late to the soul search party

I’ve been lying in bed a lot for the past few days. There’s been nothing to do; occasionally I’ve zombied myself over to my computer to respond to IMs and read tweets. It’s difficult to get up at times: I’ve inherited a rare rash side effect from my anti-depressants and my left ear is all but deafened by some stray wax in its canal. It’s hard to sleep.

My computer is still broken to the point where no one can fix it; we’re starting to consider getting a new one. I have one picked out, but it’s around $800 and we can’t afford it. I asked my dad in an e-mail if he could cover some of the cost. He hasn’t responded. Apparently he’s in Tucson right now and wants to see my brother and I. If I want him to pay for that computer, maybe I should oblige him.

Living without a decent computer makes me wonder about how dependent we’ve become on them. For me, the internet has always been a place to project a side of myself that I can’t quite get across in the real world. These days, though, I think I’m the same person online and off. Somehow, my social anxiety extends into the internet. I’m not sure how that works.

Then again, it may not be anxiety so much as a loathing of the personalities other people project onto the internet. I once described myself as “internet old and reality young,” meaning that I’ve gotten to the point where the internet no longer surprises or shocks me. Everything is predictable, so I’m not sure what the point is of my being here.

It must be some kind of symbiotic relationship. I’ve grown up online; Final Fantasy XI, IRC and FFLegend replaced my ill-fated high school attendance. I’ve made close friends, been in love, fought for causes, discriminated, defended, attacked and vandalized. I learned about basic economics, psychology, philosophy, politics, religion, debate, grammar and spelling.

Now I’m sitting here, preparing myself for college, desperately fighting off depression and anxiety. I have a chemical imbalance — that means I’m depressed regardless of how good or bad my life is. It’s honestly more of a physical impairment than a mental one, giving me bouts of fatigue and stomach aches. The mental issues are more along the lines of a general disinterest in things, a lack of motivation and minimal emotional reactions to even significant developments.

I’d say that’s why this blog only has two entries. Things happen, and I don’t care. I have reactions, but I get self-conscious about writing them. “Someone else has already said this somewhere much more significant,” I’ll tell myself, and close my notepad window. Then no one knows how I’m really looking forward to Skyward Sword or that I was really sad that Mega Man Legends 3 got canceled. Then I never write about the criticism “metrics” my friend Jared and I were talking about, or the joke website we wanted to create where games are rated on a scale of 1 to 100 BioDomes (Because BioDome has a score of 1 on MetaCritic, thus 1 = 1 BioDome).

I don’t know. It makes it difficult for me to choose what to study in college, because I’d like to study English or Journalism or something similar. On the other hand, gaming journalism is so terrible that I don’t want to be associated with it. I do want to write about games, though. So what am I supposed to do?

I can take a small amount of pride in being involved with ExtraLives, though. They just raised $10,000+ for Free The Children earlier this month, which was great. It’ll be the fifth school they’ve funded for a developing nation, which I believe is going to Sri Lanka.

Even that isn’t without its stresses, though. Somehow, even when raising money for charity, some people on the internet try to berate your cause for various reasons… but I shouldn’t get into that.

I have an unshakeable feeling of irreverence toward the internet, but I don’t know if it’s a fair one. It could be just be my own fatigue of being poked on the shoulder to see things that are all too familiar. A game got canceled, a petition was made and it didn’t work. A game developer said something stupid and then a talk show host said something stupider. Millions of people are making Amy Winehouse jokes instead of mourning the 90+ who were murdered in Norway.

I suppose it’s no different from the media cycle we see every day on TV, of course. It’s just that, when you spend so much time on the internet, it’s a lot more difficult to shut it all out. Eventually, you think about it so much that you’re not even sure what the problem is anymore. Then you think about it more and it bothers you again.

It’s those kinds of cycles that have ruled my life for the past near-decade. I’m not going to openly complain about that, though. Actually, things have been alright for the past six months or so. I mean, we don’t have any money, and my computer is broken, but it’s peaceful and I have things to eat and a place to sleep. It’s much cooler in my room since we’ve gotten new blinds put up. I’m getting closer to being ready for college. There’s not a whole lot more I can ask for. I’m not really unhappy, just incredibly bored.

Surprisingly, after E3, I felt pretty optimistic about gaming. There’s more games I’m looking forward to now than there have been in years. Of course, I can’t afford any of it right now.

Skyward Sword looks better every time I see it; its colorful art style is extremely appealing to me and the idea of every part of the game being “like a puzzle” sounds like a lot of fun. From what I’ve heard, the game is huge, too — it has a two-tiered world map with floating islands to explore in the sky as well as a whole overworld beneath the clouds. It seems like Aonuma wasn’t kidding when he said he was determined to surpass Ocarina of Time.

Mass Effect 3 looks pretty incredible as well. Every feature seems to have been improved upon: movement is faster and smoother, character progression has more depth, weapon modifications have returned, and there might even be some ME1-style planetary exploration this time around (though that’s just a rumor).

Then there’s Final Fantasy XIII-2, which seems to address nearly every issue I had with FFXIII. I’m glad this game is getting made and seems to be going in the right direction, because while I liked FFXIII, a few things about it left a bad taste in my mouth.

I’m also looking forward to Battlefield 3, Mario 3DS, Mario Kart 3DS, Twisted Metal, Ultimate MvC3, Tales of Xillia, Arkham City, Guild Wars 2, The Old Republic (sort of), White Knight Chronicles 2 (ditto), Final Fantasy Type-0, Final Fantasy Versus XIII, Skyrim, Tomb Raider and Beyond the Labyrinth.

I’m still extremely disillusioned with gaming culture, though. We persist in a fanbase where it’s cool to be negative and snide and cynical toward absolutely everything. I feel that it’s gotten to a level of cynical propagandism so deep that if there’s nothing negative to react to, we desperately dig through media, interviews, trailers and developer quotes to find something.

If there’s anything wrong with gaming, it’s probably our own unsatisfiable faults. On the internet, most communities are led by a few message board kings dragging a coat tail latched onto by countless sycophants who feed on their anti-intellectual complaints, pollinating every place they go with wanton negativity.

Of course, I’ve been guilty of such things myself. I started my online life doing it a lot. As I got older, I mellowed out quite a bit, and found it hard to muster the energy to care that much. That’s not to say I no longer have any opinions, I just don’t feel so strongly about them when they have no bearing on my life. Not all people age in such a way, of course, but I think that was a “teenage” thing of me to do. It’s a teenage thing for anyone to do.

Belligerence is fine in the right context; important, even, but declaring war on the subject of every article that pops up on Kotaku is not the way to go. I called myself a “gamer” when I was in my early teens, in a time when video games were just beginning to come into their own. Now I want nothing to do with that label because it’s been abused and dissected of meaning by a much larger populace. We’ve become, largely, blind to what was so great about video games in the first place — what is still great about video games, if most people would actually take an objective look — and that’s something I can’t consider myself a part of.

Although the gaming community has always been fractured, it was once by genres and not by barriers of false idealism that pseudo-intellectuals and fake business majors swear exist. There used to be a sense of community and belonging for an alienated fanbase where there is now groupthink and rhetoric. People used to talk about games; now they just pretend they know something about economics and large-scale marketing practices while tearing down every new idea because of “who it caters to” and “how dumbed down it is compared to x.” Never mind that most people are also completely ignorant of how game design, budgeting and resource management actually work in this industry.

If it sounds familiar, it’s because it resembles political media. Which is the point. That’s kind of pathetic. There’s a divide among the gaming community that uncannily resembles the “Fox News vs. MSNBC/CNN” train wreck we see on TV every night.

So, yeah, I don’t want any part of that. Aside from the other factors, that’s why I haven’t been writing about games much lately. I don’t want to fuel that fire because it’s burning down my house. What’s best for me is to relax and try to piece my life together.

wish one last upon these vanishing white dandelions

“I hate Kingdom Hearts.” That was what I thought until I replayed KH1 and 2 throughout the last few weeks. Actually, the specific sentiment was “I hate Kingdom Hearts 2.” If you read Climb the Hill, you might remember a post where I pasted a bunch of old journal entries from my LJ before I started taking writing more seriously. One of those excerpts was on Kingdom Hearts 2:

“On Kingdom Hearts II 5-17-06

Kingdom Hearts II is seriously the most fucking over-rated game ever

It’s not awful but god damn if you want a boring repetitive hack and slash game with a confusing story go play Dynasty Warriors

It does it better

This is the first game I’ve played in a long time where the best part was over after the first three hours. The beginning in Twilight Town with Roxas was really cool, if confusing. The lack of Disney characters was nice. Roxas was much cooler than Sora. After that, though, you’re slapped in the face and forced to control Sora again and travel across all the gay Disney worlds (Most of the new ones suck balls, like Mulan, Beast’s Castle, etc., and almost all the returning worlds are terrible, such as Halloween Town and… the Little Mermaid world, I forgot what it’s called, but it sucks). Well, at least Sora doesn’t look like a dipshit anymore due to his new getup.

You’ll spend most of your time travelling the boring/frustrating Disney worlds and pulling your hair out at the retardedly generic dialogue… of course, it’s not all bad, Olympus Colliseum is a good world, and along with it comes the return of the tournaments, which are pretty fun, showcasing the only good feature about the game (That managed to be better in the last game), the battle system. It’s a shame that they made all the drive modes for this one though, they’re really cool, but the game’s so god damn easy that you’ll never need them. Ever. In fact, I could count the number of times I’ve come close to dying on one hand. I’ve only died twice, ever. :\

Okay well, I exaggerated about the battle system being the only good feature about the game. The story is actually really good, just only when it doesn’t involve the half-witted Disney characters other than King Mickey, Donald and Goofy, who kick vast amounts of ass. There’s lots of good twists and turns and I’m still interested in just who Roxas really is (I’m, maybe, 60% done with the game?). The inclusion of new FF characters, however, feels almost forced and unnecessary; the last game had you really guessing if these were the same characters you grew to know and love in their original games, but that feel is all but gone in this installment. Along with the usual crowd of Squall (Leon), Aeris (Aerith, wtf, these translators fucking suck), Yuffie, Cid, Cloud and Sephiroth, you get Yuna/Rikku/Paine in all their FFX-2 outfit stupidity, Seifer, Fujin, Raijin, Vivi, Tifa, Auron and… Setzer, who Tetsuya Nomura managed to turn into a purple trenchcoat-wearing fag. Good job, dumb ass. Seifer’s gang and Vivi are pretty well-done, all acting like they did in FFVIII/IX. Auron is kinda cool I guess, but he’s not around for long. All the others, however, lose. Tifa just pops up out of nowhere and is apparently looking for Cloud. She never even tells you her name, that I’ve seen yet. Setzer, as I mentioned, looks nothing like his former self and quite frankly acts like a spineless pussy, completely unlike his FFVI counterpart. Luckily you don’t have to stare at his gay face for very long, as you pretty much never see him again after the prologue. The FFX-2 crew is just bizarre, they’re like fairies or something, and apparently work for Maleficent. They act just as obnoxious/braindead as they did in FFX-2, of course.

Honestly I’d rank this game with the likes of Suikoden IV. The story and battle system are good, but it just feels like Square was trying too hard with this one. It’s fun, and there’s lots of cool customization to be done with your characters, but in the end, it’s just way too easy and the dialogue between Sora and the Disney characters is mind-numbing, not to mention that the worlds themselves are terribly uninspired (Which may be a paradox considering they are directly inspired by the original movies they’re based on) and boring. It also feels like there’s much less strategy needed here, and more pure DPS zerg rush. You almost never have to dodge attacks, just run at the enemy and press “X” until it dies. Disappointing, sadly.“

Wow. Did I write that? The story is good? I don’t remember liking the story. Actually, my recent perception of Kingdom Hearts has been that the Disney stuff is a lot more interesting than the Square stuff — all of that angst and Nomura-driven confusion really grates after a while.

Like I said, though, that was what I thought until I replayed the games.

The original Kingdom Hearts is generally looked down upon as a game that hasn’t aged well, but actually, I think that’s just a product of people being frustrated on replays of it because you can’t skip the cutscenes. I don’t think it’s better than KH2, but I don’t think it’s much worse, either. The combat is simpler. It’s also a harder game. You have no drive forms, and it doesn’t let you mash X to do insane combos that jump and maneuver for you without your input as much. You have your standard combo, a guard, a dodge roll, and later, a glide. Cure spells combined with MP Rage and MP Haste are fairly abuseable, but not to the extent of certain Limit commands in KH2.

KH1′s story, setting, characters, music and themes can be described as surreal. Throughout the entire game, protagonist Sora seems to constantly phase in and out of his own existence, going to unknown places where he sees visions of people he’s never met, events he’s never seen, places that don’t seem to exist anywhere in particular — in fact, the first thing you see in the game is what I assume to be a dream Sora has where he moves between massive stained glass platforms decorated with images of various Disney princesses. Here, a disembodied voice speaks to him, telling him not to fear the darkness; “don’t be afraid,” it says, as hordes of Heartless materialize from the ground and attack.

The entire concept of KH’s world is bizarre — and let me know if I’m overthinking this, because I’m sure I am — but all the Disney worlds are separate from each other, I assume, existing in some massive void of space somewhere in the universe, represented by caricatured planetoids on the world map. What I don’t understand is that some of the Disney worlds are based on real places: for instance, the Neverland world has an area where you fly around London’s Big Ben, yet the Tarzan world, which would be in Africa, does not exist there; it exists as a separate world floating in space elsewhere.

Now, I can think of a lot of ways to explain this. It could be that the worlds represent different dimensions, or times; however, in KH2, the Timeless River clearly represents an “earlier” version of Disney Castle, and you can’t just fly there with the Gummi Ship, so I guess time is out. Dimensions would make sense, I suppose, but the problem is that they’re not presented that way: the game seems to have us believe that each world is simply floating in space(?) like twisted mirrors of standard existence.

The lack of elaboration is a constant theme throughout the series. Often, the plot will purposely leave several obvious loose ends untied just to get you to buy another spinoff game — proudly, I have not bought or played any of them. Not that it’s an uncommon business practice, of course.

I enjoyed playing through KH2, actually. The interesting thing is, I still don’t know what to make of its story. I used to think it was overwrought and overcomplex, and to a degree, I still believe that; but mostly, I’m fascinated by its striking resemblance to various Shonen animes, such as Dragon Ball Z, Naruto, and especially Bleach.

The resemblance is scary. Think about it: Sora is a young boy chosen to wield a “keyblade” (zanpakuto) who is trying to save a girl (Orihime/Rukia) he grew up with. The keyblade releases the hearts (souls) from monsters called Heartless (Hollows). At one point in KH1, Sora briefly becomes a Heartless (Ichigo briefly becomes a Hollow), and a Nobody is created named Roxas (an inner-Hollow is created within Ichigo), which is left over when a person becomes a Heartless. In KH2, he gets new clothes that give him access to drive forms (bankai), though sometimes upon changing forms he becomes the Heartless-like Anti-Sora (Ichigo’s Hollow form).

In KH2, Sora fights against Organization XIII, a group of thirteen humanoid Nobodies designated by numbers (Espada) who all use a different type of elemental weapon (ditto) and wear the same clothes (Espada wear white coats; Organization wear hooded black coats). Each member of Organization XIII also has an alias (“The Freeshooter,” “The Whirlwind Lancer,” etc.), which is thematically similar to the names of Zanpakuto and various other powers in the Bleach universe.

With all those similarities, the one question I have is: is this a bad thing? I mean, considering I know that much about Bleach, I must have watched it at some point (I have). Bleach, to me, is a guilty pleasure: I find it pretty entertaining because it’s so mindless and cliched. By the same token, I suppose I find Kingdom Hearts entertaining. Is that why I find it entertaining, though? Is it actually mindless?

I’m not so sure. It confuses me. There are genuinely interesting plot points that exist within the lore; in particular, the entire concept of Nobodies legitimately fascinates me. In fact, one of the points I made in my initial evaluation of KH2 was that the opening sequence with Roxas was the best part of the game — and actually, I don’t think that’s too far off. Granted, there’s not much in the way of engaging gameplay, but if you’re the kind of person who enjoys games for their stories, the intro is the plateau. As you progress through the game and learn more about Roxas, everything that happened during those first few hours makes more and more sense, and to me, made what was actually going on at the end of the game flat-out boring by comparison. The only real feeling I had by the end of KH2 was one of empathy toward Roxas. As a Nobody, he had no real reason to exist, and was merely a transparent segment of Sora’s whole; a pointless being destined for no identity of his own.

The music of Twilight Town, as it slowly drills its way into your skull throughout KH2′s introduction sequence, is wonderfully sentimental and really invokes a feeling of childlike innocence. I don’t think I’ve given Yoko Shimomura enough credit over the years; I always liked her work on Super Mario RPG, but nothing else she did really resonated with me until I replayed these games. I think her music perfectly captures the dense, dreamlike atmosphere the series puts forth, and drapes most areas of both games in a thick, comfy blanket of melody that makes you feel like a child again. I would say that, aside from “Dearly Beloved,” Twilight Town’s theme encapsulates the aesthetic. Boy, that sounded snooty. I’m sorry.

Hell, I almost wish the entire game was about Roxas living in the digital Twilight Town as he slowly realizes that everything around him is a simulation, Truman Show style, and at the end of the game, he finally wakes up Sora, starting KH3. That would have been a beautifully profound game with a mind-blowing plot twist, not to mention a bait and switch on the level of Metal Gear Solid 2. Of course, I completely understand why they didn’t take that direction with the game — people would have been pissed.

Another thing that’s always bugged me about KH in general was that, while clearly attempting to reach a younger audience with all the Disney characters, the plot is extremely complex to the point where a full-grown adult would be perfectly excused of his or her confusion. However, a friend of mine made the point that it’s supposed to be that way: “I think they do a very good job. A kid can play the games and enjoy them, or something else can play the games and enjoy them,” he said. He’s probably right. When I think about it that way, it’s a good thing: despite what SUPER BROHARDCORE GAMERZ will tell you, a game that can be enjoyed by almost anyone is an extremely desirable outcome of game development. It’s hard to achieve and shouldn’t always be aimed for, but when you get the opportunity to create a Final Fantasy/Disney crossover, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable goal. I think they succeeded.

Now, I’m not suddenly loving on Kingdom Hearts. I didn’t used to like the games, but it’s been a long time since I played them. A lot of my hate towards them was directed at Tetsuya Nomura’s ever-awful character designs, as well as the elements of the story that were overly complex. Those issues are still there, but I can understand what people see in it now. It’s not perfect, it’s not terribly well-written (DARKNESS HEARTS DARKNESS DARKNESS KAIRI RIKU SORA DONALD GOOFY DARKNESS), and the gameplay could use some fine-tuning. There is good to be had here, however, and it’s not all that hard to see — deciphering the plot is “fun” in the way a good puzzle is fun; the atmosphere is dreamy and abstract; there’s even meaningful symbolism to be discovered, and surprisingly, it’s done better here than in many supposed “contemporary classics” of game writing.

So, while Kingdom Hearts still isn’t one of my favorite series around, I now have a certain degree of respect for it. I’ll buy KH3 whenever it comes out. God knows when that will be, of course — I’ve often wondered if the reason for its absence was due to a lack of Disney worlds to insert into the game, but with The Great Mouse Detective, The Rescuers, The Sword in the Stone and others untapped, I doubt that’s the case.

Aside from Birth By Sleep, I will never buy a KH spinoff, however.

Ever.

shorts

I can’t speak for everyone, but personally, the reason I find anime-inspired character design repulsive these days is that I can look at virtually any modern anime character and know their personality instantly. There’s no surprise to it. It’s old.

—

Final Fantasy XIV is getting absolutely trashed critically. It’s good that it is, because it’s really terrible, and Square-Enix is going to learn the hard way that they’re not bullet proof. The game will fail if they don’t get their shit together in a hurry. I really want the game to succeed, and I want it to be good, but right now, it’s looking pretty bleak.

More interesting, though, is how harshly critics have reacted to it. I have a theory. FFXIII left a bad taste in a lot of peoples’ mouths (including mine), and I think some of the people who are reviewing FFXIV are looking for an excuse to vent their frustrations about it. I’m not saying the game’s launch hasn’t been disastrous — it has — but it’s not that much worse than other recent MMOs. It’s pretty obvious the game was rushed out early to get it in stores before WoW’s Cataclysm expansion, and I seriously doubt the critics weren’t aware of that. Given how well-reviewed other MMOs with terrible launches have been, it’s more than a little suspect that they’re being so harsh on XIV.

Of course, the idea of reviewing an MMO at launch is sort of a running joke among rational people and it’s amazing that writers get paid to do it. It’s like neutering pets; I understand why it’s done, but that doesn’t make it any less depressing.

It should go without saying at this point that gaming journalism isn’t even close to the point where it can be taken seriously. We still have critics who use hundred-point scales, for Christ’s sake — twenty points is already too much, and ten is pushing it. Compounding that is the fact that the new gaming critic rarely uses scores lower than 6 and higher than 9, effectively creating a four-to-eight-point scale within a ten-to-twenty-point scale. How obtusely asinine.

I’m glad I don’t write reviews anymore.

—

I don’t get excited about very many games anymore. There’s, maybe, two or three games I buy a year; I at least try most of the big titles that come out via demos or rentals or whatever, but I almost never like those games much. In fact, the reaction I have to them most often is “seems like a good game, but I can’t really get into it.” This was true for Gears of War, Uncharted 2, STALKER, Just Cause 2 and others. This year, I loved Mass Effect 2, Red Dead Redemption and Halo: Reach. That’s pretty much it. I liked Mega Man 10, but it didn’t have the same impact 9 did.

Some games are almost universally adored, and I just plain don’t like them. Case in point: Dragon Age. Actually, it’s not so much the game I dislike as it is the double standard it exposes within the zeitgeist of gaming: WRPGs are free to copy and paste themselves everywhere, stolen Tolkien lore and all, and still be well-received. If a Japanese game does the same, it’s a sign that Japan is out of touch and needs to reinvent its design methods. It’s funny, because Dragon Age stole its best feature from Final Fantasy XII, which is also a much better game.

Another example is MGS: Peace Walker. Ignoring the fact that the PSP’s control scheme just can’t do Metal Gear properly, the game is an absolute mess. Pacing issues plague the game at every turn — you have five minute stealth missions followed by incredibly drawn-out “boss fights” where you have to destroy or capture vehicles that are guarded by several waves of soldiers. These battles usually degenerate into determining the fastest way to DPS the vehicle to death before the soldiers kill you, and are completely devoid of strategy or fun. Boss fights have never been Metal Gear’s strong suit; most of the memorable ones (Psycho Mantis, The End, The Sorrow, etc.) are built around one-note gimmicks that, once figured out, make the fights incredibly simple. So here, we have the gimmicks removed from the game, and we’re left to be forced to wrestle with the PSP’s awful button layout while we mindlessly zerg rush armored vehicles for fifteen minutes.

I had actually thought that MGS4 was a fluke, but Peace Walker confirms to me that Hideo Kojima has fallen off. Snake Eater was his magnum opus, and I think he knows it; it’s probably why Konami’s porting it to the 3DS.

Really, I don’t know what to do with video games anymore. I’m not growing out of them, and I’m not developing a grandfather complex and being biased toward the games I grew up with. It’s fair to say that gaming is changing, and at heart, I probably don’t like where it’s headed.

So what am I actually excited about now? Mega Man Legends 3. Or, the 3DS in general. Fallout: New Vegas. MvC3. Dragon Quest X. Golden Sun. Mass Effect 3. That new Tales game, maybe. I’m cautiously optimistic about Skyward Sword. Disgaea 4 looks interesting.

Still, there’ll always be a gaping hole where my favorite games used to be. Star Ocean and Suikoden are dead and buried at this point. Final Fantasy actually did fall off after XIII, and if XV isn’t good, it’ll be over. More over, a game like FFXII will never be made again. They may keep making 8-bit Mega Mans, but there will probably never be a true next-gen progression of the classic series. There will never be a third Chrono game, a third Shenmue or a Skies of Arcadia sequel. Knights of the Old Republic 3 will never be made due to The Old Republic Online’s existence. There will probably never be another Metroid game as good as Super Metroid or Metroid Prime. Ditto for Zelda and A Link to the Past/Ocarina of Time/Majora’s Mask/Wind Waker.

It’s sad, bro. Makes me want to cry.

i wanted to call it “bottled ships,” but it was taken…

I’ve spent much of my life being alienated by people. That’s the main reason I don’t trust or like anyone in my life and don’t seek to bring more people into it.

One of the last things I talked to Phil about was “formative video games” — the games that have shaped the things we love about them. We weren’t talking about favorites here, just the games that showed us something. We could even hate them.

Of all the titles that came to mind, the main recurring theme seemed to be elaborate, well-detailed worlds. Gameplay and to a lesser extent story were there, but it became clear to me that I valued the arts of world building and atmosphere over a lot of other things.

That made me think of the reason I played video games, and at that point, it was pretty obvious: to escape. I had a tumultuous childhood to say the least, and most friends I’ve had were manipulative and disingenuous. I play video games to escape from alienation.

However, even among that niche, I’m completely alien. I’m a writer, yet I don’t value game writing over things widely considered less important, like graphics and music. I think Xenogears is one of the worst games I’ve ever played. I think Final Fantasy XII is the best game in the series, and I don’t think it’s close.

I find gaming culture as a whole incredibly inane. I’ve never felt like I fit in among anyone who considers themselves a part of it — I find myself fighting for the cultural acceptance of video games, yet I completely understand why the uninitiated see it as nothing but a childish hobby at a glance.

In all our striving to be unique, many people never notice that not only are they not unique, but that no one else is, either. I’m an alien to gaming culture because I have the mentality of a tired misanthrope who just wants to be left alone so I can learn as much as possible and leave everything on earth the way it was when I got here. Gamers are, mostly, hyper-active teenagers and pseudo-intellectual young adults who think they know things about art even though they’ve never explored it.

I wanted to call this “Bottled Ships” because of a Themselves freestyle called “Rappers is Modelships” — which includes the lyric “I eat the body out of rappers/put ‘em back in bottles/like they was supposed to be some type of model ship.” The first thing I thought of upon hearing that lyric was how the metaphor of a “ship in a bottle” fit gaming culture and gamers themselves perfectly. We all have these armchair ideals that have been constructed from very limited sociological sources — and we’ve built them into an elaborate code for us to enforce — as long as the argument never leaves our bottle. To leave the bottle, those ideals must be deconstructed. Deconstruction is a frightening thing, because it can lead to the obsoleting of everything we’ve ever believed to be true about our medium.

It’s not like I’ve never partaken in that kind of behavior. In fact, I still do, but it’s a lifelong goal to relieve myself of it. To be honest, I’ve called myself out on so much hypocrisy that it doesn’t even surprise me when it happens anymore. The older I get, the more I realize how imperfect everyone is, and the more it disgusts me, especially in regard to myself. All I’ve ever wanted out of life was for things to work they way they’re supposed to, and it depresses me knowing that it’s not always going to be that way. Aren’t I an asshole?

At first I called it “Unhallowed Ground,” after a very pretty song on Valkyrie Profile’s OST. However, there were a bunch of songs with that title and a book by Heather Graham (no relation to the actress, apparently), so I scrapped that. I even had a whole schtick about it referring to the “nothing is sacred” mentality of the blog, but I wanted something more unique, I guess.

“Counterfeit Self” is, also, a song on Valkyrie Profile’s OST. It’s an interesting song, but I just like the title. I guess you could say it’s emblematic of themes that are present in a lot of my writing — I talk a lot about how disingenuous and artificial people can be, mostly in poems and random things I don’t usually post anywhere. Really, though, it feels to me like a subtle reference to our internet alter-egos, something that has been a large part of my teenage years and young adulthood. Or maybe it’s a jab at the events that led to me abandoning Climb the Hill. I dunno. Make of it what you will. My ability to find ulterior meaning in things is little more than a running joke at this point.

Valkyrie Profile is the most beautiful game I’ve ever played. I feel like referencing it is more tasteful than coming up with another not-so-subtle gaming reference as the title that includes the words “pixel” or “joystick.”

The content here is going to be gaming-related, but also a lot more personal. The writing might be a bit more polished. Maybe.

On that note, I’m now a member of ExtraLives’ forum crew, signing on as a moderator. So go check that out if you’d like. Their next marathon will be a second Sonic marathon, starting (tentatively) on August 20th. I don’t know if they’ve picked out a charity yet, but I don’t think it’ll be Free the Children again, since they’ve raised money for them, like, three times in a row.

And that’s about it. It’s 6 A.M.