I highly recommend the old StarCraft if you can’t play the new one for whatever reason.

Thoughts On How Memories Work

To this day, I’m baffled by the number of people (I’m looking at you JK Rowling) who actually believe that the human mind is even capable of remembering an event perfectly.  That’s simply not how the mind works.  It’s all a series of connections, relations, and correlation.  No one memory stands alone fully intact.  They’re all, to some extent, connected to other strands of memory.  This reduces memory redundancy with similar events and situations, so it saves space.  In CS terms, it’s a form of data compression. Unfortunately, this type of compression is susceptible to false connections.  A dream is little more than a series of free floating memory strands.  When said strands get mixed up when we’re awake, it results in us remembering things happening in ways they didn’t.  A conversation you had yesterday being remembered as something that happened a week ago…  Something in a fan fic that later you remember as having actually happened in the real book/s…  Something happening in a dream that you later recall as something someone told you…

Or, in the case of this clip, something that didn’t happen at all, but was put together from other memories that actually did happen…

Put Squaresoft Up On PSN

Before Square Enix, there was Squaresoft, and the way I see it, with the notable exception of Final Fantasy X and the first Kingdom Hearts, all of Squaresoft’s best games came out on the original PlayStation at some point. Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, Xenogears, Parasite Eve, nearly all the Final Fantasy games up to FF9…among others. Seems to me that the fastest way to make PlayStation an RPG powerhouse again would be as simple as putting all the old PS1 Squaresoft games up on PSN. Forget about Xbox 360′s Infinite Undiscovery; Sony has nearly all of Final Fantasy at its fingertips just begging to be ripped and put up for digital download.

For a system that had so many great Squaresoft games, it’s criminal that that legacy is only being represented by Final Fantasy VII on the Playstation Network. I’m still very happy that FF7 is there, but I want more.

Finally, Final Fantasy VII on PSN.

American consumers can now download the PSX version of Final Fantasy VII off the PSN store. I highly suggest that everyone get it.

People have been modding their PSPs to play Final Fantasy VII since the system came out, and now you can finally play it on the PSP natively without any need for mods. Truth be told, I already have a PSP with custom firmware that lags behind the official firmware, but with a little howto I found here that wasn’t a problem.

In one of my earliest posts, I pleaded with people not to play Final Fantasy VII Crisis Core before playing the original Final Fantasy VII first. Well, here’s the best opportunity to do that. All downloaded PSX titles from the PSN store can be played on both the PSP and PS3, and you can even share save files between the two systems, so you never need to redo a section of game you already played through on one system.

I was slightly disappointed that this version of FFVII doesn’t have the PC version’s translation of the dialogue (the Cloud and Aeris conversation outside the Honey Bee Inn still makes no sense), and at 1,349 megabytes, it’s a little big for any PSP memory stick 4 gigs or under. That being said, I still think this is a great thing. I already own FFVII on disc, but it’s great to have a version I can carry with me in my PSP, and play on my PS3 regardless of what disc I have in the system.

Hopefully, Sony and Square get enough positive response from this that they’ll want to do this with all the old popular Square titles. We might even get some PSP remakes like what the Nintendo DS got with FF IV. Just imagine Final Fantasy VI remade with the Crisis Core engine for the PSP. Of course, I’d also just be happy with a Chrono Trigger port.

From Job-less to Oblivion

Many moons ago, I picked up a used copy of The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion at Blockbuster. In the past, their used games have been cheaper than anywhere else, and at that time Oblivion was selling at a price that I couldn’t refuse. The problem, of course, was that I simply didn’t have the time needed to dedicate myself to the game, and so it just sat on my shelf.

Then I lost my job, and suddenly I had almost nothing but free time to kill. Let me tell you, Oblivion is the greatest time suck I’ve experienced since I stopped playing World of Warcraft. The amount of content in this open world RPG is simply amazing. This thing is a lot like a single player MMO.

I really like Japanese RPGs, because they’re so story driven. I like Oblivion because it’s so easy to become consumed by the world. It’s not like in Final Fantasy, where if there’s a chest in a house somewhere, it’s contents are yours, because the contents of all chests are yours by virtue of you owning the game. In Oblivion, if you get caught taking something from someone else’s house, the game penalize you by either having the owner attack you, or by having a watchman fine or imprison you. In Final Fantasy, if it’s free, it’s yours. In Oblivion, sometimes you don’t even want to take the stuff you know you won’t get in trouble for, because the idea that someone else might need or want it has been drilled into you by the game’s mechanics, even though the only “other people” are all NPCs. That’s just an example. There are hundreds of other little things like that that make this game so immersive.

That being said, I think it’s time for me to move on to something else. I finished the main story, and going back to do other quest lines or starting over feels a lot like WOW grinding. That’s cool sometimes, but I’d like to think there are better things to do with my time. Learn how to juggle, for example…

Why Geeks Love Adam Savage

With all the crap that’s going on right now, I feel it’s time to present reassurance to the Geek community: No matter what’s going on in the world, we Geeks have the ability to do anything.

There’s more to this series of clips. If you want to see the rest of them, you can find them on youtube.

Enchanted Arms Doesn’t Suck

I’ve been playing Enchanted Arms on my Playstation 3 a lot recently.  I’ve gotten over 30 hours into it, so I’m probably about half way through, more or less.

The game is sort of like a cross between Final Fantasy X and Pokémon.  The peppy main character and his friends go around collecting fighting golems and try to save the land from other golems.  The overall story and dialogue aren’t anything to write home about.  What’s more, the game itself assumes you’ve never played a JRPG before, so the fighting system isn’t too complex, and the tutorials get a little redundant.  The graphics in the game look like a PS2 game that had the resolution turned up a bit, so there’s nothing special here visually.

All that being said, the game doesn’t suck.  And right now, it’s the only Japanese RPG on the Playstation 3.  If you are so desperate for a JRPG that the idea of playing a subpar Final Fantasy/Pokémon is actually appealing to you, then find yourself a used copy and buy it ASAP.

If you’re not desperate, though, you might just want to wait till Eternal Sonata comes out on PS3.

Weezer & Internet Stars

For all those who spend more time surfing the web than exposing their skin to the sun’s deadly rays (it burns!), this music video should be extremely amusing. This song has been running through my head almost non-stop since Friday.

Barack (Skywalker) Obama

It’s not often that my geeky side and my political side come together to have a great big laugh at the same youtube video.  But that’s what happened here:

Obama has already been endorsed by Mark Hamill, but I wonder if he’s likely to go much father in courting the geek vote.  It would amuse me to no end if he were seen, at some point, with a little Yoda figure sticking out of his front pocket.  No!  Wait!  How about a Mace Windu or Luke Skywalker (ROTJ, naturally) Lightsaber replica attached to his belt at the next press conference?  Probably won’t ever happen, though…  But, a geek can dream, can’t he?

Don’t Play Crisis Core Before Final Fantasy 7

I thought about doing a full review of Final Fantasy 7 Crisis Core, but I came to the conclusion that that has probably been done to death.  Instead, I decided to deal with the largest issue that has arisen as a result of Crisis Core.

It’s been over ten years since Final Fantasy 7 first came out, and in that time, people have grown up, and gaming has changed.  But one thing remains constant: Final Fantasy 7 is one of the best stories in gaming history.  A lot of the reason for that is the deep back-story.  The story doesn’t start with the main character, and a lot of the most powerful revelations in the narrative are about things that happened long before the game starts.  Crisis Core is a great prequel, but it will ruin the story for anyone who hasn’t already played Final Fantasy 7.

Given that it’s been over a decade since Final Fantasy 7 came out, there are probably a lot of people who have never played it.  There are people who are new to console RPGs (because they were simply too young when FF7 came out), or people who missed it the first time around for whatever reason.  Those people are going to be powerfully tempted to play Crisis Core because of the good reviews, and I want to implore them not to.  Please, I beg, do not play Crisis Core before Final Fantasy 7, because it will ruin the story for you.

We aren’t dealing with a Star Wars-esk prequel here.  Knowing that Darth Vader is Luke’s father doesn’t ruin the Original Trilogy.  But, there are many moments in Final Fantasy 7 that are spoiled completely by Crisis Core.  Imagine, if you will, going into Knights of the Old Republic for the first time and being spoiled about (spoiler! highlight to read) your character being Revan from the beginning.  Remember how that revelation made you feel the first time you played the game.  Now imagine that same feeling happening multiple times through the game, and you come to understand why spoilers for Final Fantasy 7 might actually ruin a person’s experience of the entire game.

I loved Crisis Core, and I highly recommend it to any fan of Final Fantasy 7.  But, if you haven’t played Final Fantasy 7 yet, or you have friends who haven’t played it yet, please, do everything in your power to prevent yourself or them getting spoiled.  Friends shouldn’t let friends play Crisis Core before FF7.

Square Enix is being rather coy about whether they are going to remake Final Fantasy 7, but frankly, it’s become pretty obvious to me that they will.  If you haven’t played Final Fantasy 7 because it was a first generation Playstation 1 game with relatively poor graphics, then I recommend you wait for the remake before playing Crisis Core.  Yes, I’m perfectly aware that it might take three or more years before a remake ever hits the market, but I’m adamant that it’s better to wait till then, than spoil Final Fantasy 7 by playing Crisis Core now.