I Have The Pooooowerrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!

Final Fantasy X:

Godhood approacheth.

Sin will fear me.

99,999 points of damage in one hit is worthy of all inhabitants of Spira bowing down to my knees and trembling in fearful worship at my power.

And another thing, strictly for Final Fantasy gaming geeks:

If that Crazy Old Bastard at the monster arena is capable of synthesizing beasties that can annihilate every sentient for a 50 mile radius and make plants regret ever blooming in the first place, how come he just doesn’t take over the world already?

Tidus: DAMN. That’s a big ass monster.

COB: Ayep. It rightly is…

Tidus: What the hell is that?

COB: Arm.

Tidus: All FOUR of ‘em?

COB: Ayep…

Tidus: How much damage does this thing do?

COB: Kills towns when it’s sleepin’. Pretty much wipes out regions when it’s awake. If it gets mad… well, I ain’t ever seen it get mad…

Tidus: Where the fuck did you find this thing?!?

COB: Didn’t find it, ya’ in-bred, ignorint turd, ah MADE it.

Tidus: You made it?!?

COB: Ayep. That ah rightly did…

Tidus: Shit. This thing could kill Sin, the scourge of the land, you Crazy Old Bastard…

COB: Ayep, s’pose it rightly could…

Tidus: Why don’t you just sick it on Sin or something.

COB: Don’t wanna’…

Tidus: Well what do you wanna’?

COB: Ah’ll let you fight him. Fer, say, 8000. Aw heck, ah like the look of you, first brawl’s free…

Tidus: Can I use nukes?

COB: Only if you let me run first…

The Big Ass Update

Since there is a lull in kitten rescuing, video gaming, video game reviewing, comic book reading, not-so-short-story-writing, jobs, viral infections and middle east wars, I figured, “Heck, I’ll write something!”

House Is Officially Decontanimated Of All Cuteness

Pathos is gone.

A French couple showed up on Monday (She is an artist, he is formerly a sales rep for Ubisoft, who hardcore gamers may recognize as the company that made the moderately successful Rayman franchise. They have been in Singapore 6 months) and in a complete twist of cultural irony, we surrendered (The kitten that is) to them. I’m still convinced that if I spoke in a German accent they would have given us whatever we wanted without a fight AND offered a tour of the Eiffel tower, but apparently I’m being uncharitable when I say such things.

They took MY-… sorry, THE kitten.

I kind of miss her. She was sweet and cute and incredibly clumsy, although, in a bid to perhaps turn me off at the last minute, she contracted a case of diarrhea and made sure we knew about it by attempting to show us all over the rug. Urgh. That was not particularly endearing.

What WAS endearing however, was the fact that Zero is now back to his old self. In a telling moment, he threw himself on the rug (The clean part) turned himself over, and promptly began to purr when I petted him, something he hadn’t done all week as he ran in terror from the ferocious kitten that took his couch, took his pillow, took his litter box and took his owners hostage. Zero is now pleased to see the liberation of these assets and commented that the ousting of hostile forces was an inevitability and that he expected to see victory with little resistance. Zero is now at Camp Sofa, convening with his puffy toy on future strategies regarding the administration of these newly liberated territories.

You Looked Better In Your Picture

Which is the first thing I thought last night when we saw another cat somewhere out in the north east, an area called “Senkang.”

Out o’ curiosity, the girlfriend and I noticed a pretty sleek and beautiful looking cat on the same adoption website that Pathos was stuck on, and we decided to go down and see “Chynna”, to see if whether or not we might not want to adopt her ourselves. We have both decided that a kitten is a bit much and a more independent, “I don’t give a rat’s ass” attitude like Zero’s (Minus the supreme cowardice) would be cool to have.

Chynna turned out to be a little too independent.

However uncharitable this is, the first thing I thought when I saw her was, “You’re FAT.” She looked much sleeker in her picture, but I now realize this had largely to do with her holding her breath and wearing a black collar ’cause that’s slimming. The obesity I was willing to forgive. The Fuckin’ Attitude I was not. Zero’s yellow, YELLOW soul is pretty forgiveable, because there’s no hostility involved, just an endearing morbid terror of anything that… well, okay, just ANYTHING. This Chynna cat however had a major “regal” attitude. That’s the only way I can describe it. She will “tolerate” petting, just so. She will tolerate company, just so. She will tolerate scratching, just so. Any deviation from the way she wants these things is met not with a hiss but with a surprisingly annoyed and curt “meow” that brings to mind some Old Money Boston Hag looking down at her black maid and saying, “Your inherent stupidity will be forgiven. ONCE.”

A pleasant surprise was the OTHER cat there. One we had written off ’cause she was, to borrow the old Canadian slang, “Fugly.” Those of you that DON’T know what that is, take “Fucking” and “Ugly” and you begin to see the word origins for yourself. This cat was named “Min Min,” and looked somewhat better than her picture.

Somewhat.

The attitude however, is what makes her pretty neat. She’s pretty dog-like, what with the turning on her back to offer her belly for scratching and, to me anyway, with my broken tailed cat, she has a HUGE FUCKING TAIL that sweeps casually back and forth with the blissful ease of a cat that has never seen a rocking chair. She’s sleek but the picture failed to convey just how big she was. Not fat, all her limbs are in proportion, she’s just BIG.

And still ugly.

Sigh…

Our latest suspicion has turned to a cat that we refer to as Friendly Cat. She seems to share Zero’s apathy towards manhandling, minus the Pantophobia (From Merry Christmas Charlie Brown, Pantophobia being “The fear of everything!”) she hangs out by some fixed benches and tables near one of the HDB apartment complexes and seems to be very territorial, though her territory is SMALL. Just those benches. She’s laid back, very cute, pleasantly plump, nice coloration, and just doesn’t seem to care about being man-handled at all. She passed my “Head Grip” test with flying colors. I automatically like cats that allow me to envelop their entire face in the grip of my hand, and she is one of them. On a whim, I tried picking her up last night, and got a tired sort of “Oh whatever” meow from her, like an old wife that is humoring her husband’s begging for sexual favors. The girlfriend is obsessed with bringing her home. I myself wonder how easy going she’d be once she’s removed from her little kingdom.

And we may have found Pathos’ sibling.

Yup, at the EXACT same construction site. Walking back from Friendly Cat, we heard a mewing, and I thought I was having Pathos flashbacks since it sounded just like her. Further investigation revealed a teeny kitten, Pathos’ size, but a much more common brown tabby color. The general shape of the body and the eyes however, are dead ringers for Pathos, so I’m pretty sure this is another member of her abandoned litter, but its MUCH more frightened than Pathos was. I’ve never been hissed at by a kitten before, but it happened last night, so this kitten, having been out longer, must have been kicked around quite a bit already. It’s already got a kink in its tail.

Of course, now the debate is “Should we do anything about it?” but having since just restored Zero to normal psychological functioning, and since this one seems to be a lot harder to coax out, we might just let nature take its course. I dunno… it looks sufficiently mean or paranoid enough that it might survive. Pathos mewed “HELP ME!” This one mews “FUCK. OFF.”

Who Wants To Be A Hundredaire?!?

I’m the big winner!

At least for the week, anyway. More jobs trickle in with little checks to keep me from the brink of total starvation, though it should be enough to keep things going at least until June when, hopefully, the pay as an editor for Playworks begins. In the meantime, cigarettes are now becoming an increasingly precious commodity to be hoarded with all the enthusiasm of a Jewish family in 1940 Berlin, and Mass Rapid Transit (For Edmontonians out there, somehow, “lerting it” always sounds less geeky than “merting it…” but that’s just me…) has once again become a favorite reading place. Ah the joys of poverty…

The Placard Reads: Will Work For Dignity

Well, okay, that’s an outright lie.

A discreet e-mail to the Lonely Planet people at the urging of well intentioned friends (Thanks, Ching…) has revealed that Lonely Planet has pushed back their pre-production schedule to May 1st, and so no decisions will be forthcoming after all for at least another week or two. I have, however, recently done a radio commercial wherein I did a 30 second voice over for a perfomance of fusion North/South Indian music with Western influences called “SCHRADAAAAAA!” (Pronounced “Shra-dah”) I w
rite it like that ’cause they wanted someone excited and so when I arrived, I jokingly did my combination Wrestling Announcer/Demolition Derby announcer (“Four musicians enter. ONE SITAR PLAYER LEAVES. A no holds barred, knock down, drag out concert to end all concerts where the music and the players are bloody awesome…”) and was stunned beyond all reason when I was enthusiastically told that that was EXACTLY what they wanted in terms of delivery:

He comes from North India and decimates all opposition with the lethal stylings of his Tabla drums!

She is the Punjabi dervish known to kill with a single strum of her deadly Sitar!

THEY MEET FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY AT THE ESPLANADE TO OVERWHELM THE CROWD WITH KILLER MUSIC THAT WILL SLAY YOU! A CONCERT SO DEADLY THAT AN IRON CAGE WILL BE ERECTED TO PROTECT THE AUDIENCE FROM THE AURAL BLOODSHED THAT AWAITS, SCHRADA WILL SHRED YOU…

Or something like that.

Would you believe I actually DO this stuff???

Also, I keep forgetting to invoice Nadya for the giant squid proposal. She’s all ready to pay up the money (Ah… attractive women owing me money… there is some justice in this world. Then again, I did whore myself. Agh…) I just never get around to making up the invoice and mailing it to her ultra boho-incredibly stylish address at chic expat neighborhood Holland Village.

ATTENTION ALL STALKERS:

FOR THE FIRST 5 CUSTOMERS WHO ARRIVE AT THE PURCHASING COUNTER, WE ARE HAPPY TO INFORM YOU THAT A 50% DISCOUNT WILL BE OFFERED ON THE HOME ADDRESS OF ASIAN CELEBRITY NADYA HOW-DO-YA’-SPELL-HER-NAME. BE THE FIRST IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD TO CAMP IN HERS. THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING S-MART!

On a totally unrelated note, they have now found a squid bigger than “Giant” size and are calling it colossal! I WANT ONE!

Kool Komix @ @omix

I got another set of comics from the boys at @omix comix. Three actual comic books as opposed to all the trade paperbacks they heaped on me last time. I wasn’t terribly impressed with 411, the Marvel “pro-human” peace initiative, ’cause it really just gave the writers a chance to exercise their Pulitzer Prize Nomination fantasies and write something that felt too self-consciously literary, as opposed to actually playing off the strengths of a comic book. On the other hand, there was Blood + Water, which is a really smart, SMART vampire mini-series that I have nothing but good things to say about. if you ever get the chance, check the book out, though I’m waiting for it to be compiled as a trade paperback. It’s been a long time since I experienced the pain of wanting to know what happens next on a good monthly series. BW reminds me why I usually wait for it all to be bundled…

All’s Quiet On The Video Front

There’s really only the tedium of Final Fantasy X and the ongoing, slow, turgid march towards omnipotence. Clocking in at over 160 hours of game time and over the biggest hump, it’s gradually going downhill now…

Got interested in what Bungie (The guys that make Halo) have been up to and so did some researching and cross-referencing with their old Mac FPS game Marathon. There is a wealth of information and story here worthy of a Sci-Fi novel, and I was pretty amazed at how deep it runs, like a very well thought out conspiracy of Illuminati caliber. Now I’m all excited about whatever is going to happen in Halo 2. The story sucked me right in for the first Halo…

Also trying to see if I can swing some game time with Enter The Matrix as the Playworks folks are hosting the X-Box launch of it in tandem with Eidos over at Funan Center in May, second tech-capital of Singapore next to the mightier and grungier Sim Lim. Hopefully the status as a contributing editor will allow me to abuse privileges like no one’s business and find out if the Brothers Wachowski really are as big gaming geeks as they claim…

But You Write Too, Right?

Well, that’s the theory…

There’s been much written in terms of reviews for games and comics, but little on the fiction side since the deadline came, went and the story was turned down. I’m going to go back to it again and add in some stuff. I’m not sure how much to give away, but in the broadest possible terms, someone gets beaten to within an inch of their lives, someone else gets shot, and someone gets their viewpoint seriously expanded. Sue me, I write big…

The War

George, listen to me. You SUCK.

It’s bad enough that you’re giving all the Freudians a reason to start charging higher therapy prices with your out of control Oedipal complex (Hear me now and believe me later; waging a bigger war than your daddy will not make mommy love you more or enlarge the size of your penis, only your doctors can do that for you) but if you’re going to start storming through desert nations that have acted as cradles of civilization, at least have decency to protect all those priceless artifacts that you didn’t reduce to component molecules with your precision bombing. I mean really, how rude…

SARS

There is some crazed, Chinese National who is illegally staying Singapore. She exhibited symptoms of SARS and was quarantined at the Center for Disease Control. Of course, this means she escaped immediately, and since her favorite haunt seems to be OUR PARTICULAR NEIGHBORHOOD, there’s been speculation about whether or not she’s just happily vectoring away in our neck of the woods, spreading the viral joy to all within coughing range. Brilliant. Bloody, bloody brilliant…

The way I see it, we’ve got Death, War and Pestilence riding high, so where the hell is Famine? Is she taking the day off, or have people just decided she’s out of fashion and sent her off to a detox clinic in Beverly Hills to talk about how she’s a victim of her siblings and that’s why she doesn’t eat? Is she afraid of her horse since it threw her that one time in Africa? Hey, FAMINE, EARN YOUR PAY CHECK…

Thank GOD…

Blitzball sidequest: FINISHED.

I’ll never have to execute another fucking Jecht Shot for the rest of my days. Screw this team game shit…

All Celestial Weapons acquired. Lulu is now so amazingly powerful that she kills pretty much everything with one casting of “Ultima” and if that don’t do it, she’s got the “double cast” ability that lets her do it twice. Of course, the only problem now is that she’s so imbalanced compared to the other characters (I’ve been constantly using her, meaning that she’s been going up in levels like no one’s business and no one else has) that it’s gonna’ a take a while to bring the other characters up to speed since she kills everything before anyone else can move.

This is a good problem to have…

Break Time

This has been a fairly productive week.

I’ve cranked out multiple articles for my opinions on games, where they’re going, started reading comic books, kept up faithfully with Serial Jen, at least 3 pages a day, just broke 40, and watched the animes Outlaw Star and Super Yo-Yo, then gone off and written my reviews of them. The only thing I haven’t been doing is playing Xenosaga, and that, unfortunately, is because the software was… hm… how shall I put this? Acquired through “enterprising means” and likely bought from some guy selling them at a table at ridiculously low prices with an English vocabulary only slightly larger than the number of teeth in his mouth. In other words, the PS2 refuses to read it. Argh. I suppose things will continue this way until PlayWorks gets more credibility in the industry and more developers start kissing up and unloading free software in their laps. As it is, they’re not receiving much cooperation from anyone except the keepers of the Bill-Box. *Sigh*…

Oh well, at least there’s still Final Fantasy X.

Damn that Blitzball… pissing me off. And this monster hunting side-quest is getting really, really old. On the other hand, I’ve acquired every celestial weapon but one, and that’ll be done once the stupid Blitzball tournament has been won…

Right. INTO THE FRAY ONCE MORE!

It’s Official: MOM Is Fed Up And I Reap The Rewards!

Just a couple of hours after the last post, I actually got a call from MOM telling me, lo and behold! MY APPROVAL IN PRINCIPLE HAS ACTUALLY BEEN APPROVED! I think this has something to do with that last visit yesterday morning. The officer at the desk (They’re called “officers” now, no one wants to be a pencil-pushing bureaucrat) must have had something to do with it. She was pretty baffled (AGAIN…) when the records showed that my application for a 10 day process had been pending since January, and since I had nothing to do with it, logic dictates that, against all odds, the bureaucracy must have fouled up somehow. I suppose in order to prevent further blame from burning up the ladder (The girlfriend’s theory is that they probably lost the application and just won’t admit it) they just went and gave it approval in order to hush it up and keep it all in the closet.

So now that the Approval In Principle has been given, I can actually go off and register a name for a business and then hire myself to it, thus circumventing being illegal in Singapore, WITHOUT having to apply for permanent residency.

Thank. GOD…

Crank Up The Drama Magnet

One of the double edged swords that seems particular to my life is that even when I am trying my best to avoid drama, it breaks into my house, ties me to a chair and forces me to watch the slide show it made of its trip to Iraq and North Korea. Which is to say that once one worry is addressed, another shows up asking to be invited to the party.

The worry in question is the next step in bureaucratic hurdle of starting a business, getting the Banker’s Guarantee. This is essentially hostage money. When foreigner goes and starts a business in Singapore, a Banker’s Guarantee of $3,000 is required. You put up the money, they hold onto it, and one of two things happens; when you decide to pack up and go, you rescind your employment pass and you get the money back with some small interest, or, you get arrested for sleeping with 15 year old girl at the fish net stocking party you threw with your clients (“I swear to God, she LOOKED 21!”) and the money is taken by the bank as punishment for you not behaving yourself. One of the steps that is required to do this (Being poverty-stricken, I threw myself at the mercy of Ching and she delivered. I owe you biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiime, girl…) aside from putting up the money is that you have to present a business plan, usually the same one that was presented to MOM to get the approval in the first place.

However, the business plan that got us approval in the first place was sitting on the girlfriend’s E: drive, and that, due to some incredible carelessness on the part of the computer repair guy when she brought it in, has been mistakenly reformatted, and we only made the ONE print out. I get queasy just thinking about that. I’ve made multiple copies of my novel which I believe are sitting with various friends as a redundancy measure, I never did that with my third book I’m currently writing. The guy who fucked up felt so bad that he threw in a free graphics card as compensation to her, but in my case, I’d just look at all that work gone and irreplaceable and a graphics card just wouldn’t cut it. If I’d lost my OTHER novels in the process… shit, that’s 8 years of writing down the tubes…

So anyway, after placing a rather worried call to MOM asking if it was possible to get a copy of that business plan back, they gave us a FAX number, if you can believe that, to which we are supposed to fax our request, and they will “consider” it.

Damn you MOM…

Press “X” To Dodge

The tedium of Blitzball finally got to me and I’ve moved on to something else to ease my frustration, only to find it may just increase it. Running around a rocky area called “The Thunder Plains” trying to dodge 200 bolts of lightning in a row in order to get one of the components required to assemble one of the various Ultimate Weapons for the the characters.

Dodging 200 bolts of lightning, what sick bastard came up with this one?

Probably the same kind of sick bastard that is actually sitting down trying to do it.

Damn you, Square. Damn me too, while we’re at it…

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…

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…