Agh

Serial Jen is now officially at 31 pages and still going strong. It was supposed to be over at 36. Why?!? WHY DO I DO THIS TO MYSELF?!?

AGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I Repeat

I hate playing Blitzball.

Stupid sports game… I didn’t want to be a jock in real life, what makes Square think I wanna’ be one in the fictional world of Spira… Argh… Wakka’s Overdrive Reels had better be worth this grief…

Sporadic Manifestations

That is an apt description of both my postings and my income of late.

I keep getting checks in the mail of a few hundred dollars at a time for work I’d done and completely forgotten about. These checks always seem to come in just as I say, “Well, that’s it, the bank account is nearly empty,” and keep me going for another couple of miserly weeks. Thank God for videogames, novels and DVD extras, great ways to kill days at a time without having to go out and spend frightening amounts of money…

There probably aren’t going to be much in the way of postings for the next little bit because A) not much is happening, and B) To prepare for the eventual release of Final Fantasy X-2 later in the year, my nostalgia kicked in and booted up Final Fantasy X, ostensibly just to view the ending cinemas one more time… and of course I realized, “Hey, I didn’t play this game to death the first time around and get EVERY single ultimate weapon for EVERY single character and get EVERY single one of them up to max level and win EVERY single trophy in the Blitzball tournaments… so now guess what I’m doin’?!?

My GOD… I’d forgotten how beautiful this game looked…

So between trying to crank out a minimum of 2-3 pages per day on Serial Jen (Up in the 20s! Whoo! Hope it it doesn’t get up into the 90s like the last one…) and then retreating to the Cave to summon Aeons, play Blitzball and generall try to ogle Lulu’s cleavage when she bends down for her “victory pose” after winning a fight, things are wonderfully, blessedly quiet and routine. Aside from the fact that each day is one of financial uncertainty, this is more or less the life I’d always hoped to live, minus the book tour and plasma TV home theatre set up. Everything else is pretty much there though; the girlfriend, the cat, the writing, the games and the movies. I want for very little except a little more financial stability, although, the more I think about it, the more I realize it means the end to this incredibly pleasant lifestyle (IE, full time job equals 8 hours in the office, 5 days a week, or, success with the book means more pressure to write regularly, only now with editors hounding me…_) and so I’m trying to get as much mileage as I can outta’ this before Change, as it always, cheekily, reliably does, goes ahead and fucks up something that was working out just fine, thank you very much…

Who Would’a Thunk It?

I don’t fucking believe this one. This just happened this evening while making a cigarette run to the 7-11. I looked casually at the shelves, and saw what I thought was a pretty hip, stylish looking geek/gaming mag. Closer inspection revealed that it wasn’t one of the familiar gaming mags I know from the U.S. or U.K., but something actually produced HERE. What bowled me over even more was that it’s GOOD! My God, it’s ACTUALLY GOOD! No grammar errors willy nilly, no spelling errors, and the writers actually seem to be able to live up to that title!

The magazine itself is called Playworks and has only been in circulation since November. I was caught by this particular cover right here for Final Fantasy X-2. After flipping through it and actually laughing in all the right places (Their Mean Letters Responses section by Dr. 1-Up… God, I wish I’d written that abortion joke…) I felt compelled to write them and beg for a job. I did that about three hours ago, barraging them with everything from my agent’s website to the my mention in the National Book Development Council of Singapore’s website as a “Singapore Writer” (Yes, they’ve already co-opted me, the sneaky bastards…) some of my online articles, like the one written for Upload magazine, and last, but not least, but pseudo review of Suikoden III that was posted right here in this very blog. Two hours ago they wrote back asking me for my contact details. That stunned me, since the e-mail was sent off at about 11 pm local time, but I guess someone must’ve been burning the midnight oil over there to get the next issue out, so I guess all I can do now is wait. Still, writing for a gaming mag would be a ton of fun for a while, and might even potentially lead to possible avenues of exploitation for Geek Life…

I’m getting entirely too mercenary for my own good these days…

Right, back to Final Fantasy X… See you all in a couple of weeks…

Stupid Blitzball tournaments… I don’t even like Blitzball…

Here We Are, Born To Be Kings, We Are Princes Of The Universe…

Just had an idea while walking back with the groceries, and I wanna’ get it down before I lose it.

One thing I have always loved about RPGs was the fact that usually the storylines had fairly big, epic scale. Usually the scale was save the world, although sometimes it was save the galaxy. But today it suddenly occurred to me, “Hey, why doesn’t anyone take it further?”

So I have now come up a rough idea for an RPG that would either be called Karma, or Nirvana. The scale here isn’t just epic, it’s cosmic. It’s multi-generational and the stakes are the very fundamentals of existence itself.

You control an entity. I have to call it an entity because over the course of the game, the protagonist would actually shift in form, gender, what-have-you as time passes and it moves onto the next cycle of its karmic/reincarnation system. Okay, let me back up. I haven’t yet fully worked out the mechanics of the plot yet (Since this idea is about 15 minutes old at the moment…) but it has something to do with the hero/entity progressing over the course of entire lifetimes, moving onto the next cycle in newer, more powerful forms. The idea of “levelling up” would be slightly different in this game, as you get Karma instead, and while you will progress in “levels” during the course of one lifetime, adding new skills, upping your stat-attributes and all the usual rigamarole associated with RPG advancement, the big key here is that you will die. You will die frequently and you will often want it to happen because when you do die, it will doubtless be in the elimination of some key figure of the plot and when you are reborn into your next life (Years, sometimes centuries after the previous one) you will be able to spend the Karma you acquired to purchase new abilities for this new life. Actually, maybe I should be more specific and say that while you will still acquire experience points in order to advance the abilities of your current character (And some of those stat/ability upgrades will carry over into the next life) the Karma points are what allow you to purchase the “Super” or “Cosmic” abilities will allow you to truly kick ass in combat.

The whole point of this game at the moment seems to be the systematic elimination of various levels of Gods. I think quite a few religious parties would get mightily offended with this game, but for the moment I toying with the idea that the character progresses in power and ability over the years, decades, centuries, millenia and eons to eventually challenge the fabric of deification itself and kill it.

The reason I started this post with that Queen lyric is because I’ve ALWAYS wanted to see, hear or read something that took it at a literal level. This character/protagonist will start out in a tutorial/introductory prologue as a fairly primitive sort of person who is more enlightened than those around him, and will challenge the conventions of his pre-agragrian society as the game’s intro. He’ll start to question the idea of why people have to live in fear of gods at all, and will, after successfully beating the shaman/priest/religious figure of his tribe, die at the hands of the tribe.

Then we move to the next “chapter” (The game will be divided into chapters) with a woman, although she recognizably has the same eyes and similar facial structure as our cave man. Whatever abilities the cave man acquired through levelling up and Karma acquisition will also be present, though can’t be spent just yet as the woman, for the first few minutes of the new chapter anyway, goes about her normal life, as usual feeling that something is inherently wrong with her or the world, though she can’t quite articulate what. Eventually, her country is totally ravaged by a thinly disguised stand-in for Hebrews who are killing and enslaving people left, right and center, claiming this land is theirs by divine right, and the woman watches as her family is slaughtered and her military helpless to defeat these substitute Hebrews as divine intervention in the form of Holy Fire or whatnot decimates troops and she begins to truly question and hate the presence of gods.

This triggers latent memories of her previous life and now the game gets cooking as you can finally spend those accumulated Karma points to buy up new abilities. She manifests these cosmic abilities as she attempts to unsuccessfully repel the Hebrew stand-ins (This chapter, like most to follow, will probably take about 3-4 hours to complete, and will have many twists and turns) as she is regarded as both a saviour by her people and a demoness by the righteous Hebrew stand ins that bitterly resent her interference in their divinely approved genocide. Eventually, at the end of the chapter, her “boss” is a confrontation with the substitute Moses where they discuss the rights and wrongs of brutally murdering an entire people based on a God’s say-so and the Moses substitute shrugs and says he is merely an instrument of the divine and it is not his place to question these purposes. The woman says that maybe it’s about time someone started doing just that, and proceeds to beat him, leading to his martyrdom, rise to prominence of this new religion, the unavoidable slaughter of her people. She is struck down by the prophet’s own god, since humans can’t seem to do it, and dies with a burning sense of injustice in her heart.

The game continues on in this fashion, with various incarnations of this same soul always rising in power/stature (As a result of the accumulated Karma and experience from the previous life), always having the same eyes and same general facial structure and always eventually rising to challenge the deities of the universe. It starts out small in the first few chapters, taking on the human agents of these gods, and gradually, as the game progresses, the amount of time it takes for the soul to come to itself and remember its purpose gets shorter and shorter, until finally, towards the middle of the game, permanent retention of past lives goes into effect. Many sacreligious moments will occur in the game with more thinly disguised religious moments pertaining to all faiths, such, as for example when the protagonist goes out into the desert to see the game equivalents of Jesus and Satan during the temptation, and the protagonist stands in for humanity demanding that they both go away and leave people alone.

Gradually the scale of the game ramps up, going beyond the confines of earth to encompass the galaxy, and finally the entire universe. I envisage certain cutscenes/plot developments like when the supercharged, nearly god-like protagonist engages in battle with one of the more powerful pantheons/deities in an effort to stop them from wiping out an entire cluster of galaxies, and fails, showing a cutscene that involves the death of trillions upon trillions of sentients who snuffed out as a result of divine whim. The game would end with the final form of the protagonist, now, for all intents and purposes, a god, wiping out the last of the deities that rule the universe, and in chaos that ensues from destroying such a pillar of existence, finally makes the ultimate sacrifice of using their superpowered soul to keep the universe going, but with the provision it has wiped out any possibility of coming back as a more concrete deity to once again control the lives of countless beings.

The theme of the game is, of course, that humanity doesn’t need gods, fate, or destiny and that in the end, human will should be the defining factor of life, not religious faith or divine intervention. As the protagonist advances from humble cave man to prominent leader of a nation to mistaken prophet to finally demi-god and fully divine status, there is a constant reinforcement that blind faith is wrong, expecting a divine force to rescue you is wrong, carrying out genocide on the justification of divine right is wrong, and that ultimately, we are responsible for our actions and should not give, or make accountable, our actions to anything beyond ourselves.

Let’s just say I wanna’ take Nietzsche’s famous statement of “God is dead” a step further and have a game where God is killed and existence is the better for it.

This is truly evil, isn’t it?

Downtime

Not much to report today in the aftermath of Suikoden III. I think I’m experiencing the game geek equivalent of post-partum depression in a mild state. I don’t actually feel upset or sad, so much as I feel like I stopped carrying something and I’m still wondering what to do now that I don’t have it to occupy my time.

In the meantime I’ve been doing small stuff. Wrote another article for Upload, a review of websites they gave me that forced me to join up with a free “Friendfinder” service for locals. Since I wasn’t particularly interested in making new friends, I just dropped the tagline, “Love Is Dead And I’m The Coroner” and proceeded to write a snarky, mean spirited intro that should repel all but the most psychotic of women. Nadya got back to me about changes she wants to make to her concept proposal again, and I did it and sent them off.

Oh, and I had to go down to my old, favorite post-production house, 4MC, now newly christened “Ascent Media” thanks to some merger out in the ‘States by their owners, and met up with an old coworker who promptly threw more work in my lap. This is a good thing, since it also meant I could bug her about the DVD and PS2 games that she owes me from the last time I did her a favor. Jen still needs to be written and finished, and I expect I’ll take another chunk out of it today.

However, I took a brief break to actually sit down and read something for once, something I haven’t actually done in months and felt pretty weird about. Since I can’t actually afford Pattern Recognition at the moment, I opted to go and reread the classic Ender’s Game.

Damn I wish I could write like that.

The thing that I like about Orson Scott Card (Or at least THIS book of his, I wasn’t too crazy about the sequels that followed) is that he is not the master–nor does he care to be–of style, eloquence or even memorable dialogue. What he TOTALLY kicks ass in is psychology. All the characters in Ender’s Game come off as very deep, unbelievably complex, and even if they’re not dropping pithy dialogue eveyr 5 seconds, everything they say or do oozes character and sympathy. Somehow, without relying on any kind of pyrotechnics, but just pure, blunt, human psychology, Card’s characters come off as more memorable and engaging than most of the extremely well-spoken characters that appear in the vast majority of literature today. Admittedly even when I compare my gods, Gibson and Gaiman up to this one book, their characters pale against it. How the hell did Card DO that?!?

It also pains me slightly to realize that this book I love so much was published by the publishers who are currently sitting on my book, and was in fact EDITED by the editor who has my books. I keep wondering what that guy could do for me to improve my writing if the likes of Orson Scott Card got his ass kicked by him. Argh… that eager part of me that wants to learn just sorta’ burns at how closely the opportunity is, and yet at the same is still inaccessible for the moment.

I continue to obsess about Xenosaga, now scouring the ‘net downloading every available audio and video file available to work up my already psychotic levels of anxiousness for this game to a whole new level of mania. I think it would really cool if someday I could actually work with Square or some other big RPG company and write the scenario for their game…

Sigh… a guy can dream, can’t he?

Oh well, off to pick up groceries. Whee!

Oxygeeeeeeeeen!

For those of you who for whatever reason actually follow these ramblings, you may have noticed a clear, decisive absence in posts. That is for one very simple reason:

Konami’s Suikoden III for the Playstation 2.

I am finally coming up for air after sitting there this morning at 4:30 am, watching the final credits roll on the game and checking the game clock to realize that I had been playing for over 100 hours. The guys who made this game lied. They said it would take 60. This is the kind of lying I like though.

Yes, this is the obessisive compulsive RPG gamer side of me again, finally being put to rest for at least a couple of weeks and letting me come up for some air. I don’t know what it is about those damn games. I think it’s the whole immersiveness of it, because RPGs don’t just give you a realistic environment to play around in, they give you a world, with traditions and history and little people all wandering around going about their business. One of the things I liked about this game–well, there were a LOT of things I liked about this game–was the fact that when I wandered around in the cities, they felt like real cities with people talking to each other, kids playing, people at medieval market stalls stuffed with baskets of fruit, vases and urns… It was just unbelievably cool if you’re the kind of gaming geek like me who just wants to completely lose himself in the game.

It was a good game. A fine game. I was initially put off by the simplistic, cartoony, polygonal graphics, after coming from the visual powerhouses of games like Final Fantasy X, but in the end, what Suikoden III lacked in visual splendour it made up for with one of the few epic story-lines in video game plots for 2002, and I can see why it won the awards for RPG of that year. From a pure story point of view (Assuming you care about that stuff like I do) nothing could touch this game. It just sucked me in, and no matter how tedious the random battles got, I kept pushing myself to move forward because a) I HAD to find out what happened next, b) I got so attached to my particular group of 108 possible characters in the game I just liked making them kick ass be at ridiculously high levels and most important of all, c) I stupidly felt like there were stakes involved, high ones, and that I wanted to make sure that when the upcoming battle with the enemy came up, my troops were up to the task, the enemy would be thoroughly vanquished, and the sanctity of the kingdom was preserved. When a game gets me THAT emotionally involved in the welfare of its fictitious world, I know I have a winner on my hands. Fortunately, I didn’t have to neglect the girlfriend for this particular effort, ’cause it had anime based designs, a fantasy/epic storyline and she is ALL about that stuff, so 3/4 of the time she was sitting there playing backseat gamer and pointing out things/objects I’d missed, and sitting there oohing and aahing the story right up until the very end. I’m the luckiest guy on the planet. My girlfriend got just as excited about the end of a videogame as I did.

And that, my friends, explains where I’ve been for the last week. Coming back again and again to fight for the preservation of the Zexen principality and the Grasslands to ensure they wouldn’t be annihilated by the overly ambitious Holy Harmonia Kingdom and its phalanx of magic wielding Bishops. On a scale of five shoes, I give Suikoden III five shoes, with shoelaces. All neatly tied up.

Of course, now it’s time to worry about the real world. First thing up:

Uh… We Don’t Know. Go Away And Don’t Bother Us.

MOM is confused.

The Ministry Of Manpower, in its usual, stumbling, bureaucratic way, has promptly gone and fucked up my application for a business and they don’t know how or why it happened. Fortunately, none of this is my fault.

What happened is that normally this type of application would be processed in about 10 working days and they would tell you what the outcome was, first by sending you a letter to let you know what your processing number is for references regarding inquiries, and then, eventually with the final outcome itself. None of this happened. I never received my letter, and my passport, which, thankfully was extended to the end of February, sat there and clocked the days. Last week, I finally got antsey and so called up MOM to ask what was going on. MOM was utterly confused as to why this happened and asked for my name and passport number, and that they would conduct an inquiry to find out what happened and either call me at the end of the day or the next to let me know what happened. They didn’t call that day. The next day they DID call, and that was to act surprised all over again and ask me the same questions and tell me they’d conduct an inquiry and that I’d be receiving a call by the end of the day or the next. The next day, they called back with the nebulous, “It’s still being processed,” excuse, which seemed to baffle the woman on the phone as much as it did me. So I had to write a letter to MOM explaining in the politest possible terms, “Please extend my passport while you sort out your fuck up,” and they did it, telling me that THIS time, for sure, the processing shouldn’t take more than ten business days.

We’ll see…

The Beautiful People

Nadya is not in town. Or if she is, she’s not speaking to me at the moment, which I regard as a Good Thing.

One thing I have noticed about the Beautiful People, and perhaps this is because they are, in fact, beautiful, is that they have a very reliable habit or not calling you back when they say they will. Normally, I suppose this would be regarded as an extremely annoying trait to have, especially if you want to keep their company, but they can get it away with it because, again, they are beautiful, and that turns a blind eye to many normally intolerable failings. Since I’m wierd and don’t seem particularly eager to keep their company, this suits me just fine.

For the last little while, the majority of communications with Nadya have been through e-mail. I think she finally realized I was serious when I said if the sun is out, it’s Access Denied regarding me. I wrote up her concept proposal/treatment, sent it off, she came back to me saying that she liked it, but that minor changes needed to be made ’cause she’d spoken to some people at a possible network that wanted to pick the show up, and they said they wanted certain changes made to the concept. Fortunately, they WERE minor, so it was no big deal. I was a little taken aback when she sent me photos of herself and the other host (Taken by a professional photographer here by the name of Wee Kim, hey, no snickering in the back there, that’s his real name…) that she just naturally expected me to nicely crop and drop into the document. I once again grumbled about The Beautiful People and how they expect everything to be done for them because they are beautiful (Unfortunately, more often than not, they get their way) and so enlisted the help of the girlfriend to do that, since I’m utterly clueless when it comes to computer tech that goes beyond cut n’ paste.

The document was done, I sent it off, and promptly got a call from ANOTHER total stranger who is now asking me to write HIS concept proposal/treatment based on glowing references from Nadya. Whee… gettin’ to be a real popular boy here. Or, as I explained to the girlfriend, “I spell for people who can’t.”

That was yesterday. I’m assuming that he’s one of the Beautiful People too as he said he’d call either yesterday evening or today, and has thus far failed to do so. Oh well…

GAMEZ! FREE GAAAAAAAAAAAAMEZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Why, oh WHY didn’t I stumble onto this scam before?!?

Perhaps it’s because I’m just getting craftier, more mercenary, gearing up for Geek Life (The unofficial motto if it ever gets off the ground, “We’re Not Nice, And We’re Not Sorry About That Either…”) or it’s just the needs of the poverty stricken, but I may have finally stumbled onto a scam that will ensure I’m always at the ready with the Latest Hot New PS2 Thing and it won’t cost me a cent!

Of late, I have been helping out the girlfriend by writing articles for a free tech-head magazine here called Upload. Initially it was just doing the movie/music reviews that she didn’t want to, though lately I seem to have taken over all her chores with this mag, ’cause I write them faster and it’s not as painful for me to come off as snarky and obnoxious. While flipping through the irregular contributor’s copies we receive, I noticed that they had a game review section. I also noticed the game review section was riddled with small errors such as, for Lord Of The Rings, “There are up to four controllable characters, the ranger, Legolas, Gimli, and Aragorn!” (Nope, not making that up, it’s actually in there…), and pointed these out to the editor, mentioning in oh-so-subtle fashion, “I’m a darn good writer AND a dedicated gamer, y’know…”

So since they already like the articles I’ve been giving to them, I’ve been asked to review GAMES! I GET REVIEW COPIES! OH MY GOD, IT’S LIKE GEEK HEAVEN! And here I was, wondering how, in my poverty stricken state, I was going to get my grubby little hands on a copy of one of THE RPGs of 2003 (Second only to Final Fantasy X-2) Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille zur Macht (The Will to Power) and it turns out that the kind boys at Upload are willing to drop a copy in my lap if I would do them the favor of telling them what I think, WHICH I WOULD’A DONE FOR FUCKIN’ FREE ON THIS BLOG ANYWAY!

MY GOD, LIFE IS RICH, AIN’T IT?!?

This also means that aforementioned FFX-2 as well as other goodies in the pipelines like Silent Hill III and Clock Tower III could also be within the grasp of my sunlight deprived hands. If only they didn’t already have a DVD reviewer they were comfortable with it would be heaven. Ah well, it’s all region 3 stuff anyway, so I guess it’s no big loss…

Hey, Aren’t You Supposed To Be A Writer Or Something?

Oh yeah, temporarily forgot about that.

Serial Jen MUST be completed before the end of March. If I’m going to submit that short story for consideration in the Open Spaces Anthology for Canadian speculative fiction, then I need to mail it off before April 3. I keep telling myself that I work better with a deadline anyway, and the only thing that could possibly put the screws to this story and make it nigh impossible to complete before then would be the untimely arrival of Xenosaga, which would also entail a sudden absence of my shoeless presence from the blog scene as well. For future reference, the only times I will, in all likelihood drop off the face of Bloggian Earth for days at a time, would be A) I got dumped B) I’m playing a REALLY good RPG that triggers my obsessive-compulsive gaming disorder. Heck, I figure even if I were on a book tour, I’d probably keep blogging, if only so that all the fans could find out what I really think of them, and that poor schmuck who so politely told me he thought I was so cool… in reality, my polite grin and thank you was saying “You, my friend, are an utter and total ass.”

Okay, I think that should be it. I’m pretty much up to speed with everything that’s happened (Not much admittedly, since it was all about Suikoden III) so the only thing left to do is reply to e-mails that have been piling up and going largely ignored…