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Legend of Zelda: Week 5 (Heavy Rain interlude 2)

Samm — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:42:54 +0000

In my first blog, I talked about how the controls and little details were awesome to me. Here, after my second playthrough, I’m going to talk more about the story and how it changes depending on your gameplay, so be aware there will be many spoilers! (Seriously, don’t read this if you wanna have the killer’s identity stay a secret to you.)

In Heavy Rain, you play four characters: a father looking for his kidnapped son, a female journalist who stumbles upon him and is intrigued, an male FBI agent working on the case of a series of kidnapping/murder incidents, and a male private investigator that is talking to the parents of the victims of these incidents. My first playthrough, all of them lived. The story ended with a big plot twist. One of my characters was the killer. Ethan, the father, and Scott, the PI and revealed kidnapper, meet where Ethan is trying to save his son. There’s a fight between Jayden, the FBI agent, and Scott. Madison, the journalist, comes to save Ethan and his son. In my first playthrough, everything played out well (except Scott died since he was the “bad guy”). This is because I was alert and played the game carefully.

But after it was over, I decided it was time for a second playthrough. In it, instead of saving everyone, when there was a fight scene or QTEs that needed to be hit in a timely manner, I put down the controller. I watched as my characters got beaten, tortured, shot, and put in jail. Madison and Jayden died at the first available points in the story where they could be, meaning their later scenes in the game just didn’t exist. Ethan got put in jail so he couldn’t save his son. I sat there and let everything go wrong, on purpose, to the point where the second half of the game was only three scenes long instead of twenty.

It was kind of a moral dilemma to me: I liked these characters and wanted to help them, but in order to see what happened, I had to abandon them. This made a big disconnect between me as a player and the character. While I would call this a role playing game because of the amount of decisions you can make, the fact still is that in order for me to see some of the decisions, I had to step outside of myself and do nothing.

What kind of game has been designed where in order to progress, you have to lose? That is something interesting about Heavy Rain that I don’t see in other games: there is NO game over screen. When you fail, the game keeps on trucking, and your true game over scene is at the end, when you look down into those grates, and know Ethan’s kid has been killed and you as the player couldn’t — or didn’t even try to — save him.

cult or MLM?

Samm — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:24:33 +0000

I live in a primarily Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago where suddenly, in the span of about three city blocks on a street I walk down often, there are storefronts that used to be empty now having orange, yellow, and pink lace curtains covering all of their windows and doors. There are no hours on these “stores,” nor are there signs showing what the stores are. In fact, most of the ones there actually have the signs up from the businesses that were there before. One says it’s an import store, one a computer parts place, and one has no sign at all.

It’s hard to see into them, but all three of them look identical inside: a counter, a big fish tank, tables and chairs, and no products. No listing of prices of services. Posters on the walls with celebrities on them, dollar signs or money, phrases in Spanish that I can’t understand (one has the word Invita in big block letters on it and days of the weeks with descriptions under it). They all look really professional. Usually I see a bunch of couples or families in there, all Hispanic. I never see anyone go in or out.

I just have no idea what the places are, but they seem like some kind of MLM to me, something promising big money and delivering nothing. I’ve google searched Invita, but it just seems to be spanish for “invite” or “to pay,” making me think even more that there’s some kind of scam going on. I keep wanting to look in the places more, since there’s one about one block from my house, but I’m afraid of someone inside seeing me and pulling me inside. I’ll never be seen from again.

you may waltz is on sale again!

Samm — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:21:01 +0000

I used the site createspace.com to get my book online for sale again. It’s my first book, called you may waltz to your doom in sanguine stained shoes, and it’s about 70 pages of poetry I wrote between 1998 and 2004. It’s my first book and I’m pretty proud of it.

always flat

I keep letting you go,
throwing you away,
boomerang

red curls pass your shoulders
fold down soft like
worn playing cards
tangled in my fingers

my love for you like
a can of soda opened
two weeks ago and discarded

and I can’t help but feel that
I am finally in the loop
when it’s closing around my neck

(2002)

Some of the poems are pretty dark, some are pretty light. The cover and author images were drawn by Scott Breihan. The cost is only $9.99, and about half of that goes to me, which is great. They say it takes 2 to 3 weeks to get it out, but it’s been much faster for me than that. The binding is really sturdy also, which is a plus.

Also, if you would like a signed copy and you’re in North America, I’ll offer them for $15 bucks, plus shipping, but let me know by email that you’d like to get one and we’ll work something out.

Thanks even just for checking the site out. I appreciate everyone’s support!

every12

Samm — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:40:58 +0000

Starting tonight at midnight, I am going to test my limits of both image and text. I currently don’t write enough or take enough pictures. I have notebooks in my backpack but I never write in them unless I have to. I have a hand-me-down iPhone and multiple (D)SLRs but I never take any photos.

Becoming good at something doesn’t require fine tuning anything: it requires being prolific. You can’t make a statue without having a big chunk of marble first.

So I’m getting together my marble on every12, a blog where I am going to post something every 12 hours. This means that at noon and midnight, for (I hope) at least the next 365 days, I am going to be updating with either a picture or a short piece (1-300 words) of fiction/poetry/text. The pictures might come from my iPhone or DSLR or even 35mm film. They cannot be reused images or have been taken more than one week before they’re used on the blog. The text will be something I’ve written that’s either non-fiction, fiction, or poetry, but cannot be a diary entry or media review.

I hope you enjoy what I’m going to do here.

The Butterfly Effect (1 and 2): How To Ruin A Concept

Samm — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 01:51:38 +0000

Here we go with another time travel review. This one is particularly for The Butterfly Effect 2 but since the shittiness of the sequel made me rewatch the first one, I’m going to explain why I think TBE1 is good and TBE2 is utter shit in comparison.

In the first movie, four kids grow up with fucked up lives: Evan, the main character, has blackouts; his love interest is molested by her dad; her brother is a total sociopath even as a child; and their friend has a mental breakdown because of the brother’s antics. The movie picks up when they’re in college, or at least Evan is, because the other three characters are fucked.

Through a weird series of events, he finds he has the ability to read his journals and travel back in time to his blackouts. So he does that, which changes life. It makes some things better, but other things worse. So he tries to fix the other things to make those things better (he fucks over colleagues to climb his way up the ladder) and ends up destroying everything. His motives are to save his fucked up friends. All Evan wants to do is to make everyone’s lives better, even at the eventual expense of his own.

In the sequel, the main character is a vapid cunt of a man who is surrounded by one dimensional characters who are all killed off after the first five minutes. One year later, as he stares at a picture of his dead friends, he finds he can totally travel back in time! He saves his friends, ends up living with his girlfriend. He spends the rest of the movie worried about himself and changing time for his own gain. At the end he has some crisis of conscience when he learns about that (gasp) twist that his girlfriend is pregnant when she dies. So he sacrifices himself.

Honestly, don’t mind that I just ruined the end. I didn’t ruin anything. The director and writer ruined the movie when they decided to make it. It’s not that the cinematography is bad. It’s not that the dialogue is stilted or that the editing looks shitty. It’s just that I honestly didn’t give a fuck about the characters.

I must say though, I do really enjoy movies that do time travel like this: it just happens. No technical mumbo jumbo (Primer – don’t get me wrong cuz I love that movie but it’s pretty sci-fi) or bull shit science (I’m still irritated about A Sound of Thunder.

If you like time travel, this is interesting alternate dimension super-paradox stuff. I’d say watch it, but don’t worry about thinking any character means anything. You’ll be rooting for the main character (I don’t even know his name and I just watched it) to die at the end. I’m going to watch the third one eventually, but I don’t think I can stand the bullshit anytime soon.

Legend of Zelda: Week 4 (Heavy Rain interlude)

Samm — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:26:49 +0000

I woke up the other morning, went to the bathroom, took a shower, got dressed and went to the store to buy Heavy Rain. When I got home, I started up the game, made the cool little origami figure that came along with it while it loaded, and then started the game.

I woke up, went to the bathroom, took a shower and got dressed. (I guess Ethan shaved his face, but I didn’t.)

That’s really how Heavy Rain starts out, a day you have at home. What do you feel like doing this morning? Do you want to sit and watch TV? Turn on your stereo and listen to a CD? How about reading a book and then playing with your kid’s remote controlled car?

I decided to actually get work done, and so I sat down and drew a picture out of quick time events. The QTEs in this game don’t work like any I’ve ever seen. In Resident Evil 4, a rock is flying at your face and you quickly press X to block it. Heavy Rain doesn’t just have a “quick jab this button before you die!” method of play. While doing my architecture work, I had to slowly tilt the right analog stick in a half circle. Later, I had to walk up a muddy hill by holding down a series of buttons. By the end, I was using both hands and my nose to keep them all pressed.

The small details in this game keep it interesting to me. I don’t want to talk too much about the plot obviously, but you play as four different characters and take turns with them. The decisions you make effect big things from whether or not the character lives or dies. But they also make small ones. While going down that muddy hill, I decided to not press any buttons to see what would happen, and Jayden slid down the hill. He was covered in mud. And even when he got in his car and drove away ten minutes later, he was still covered in mud.

That’s not all though: The first time through, I avoided this big fight I didn’t have to do. Later, I allowed that characters to brutally lose the fist fight. His face became more and more bloody during the scene. The next part of the story didn’t involve him, but when we came back to him in his next scene, his cheek was completely beaten up. That amazed and intrigued me, that every decision made changed something.

I want to talk more but I’ve said enough already. My first playthrough of this short game went well. I played on Hard and I got through without any of my characters dying. But now, I am playing through again to allow everyone to die to get what may be called “the bad end.” The game is as deep as an RPG and as beautiful as any PS3 game can be. I’ll probably end up writing more on it next week too.

birds and the weekend

Samm — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:00:47 +0000

This weekend was crazy. First off, I took some pictures of the Arthurian Finches (my friend Domino called them that and I think it’s a good name for them — in contrast, we call the ferrets “the fuckers”).

(From left to right: Gawain, Lady of the Lake, Galahad, Mordred, and Merlin)

If you wanna see more pictures, the set is here.

I actually was really social this weekend. It started on Friday night when Dan and I had a bunch of people over at our house playing video games and stuff like Apples to Apples until 2am. On Saturday, after I got out of work, I was planning on going with my coworker Eric just for fifteen minutes to one bar to have one drink and I ended up bar hopping until 4am. I have never been that drunk in a bar before. It was awesome.

Sunday, it was my friend Tim’s birthday so we went to play Whirlyball with a ton of people. I haven’t played in a while because I’m just not interested, but Chris brought his lady friend Sarah and we spent the time they were playing talking. She’s also poly, so it was nice to talk with her about that. Before we went over there though, Chris, Robin, and Sarah came over with Chris and Robin’s ferrets Rogue and Anna (you may remember Rogue used to be ours back when we lived together). It was a six ferret pile and super fun.

Yesterday, I went to therapy and I am feeling good. I decided I would take today off of school, not to ditch, but to work on stuff. I am caught up in all of my classes. I slept really badly last night so I thought it might be better to relax a bit today. I have one rule though: I have to be at least as productive from home as I’ve been in class. I turned in all of my homework, told all my teachers I wasn’t going to be coming into class, and started writing shit. I’ve written a few blogs (sorry about the blog spam today!) and am working on getting stuff together for scholarships and my second book.

Which reminds me, I actually am reprinting and republishing my first book, you may waltz to your doom in sanguine stained shoes, on createspace.com, meaning it will be available for purchase from amazon.com’s print on demand service. The book will only be 10 bucks, and contains 70+ pages of poems I wrote from 1998-2004. By the end of May 2010, I will have a second as of yet untitled collection ready for publish. I’ll let you guys know when you may waltz is ready for purchase!

Legend of Zelda: Week 3

Samm — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:26:53 +0000

I only had time this week to play Ocarina of Time, and I didn’t make much progress in the game. The reason is kind of simple, but something that was not much of a staple of games until the Zelda series started it: I missed something out of the way that was the only way to continue on.

In LoZ: OoT, you have an ocarina that you can play certain songs on. If you don’t learn the song in game, you can’t just randomly play it. I had made my way over to meeting Zelda and learning her song. Then I went to Goron City and went into the basement. A goron told me that the King was waiting on a messenger from the royal family, so I couldn’t get in. I walked around for a few minutes before I was told by my friend that there’s a reason I can’t get in the door. Oh, a puzzle. Right. It is Zelda after all.

It took me a few times to remember the song. When I played Zelda’s lullaby, it made sense that the door opened. That is her song, the one that is royal. But then the second puzzle was a pain in the ass. Mr. Goron King needed a phat beat to dance to because he was depressed. So I tried all of the songs I knew and none of them worked.

I was missing a song. King said that he wanted something earthy so I wandered back to the forest. And there was a maze. I hate mazes in games, seriously. In everything from Persona 4’s crazy final dungeon to the castles in Super Mario Bros 1, mazes just irk me. I finally found my way around and got Saria’s song, but it was a big pain in my ass, and by the time I got back to the king (yeah…no quick travel as young Link since Epona is still a foal and you can’t ride her yet) I was too frustrated to play much more.

Part of Dodongo’s Cavern got played, but I really haven’t wanted to touch the game since then. I’m sure I’ll pick it up soon, but week 4 is going to be me just taking an interlude to talk about Heavy Rain (which I blew through and am replaying already!).

doing things

Samm — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:08:38 +0000

This morning, like every other day this week, I woke up and worked out. I’ve only been doing full workouts three days a week but I’m getting up every morning and doing at least ten minutes of stuff on Wii Fit Plus, which is way better than the original.

I have only missed one day of class this semester. I actually am keeping up with the work this time. I’ve been loving my poetry thesis class. I’ve been writing a lot of fiction. School is fun again. I wrote a paper about Coleridge, opium, and China. I’ve been thinking so much about game design.

This morning, Dan and I went to my doctors appointment and then to a pet store where I bought (after much deliberation) a flock of finches. I named them all after characters from the Arthur mythos: Lady of the Lake, Merlin (which was the name of the bird in Heavy Rain), Galahad, Gawain, and Mordred. I ended up spending a lot less on them than I expected.

Yesterday I went to the Wireside Chat that Lessig had. It was pretty awesome that so many people around the world could watch it. Right now I’m on my way downtown to go to the skeptic’s group on campus. Tonight Dan and I are having people over to play video games and board games.

I’m tired. I miss Dustin, that’s for sure, but being in such a better mood constantly is amazing. Woo.

Legend of Zelda: Week 2

Samm — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:06:26 +0000

(For my game design class, I’m playing Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask and sharing my opinions about elements of the game. I’ve decided to cross post the blogs here.)

Sorry I’m a little behind, but here’s my blog from last week about Legend of Zelda: OoT and MM.

My experience the second week of Zelda was quite a bit different. I really enjoyed the minutia of Majora’s Mask more than I enjoyed OoT. The problem with OoT was while it was easier to figure out the next step in the game, the minigames frustrated me to no end. Getting the three chickens to give to the man in the house on Lon Lon Ranch was really fun. It took me a few tries, but it was a game of some luck and some skill. The game involves about twenty chickens, three of which are “special.” You have a time limit though, so you have to grab and release them as fast as possible.

Here’s a moment where cheating can come in. The man throws them in three directions, but there were already chickens all around the room. Dustin, who is talking me through the game, told me that when he plays that minigame, he takes all of the chickens that are in the room and throws them into a corner, far away from where the man throws the three special ones. This makes them really easy to distinguish. I didn’t do that though. I could see myself doing it after a few times through the game, but my first attempt, I wanted to play legit.

But the chicken game in Kakariko Village made me want to send my controller flying. The chickens are in places you can’t get to, or are really hard to figure out how to get to (at that point, I didn’t know you could roll into things to break them!). I eventually got so frustrated that I gave up playing the game for the day.

Majora’s Mask has a lot more options of courses to take, and that’s more interesting to me. It’s a lot like how the sandbox style of gaming borrowed from Grand Theft Auto has taken over. I do like it and it definitely works, but I am curious how any semblance of a plot will play out in the game.

I’ll try to post my third blog as soon as possible (probably tonight after I play more of the games!).