The Blogspot of Games

My first blog was Yahoo!360° (circa 2005-2006?).
My oldest blog that’s still around today is technically DeviantART (Dec 2007).
My second oldest blog still active today is Blogger (May 2008)

After 360° closed down, I migrated my blog over to a site called Multiply, which didn’t last more than a year before transforming to an e-commerce site and eventually shutting down altogether some years later. Blogger, meanwhile, has frankly managed to defy the odds and stay up and running for all these years. I’ve speculated before that the only reason Google keeps Blogger around is because of the goodwill it builds with users, the potential backlash of closing it down, and the overall small footprint it takes up on Google’s servers simply not being worth the effort to delete. It does worry me that the day may come when I have to say goodbye to Blogger. I’m not sure what I’ll do at that point besides go all-in on WordPress (where I’ve been since Dec 2014).

In my last entry, I wrote about the Crazy Castle videogame franchise, a series I’ve never actually played beyond once holding the box of the first game in a grocery store in the American midwest in 1989. Videogames have been a part of my life as long as movies, starting with the Atari 2600 all the way to my current collection of consoles that’s only one generation behind the current lineup. This meant I also read quite a number of videogame magazines such as Nintendo Power and Gamepro. Eventually, I found my way to the internet, where games journalism wasn’t bound by the conventions of print media. One of these sites was Gamespot, which is still active today. Not content with merely being a place to post articles about the games industry, Gamespot wanted to be a haven for gamers, a place where a community could thrive, where people could make connections and share their experiences with titles both new and old.

To this end, they offered a blogging service.

Although there were no real hard and fast rules about what you could post there, it maybe wouldn’t be the best place to host your travelogue of Europe or your collection of photos of telegraph poles or your thoughts on the self-determination of the South Moldavian people. Generally, if you were reading someone’s blog on Gamespot, you were reading about games, maybe anime, possibly movies, and technology as it pertained to the gaming space (graphics cards, console specs, etc.). As I was exploring options in case Blogger went the way of Multiply and 360°, I started a blog there in August of 2009. My first entry was announcing a short story I’d written that was posted to both my DeviantART and my Freeservers site (which is still somehow up and running). My last entry came in October of 2014 with a review of Velocity 2X, a PSVita game and sequel to a really nifty shooter originally released for the PSP. 47 total blog entries in those years, and I’d almost completely forgotten about it. I think the only reason I’d checked back in on it was I was wondering whatever happened to the site 1UP, as I had a small presence there. 1UP is completely gone, folded into another publication with all records of user-generated content wiped. That was when I remembered Gamespot and managed to uncover my old account there.

It really took me back. For one entry, I was complaining about how I couldn’t use certain words like class and style because, the way the site was coded, these would cause a Javascript error. I had to spell them with 5’s. Even “classic” caused an issue. I seem to remember this error was fixed, but I never bothered to correct my entries. In another entry, Gamespot seemed to think the name Shizuru was a curse word and wouldn’t let me post until I changed it to something else. Makes me wonder how people with Shih Tzus coped when they wanted to share their dog pictures.

In the years since making these entries, Gamespot has undergone many massive changes to their backend (all the technical stuff under the bonnet, so to speak), so a number of images I posted to my entries are broken, though at least one of them can still be seen if I access the site on my phone instead of my Mac or iPad. Most of them were covers of games, while others are complete mysteries as to what they were. One of them was about a portable NES console, which really doesn’t narrow it down given how lucrative that little market was, so I have no idea what image I’d have to use if I were to archive or preserve the blog.

As of this writing, Gamespot not only still has my blog up and running (images notwithstanding), but I can make a new entry anytime I want (maybe I should test to see if class and style still cause coding issues). They don’t offer any sort of migration tool the way 360° did. So, if I were to archive these 47 entries, I’d have to do it the old fashioned way of going through one by one and copy-pasting them into Notes or Pages before I could re-upload them to Blogger or WordPress. I don’t think I’ll go that far, unless I want to repost something on an anniversary or in regard to a recent event. As I said, my last entry there was a review of Velocity 2X in 2014, a series that’s remained stagnant to this day while Futurlab (its developer) focuses on Powerwash Simulator 2. Someday, maybe there will be a Velocity 3, and on that day, I’ll dig up my old Gamespot review and we can all contrast and compare, see what’s been improved, what still needs work, and even where the series can go from here.

Game on, everybody.

Razer Left Me Wanting

As I've likely prattled on about before, I use a mouse left-handed. I am not actually left-handed, at least when it comes to handwriting and most of my artistic ventures. The art I make on my computer benefits from a mouse over a pen tablet since the number pad does most of the work whenever the slower, precise movements of a mouse are not adequate. Most legit lefties I know have cruelly forced themselves to simply use their mouse right-handedly, especially when they're at work, and especially at work if someone got it in their head that everyone should have a so-called ergonomic mouse. Fortunately, most of the mice at my work are as ambidextrous as they are basic. 

As much as I don't mind keyboard shortcuts, having some of those shortcuts on the same hand as my mouse is extremely convenient. Perhaps it's from years of console gaming wherein all your important moves are managed by your thumbs rather than your fingertips. Before the Apple Pencil, my favorite stylus for my iPad was from Adonit, and it had two little shortcut keys near the tip. I mapped my un/redo keys to these two buttons and I got so used to it that when I used a real pencil and needed to erase, I instinctively squeezed the end I was holding. As for the mice I've had, there have been many, and I'll spare you the long, drawn-out narrative and get to the point by showing you the mouse I'm currently using at home:

No words. Should have sent a poet.

I like the Maus. I love the styling, it's got a good heft and weight to it, and the wireless has never been a hindrance to me. My only real gripe about it is it's a little small. This is hardly a dealbreaker as you shouldn't necessarily be resting your palm on your mouse anyway. Your forearm should be parallel to your desk and you shouldn't drag your arm on the surface, just as you shouldn't necessarily be resting your wrists in front of the keyboard. When the workaround is getting rid of a bad habit, I can let some things go. Given that, there is another gripe that's a little harder to ignore. It's that little silver button below the scroll wheel. It controls the DPI. 

If you don't know, DPI stands for Dots Per Inch and it refers to the sensitivity of the mouse, how fast you can move your cursor across the screen. The higher the DPI the faster and farther the arrow flies across the screen with less movement of the mouse itself. Most of you probably never bother with this, especially if the computer isn't technically yours (even if it is yours in the sense that you use it regularly and are expected to be productive with it). Some of you probably know you can adjust this sensitivity setting in the control panel, especially if some jerk who used your computer before for some reason needed the sensitivity way down so you'd have to practically sweep everything off your desk just to move your cursor halfway across the screen (or picking it up and putting it back down over and over, feeling a little more ridiculous each time you repeat the motion). 

By the way, that so-called "natural" option for scroll direction can kiss my ass.

Some mouse makers have decided burying this slider in a menu not many people bother with until something goes wrong and solved the "problem" by allowing you to adjust the sensitivity of your mouse on the device itself. It makes sense, but I've always wondered why the button to do so is typically below the scroll wheel and tilted towards the wheel (as it's following the slope of the mouse's shape) to make accidentally clicking on it virtually inevitable. The Maus compounds this problem by giving you the option of about a half-dozen different DPI settings, at least four of which seem to be for people who move their mice by gently breathing on them. Maybe on a 4K monitor it evens itself out, more pixels on screen means a higher DPI is needed to cover the same distance. 

There is a genius alternative to this that I hope more mouse makers catch on to. It's called a clutch. The idea is that your mouse is set to a higher DPI to let you navigate the screen faster. When you need to slow down to make more precise and controlled movements, you push a small button on the mouse to bring the DPI down to its lowest possible setting. When you need to go fast again, simply release the clutch. 

It's currently on the Razer Basilisk and the Logitech G502, both of which are ergonomic mice with no left-handed option. In fact, Razer used to be rather friendly to the lefty crowd, with left-handed versions of some of their most well-regarded mice, including the Death Adder and especially the Naga. The Naga has a full 12-button keypad for the thumb, which may sound crowded, but is fairly navigable. I had one of these mice for a long time and it served me well. I speak of it in the past tense because the middle click gave out. Despite their internal switches being rated to some insane number of presses, the one under my scroll wheel missed that QA inspection. 

Fortunately, Razer has a pretty generous support and warranty policy. Unfortunately, that doesn't guarantee they'll be able to replace or repair everything in their product range. As the left-handed Naga was no longer made, they offered me a short list of mice to replace it with, which were all right-handed ergonomic mice, including the Death Adder, whose lefty counterpart had also been axed recently. 

How's about HELL NO!?

Further mucking things up was the oversight of these many alternatives being out of stock. The silver lining to all of this was that I could opt to take a store credit and wait for a mouse they had coming out called the Viper. I could conceivably have gone for a cheaper mouse that was ambidextrous, but that would have left me with almost half of the store credit left over and nothing to use it on besides maybe a really nice mat. The choice before me then was either to take a gamble on this new mouse, or remap the middle click of the Naga to one of its many programmable buttons and therefore throw off my entire workflow (as I would have proper middle click on every other mouse I'd use). I chose the former option. 

Have I ever mentioned how much I love braided cables?

The Viper has been good, but it is so very just shy of perfect it almost brings the whole thing down. For what it costs and what it offers as a mouse, it's overpriced compared to other offerings in the catalog. Given it cost the same as my Naga did when it was new, it really felt like a downgrade. However, as I didn't have much of a choice what with being given store credit and all, I figured its size would be its saving grace, being near enough to the Naga that I wouldn't have to reorient myself with its feel. It gets a lot of other things right; it's got the braided cable, the DPI switch is out of the way (on the bottom of the mouse, in a small recess that you need a pen to push), and it is truly and legitimately ambidextrous. 

While it doesn't have the full 12 keys of a Naga, it's got two shortcut buttons on either side of it. Assigning my two most common shortcuts to them has, for all intents and purposes, made up for it not being a Naga. What it doesn't make up for is Razer's slow crawl towards a right-handed catalog. There's also the weight, which is my biggest complaint about it. For its price, the Viper feels cheap, almost fragile. I'm almost convinced the cord weighs more as sometimes the cord slipping off the back of my desk will pull the mouse down with it. It hasn't sent it tumbling into the narrow chasm between the desk and the wall, and I doubt it would, but I don't get why this mouse needs to be this lightweight. 

Computer mice occupy an amusing space of product design. Once upon a time, the computer mouse had to be the size and shape it was to accommodate a rubber-coated metal ball. Too big and the mouse would be hard to move. Too small and the ball would just as soon slide on a surface as roll. More importantly, the mouse had to house the mechanism needed to make sense of the ball's movements, little roller pins and optical sensors reading off tiny slotted flywheels. Later on, the optical sensor took center stage and could read off the surface directly. This meant the pins and flywheels had to be replaced with a few more chips and other components because it had to do more processing power to make sense of what it was seeing. As time went on, those components became smaller and smaller, with less hardware needed overall for the sensor to make sense of where it was on your desk. This made for a fair bit of empty space inside the mouse. 

One of the most audacious uses of that empty space was an arrangement of slots for metal weights. Weighing down a mouse seems like a weird thing to do, but just like the DPI adjustments, sometimes you need to be able to move your mouse in a fairly controlled and precise manner. A high DPI combined with a weighty mouse gives the best of both worlds. 

So you now understand the weight of the situation.

The Viper definitely has the empty space for such weights, but the only way I'm going to get that is the DIY route, and I'm not about to start drilling holes and prying stickers and panels off of an 80USD mouse (that's also what the G502 costs, weights included). 

Luckily, I've found a few alternatives outside of the Razer catalog such as Steelseries and Corsair. They don't have weight options, but they are notably heftier than the Viper along with sharing a similar form factor. That includes those shortcut buttons on either side of the casing. To be fair to Razer, since its release, the Viper's price has come down a little. It's still not low enough for me to begin exploratory surgery, but I don't hold the price point against them anymore. Last week, I was looking through their site to get some specs for a LinkedIN post I'm writing covering this topic in a little more work-related depth. I saw they offered two new versions of the Viper, one wireless, and one labeled "mini." I thought all my problems were solved. Wireless mice make use of that empty space by storing a battery. The battery adds weight, and I've got hefty where wimpy once was. However, Razer, in their wisdom, found a way to make the wireless Viper weigh virtually the same as the wired version. That's okay, I thought, I've got an option. Yes, the mini is smaller, but it's also about half the price, well within the territory of being modified with no real blow to the bottom line. 

Then I got a better look at it. 

Can't see the problem? That's okay. I didn't spot it right away, either. 

... 

... Razer? I want you to look at me. I want to ask you a question and I want you to think long and hard about your answer before you tell it to me. I want you to think about all that I've said about the past designs of your products which I have praised you for. Okay, here we go:

How can it be an ambidextrous mouse when the shortcut keys ARE ONLY ON ONE SIDE!?

It's the LITTLE things....

Look, I get that making left-handed versions of your ergonomic mice isn't ideal for you. There simply are not enough left-handed mouse users to justify production on that scale. 

By the way, LoFree isn't off the hook either.

Define symmetry for me, please.

In their defense, the place on the right-hand side where some shortcut keys would be nice is taken up by an adorable little storage compartment for the wireless dongle as well as the charging port. As I said, I do like the Maus, but I prefer it as a portable accessory for my iPad when I need to use a mouse with it. The same goes for the keyboard I've got at home right now. It's fine enough for the Mac mini, but it's better suited to accompany a tablet. 

A wise one once said that art is never finished, only abandoned. I suppose I've got the same philosophy with my workspace, a constant work in progress. That reminds me, I have to get back to designing my new desk. 

Skipping Rocks Along Puddles In The Rain

I'm taking a break from Deadly Premonition. I'm at a point (fairly early on in the game) when all I have to do is literally wait between 0700 and 1500 for the next part of the game to progress. My options in this time are: 1) sidequests, 2) explore the town, and 3) sleep. Given that, apart from sleeping and maybe some story segments, this game moves in real time. This is padding, plain and simple. There's no more discouraging feeling in a game than not knowing what to do or where to go next. It's one thing when you're stuck on a boss battle or a puzzle; you can work through those. However, simply killing time or not knowing how to move the story forward is downright insulting. I remember there was a Spider-Man game back in the day that literally gave you 24 hours for a time limit (years before the game based on 24) and thinking, "Dear God! Really?" instantly regretting my rental choice. It turns out the time limit is a bit flexible, but that didn't stop the game being ultimatey too challenging for my little 12 year-old brain to fully appreciate. I'm wondering now, though, what that version of me would have thought about newer games.
Anyway, by taking a break from Twin Peaks: The Game (and I mean that affectionately), I played Rain instead. Something I like about a lot of modern games is the way they break themselves up into chapters or individual missions (compared to MMOs and their hours-long dragfests). It gives me a good way to pace myself so I don't get burned out (I can't imagine what it's like for reviewers to basically pull all-nighters to meet deadlines). That did get me thinking, though, about somethinng I played a few days earlier. I think it was Bayonetta. I kept running out of time and dying on this early stage, and I think on the third time it gave me the option to skip.
I'm still not sure how I feel about that sort of thing.
I'm hardly the manliest man you'll ever meet, my most masculine traits down to the Greg Behrendt duology of being kinda big and loving women plus the added qualities that I love taking things apart and, here's the kicker, I hate asking for help. It's less to do with some idea about gender roles and more to do with being the youngest in my family on top of having to ironically fight tooth and nail to be given a chance to prove I can manage more on my own than otherwise expected. It's also one of those factors that helped feed my growing depression through college, but we're getting off topic.
Years ago, during a review of Rampart, I mentioned the gameplay mechanic in the PS2 version of Rygar wherein you unlocked easy mode by dying a certain number of times (Rampart worked in a similar fashion by offering you more cannons on your next try). I joked about it being condescending, and then I recalled all the flack the reboot of Alone in the Dark received for its chapter skip option not only being available, but practically encouraged in some of the marketing materials. I'm an old-school gamer; I like a challenge. SHMUPS are one of my favorite genres, known far and wide for their difficulty. I like Demon's Souls and endlesss runners. I like the YS series and gallery shooters. On the other hand, I like my challenges to be fair, and sometimes that's a tall order. Other times, I simply play for the story, turning the difficulty down, using the occasional cheat code, and even using a Game Shark once to watch all the cut scenes from Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero. In Deadly Premonition, for example, one of the DLC packages I got with my bundle was an outfit that triples your attack power; it's practically an "I Win" button, to say nothing of the infinite ammo machine gun the N64 version of Resident Evil 2 furnished you with. Sure, playing a game for the story, to crib a phrase from one of the DOOM devs, is like watching porn for the story, but then again, I've seen some pretty classy porn, and there's nothing wrong with loving a game entirely for its narrative, even if it means bypassing its core gameplay. My point is, when it's a more story-driven game, I don't think it's such a big deal to have various, for lack of a better term, handholding options. That said, if you're playing Bayonetta for the story, best of luck to you on that front. Finding the balance between story and gameplay is a game unto itself, one not many developers have really mastered, with gameplay usually nabbing the bigger piece of pie. In the case of the opposite, I think we need a kind of mutual understanding among gamers that sometimes bad gameplay is bad gameplay. In fact, the biggest reason for all the hullabaloo around the chapter skips in Alone in the Dark was that the driving mechanics were so amazingly broken as to make a normal play-through impossible. This led to the consensus of the chapter skip being more like a cop-out of better QA and testing than an optional way to enjoy the game. This is really unfair in the grand scheme of things. While it's usually a lost cause to compare games to other mediums of entertainment, Jim Sterling had the right idea when he quoted a friend of his: Imagine you're reading a book that suddenly changes its language halfway through. Some people might welcome the challange, while most will probably hunt down the author and beat them to death with their own hardcovers. The point is, gamers are a diverse bunch, and complex within ourselves to boot. We enjoy different games for different reasons and in different ways. I don't care that someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Halo universe has never picked up a controller; that's not what they like about it.
Games are supposed to be fun, and as long as the means by which you have that fun don't interfere with other gamers (cough, cough... gold farmers, cough), then there is no shame in using the walkthrough or reading the wiki or even using the good ol' thirty lives code.

Say it with me now:
UP UP
DOWN DOWN
LEFT RIGHT
LEFT RIGHT
B A START

The Nintendo AxeBlade Tablet

You could say I have something of a love/hate relationship with Nintendo. I grew up with the original NES. We had a 2600 before, but I remember having both and generally favored the NES. Eventually, I grew tired of what Nintendo had to offer and moved over to the Genesis. After a prolonged love affair with that system, followed by a brief spell of PC gaming, Nintendo came back into my life as the 64. I didn't technically have one, my brother did, and between us we bought a few games for it. I'd say I enjoyed it, but part of me was honestly still looking at the Sega Saturn, albeit it was definitely on the way out. I'd made up a list of about five or ten games, thinking, "If I get a Saturn, and the system fails, I'll still have ten good games for it and be content with those until the next console." Not a bad plan, though I say so myself, but it fell completely out the window when I saw a commercial for Final Fantasy VII. I became obsessed and finally got a Playstation for Christmas, circa 1997, that loyalty more or less remaining to this day.
I'm generalizing here, leaving out a lot of details like my Dreamcast, SNES, various Gameboys, even an N-Gage, but the basic point to take away is that I became a shameless Sony fanboy in high school and never looked back. The DS held very little interest for me outside of a few games, but not enough to warrant a purchase (I was quite happy with my PSP). The thing is, virtually all my friends are big DS users, and I do feel left out sometimes, not to mention seeing more and more games that do admittedly pique my interest a tad like Crimson Shroud. Still, it was never really enough to make me start seriously planning. A lot of this has to do with the fact that I've been warming up to the PS Vita, even though I could go on for hours about everything I hate about it (despite that shameless fanboy title I mentioned). Now that the 2DS has been announced and revealed, I've been given pause for thought on which handheld to spring for. 
So, as someone who does not have a 3DS, which should already tell you this console is not for you and therefore its existence shoud hardly offend, here's why I'm genuinely interested in the 2DS. In fact, I have appropriately two main reasons: 
(.) No 3D. I cannot use the 3D effect on the 3DS at all. I've tried at least twice on a store demo, and after not even ten seconds my brain feels like it's trying to make a break for it through my nose. Most people don't have a problem with the 3D, I'm not one of them. Of course, this is where most people say, "Well, you don't have to use the effect, you can turn the 3D down." No kidding, I'm well aware of how a slider works. My issue is why in the world would I pay for a feature I'm not going to use? Yes, it's not simply a feature upgrade. The 3DS is a whole new system that's far more powerful than previous versions. That's not my problem. My problem is there's three versions of the original DS, and only about a year it seems after the 3DS came out, the 3DS XL was released. I'm not one of these guys that has to have the latest version of every console, but when you're releasing more hardware than Sega in their heyday, you're doing something wrong. It does not inspire confidence. In a way, I sort of knew there would be another version of the 3DS, possibly one that would do away with the 3D or cost less so I wouldn't feel like I was paying for a feature I didn't want. 
(..) I like the design. It has no moving parts, no big hinge in the middle. As cool as I always thought the idea of holding the DS sideways like a book is, the idea of opening and closing anything like a clamshell puts this lingering weariness in my head. When I worked in customer service for a cell carrier, long before the iPhone came out, the most popular phone we had was the Motorola Razr, which is what's called a flip phone. I wish I had a nickel for every time I got a tech support call from a customer whose screen went out because the wires connecting the screen to the main body got pinched. Couple that with the simple fact that hinges wear down anyway, and I've never gotten behind the design of any phone outside the classic "candy bar" style, which is more or less what most smartphone are now. 
Frankly, I wonder if game companies don't do enough market research and testing of their handhelds before they release them, hence minor upgrades and redesigns year after year. I always felt a little resentful at the updates to the PSP, even hating the Go version. I know early adoption is a big factor in a lot of consumer electronics gaining footholds in their various markets, but I'd rather they iron out the major bugs like size, shape, and weight before they get it out to me. Now that I've seen Vita memory cards in clearance bins, I'm  wondering if Sony has similar plans for the Vita, possibly a redesign that fixes all my complaints about the current version, like no memory stick support. I think that's unlikely, but even if a redesign is on the horizon, I'd probably be every bit a happy with a price drop in the current version. As for the 2DS, everyone is mocking it and laughing at it, pointing out all the design choices with it, while I'm thinking, "Finally." I do worry that with all this mockery that these haters will take out their whiny, first-world frustrations on the people who choose this system (or receive it as a gift). As someone who grew up during the great Nintendo/Sega rivalry that was the 16-bit era, I can tell you that system-shaming hurts everyone and it takes away the most important aspect of being a gamer: Playing games that you enjoy. 
Good night, and good luck.