Exposing my socks to the world

The site’s back up, and I’m going to bed.

It has recently come to my attention that some people are masquerading as me and sending out emails selling various organ enhancing drugs, get out of debt schemes, and other random junk. Fantastic.

So, no, I’ve not jumped on the Spam bandwagon. Sorry to disappoint.

Since I’ve decided to celebrate the anniversary of my birth today, I won’t be updating the page… except for this update… and the one below that I posted shortly after midnight.

Oh, and if you tried to email me in the last 24 hours and it bounced, try again! Problems with DNS last prevented anything from getting to me.

Sometimes when running your site out of your home, you’ll forget that in addition to being the Editorial Team you are also the entire Server Team. When things go wrong, you invariably end up calling yourself to get the problem resolved.

<WARNING, Quasi-technical babble from here on down>

I had been using the free DNS services provided by hn.org since September of 2002 when the original DNS I had chosen (DNS2GO) decided to charge for their services. I’m running this site on a shoestring, so anyplace I can save a couple of bucks is worth it… usually.

About halfway through the day today, I found that my site was no longer available to the outside world. We had a wind advisory and a fairly healthy thunderstorm, so I figured I had a brownout and the old ‘Socks just needed a reboot.

I get home and this is not the case.

It would seem that on September 9, 2002 I signed up for hn.org’s services using an email address that I checked on a regular basis. Just over 3 years later with no problems, I checked that email address on the average of about once every two months to make sure that it still exists. Had I checked it slightly more frequently, I might have seen this note floating at the bottom of my inbox:

Please be advised that hn.org is scheduled to turn down by 2006.02.15.

Other than my IP address, that’s the whole email. I assume that ‘turn down’ means ‘turn off’. I mean, I assume that now since the service was gone and the page just gives the extremely helpful message that ‘hn.org is closed’.

So, in a scramble, I desperately looked for an alternative solution and eventually settled on EveryDNS.net. Which I’ll use until the donations become mandatory.

In a recent blog entry over at 1up, one of the editors makes known in a rant that she’s tired of seeing people rant about the quality of the journalism (or lack thereof) in professional game sites. One quote particularly stood out for me:

What I want to say is very simple. If you see a problem, maybe the best way to address it isn’t to shout about and point wild fingers, but to do something about it. Contribute positively – not by publishing bitter editorials. I’ve been, in the past, guilty of unleashing my frustrations that way too. But there’s no point in being sanctimonious about anything. Just, you know, do something. Do something positive. Do something with integrity. Do something to fix the wrongs you see. “

She raises a few interesting points, which I felt compelled to address.

1. “Contribute positively – not by publishing bitter editorials.” I’ll admit that I’ve been guilty of publishing articles on occasion that expose my perceived failings of online journalism (although they apply to all forms of written communication). Whether it’s a matter of poor grammar or style, unsubstantiated claims, or writing that’s obviously deficient, I do take notice. I hold, perhaps unfairly, people who write for a living to a higher standard of composition than I do some schmoe on a message board. I do not expect people to produce perfect work (there are probably a few typos on this very site), I simply hold them to the same standard I adhere to myself. To that end, I have indeed thought to myself that I can do better than some of the journalists out there given the opportunity. That’s one of the reasons I created this site, The Closeout Warrior and, on occasion, contribute to Stage Select.
2. “But there’s no point in being sanctimonious about anything” – I think ‘sanctimonious’ is a bit strong in this case. I can only speak for myself in this regard, but trying to find the time to write a well thought out piece in between earning my weekly bread and playing a game or two to have something to actually discuss is difficult at best. A fair slice of my time is spent perusing game sites to glean any information that I may have missed so, if nothing else, I can remain topical. To that end, I tend to read a lot of websites. By the time I get to sit down and actually craft an article, more often than not it will be about what stuck in my mind most recently. If I found that spelling and grammar errors got in the way of an otherwise good article, then that will be the topic du jour. The tone may come off as sanctimonious or even condescending, but, rest assured, anything I am doing is just observing, not editor bashing. The trick is filtering the baseless complaints from the constructive criticism.
3. “Do something positive. Do something with integrity. Do something to fix the wrongs you see.” – Here is where things get a bit tricky. One of the great things about mass media is the reach that it enjoys. This is also one of its greatest problems. There is simply no way to please everyone. Most sane people realize this. Those that don’t understand this simple concept will whine about what they don’t like until it is ‘fixed’, nothing will be good enough for them until they are in charge of disseminating their own brand of information. Within the group of people who know that it is impossible to please everyone there is a subset of people who believe, either rightly or wrongly, that they know what will make the media better. It is easy let the noise of the chronic complainers overlap the signal coming from this sect of the audience and to squelch all of it summarily. To use a parallel example: Suppose the Wall Street Journal published an article that had some minor spelling errors or had some other failing, perhaps nothing critical, but an oversight. What would be an appropriate, constructive response? Writing a letter to the editor? Writing a post about it on your blog? Calling everyone you know to tell them you could do a better job than those hacks? All of the above? None of the above?

   While I can not argue with the fact that it is often far easier to point out a mistake than to correct one, it is also true that if you are able point out a mistake to someone who is more easily able to fix the mistake than you are, then it is more likely to get resolved.

Believe it or not, people who rant and point fingers actually are doing something about it. They are doing at least as much as people who run an editorial in their local newspaper about the President’s latest actions or the taste of the latest coffee at their favorite coffee house.

I don’t have the ability or desire to physically go and correct every problem I see. I also am not foolish enough expect everything to be created specifically to cater to my desires. However, I do have access to a cache of words and the ability to put them in an order that will be meaningful to someone with the power to fix or alter that which I perceive is lacking, or at the very least provoke some thought or discussion on the matter. That is ‘doing something about it.’

Tales of Symphonia

It’s been a while since I played a good old-fashioned RPG. When I saw that Tales of Symphonia was down to $20, I decided to pick it up and give it a whirl.

The meat of an RPG is the story. Tales of Symphonia puts you in command of Lloyd and his troupe of adventurers on their quest to ‘regenerate the world’. Without giving too much of the story away, I’ll just say that there is a long, fairly complicated, story that grows in scope as you progress. In the end it becomes much bigger than at the outset and it leads to a resolution that is a bit open ended. Typical RPG stuff.

In playing through the story, you will notice the overt commentaries on racism, corruption in religion, and facing your problems. Occasionally, the story will stop just short of bonking you in the head with the Morality Stick(tm), but those instances are few.

Occasionaly during your game, you will see a trigger for a ‘skit’. A skit shows the characters in your party discussing something, usually the situation at hand, but not neccesarily so. Some of them are in the game just to provide some depth to the characters, which is a nice touch. Most of the skits are completely optional, so if you don’t like the flow being interrupted or just don’t care to watch them you are not forced to.

If the story is the meat of an RPG, then the battle system is the potatoes. The avatars of the monsters are visible at all times wandering about the map, and if you run into one, you will fight its group. You have the ability to stun some of them and (or) run around them if you wish to try. Entering a battle transforms the game from 3D role-playing game to more of a 3D action game feel. In the battles you directly control one character of your choosing and indirectly control up to 3 others. You have the ability to move anywhere on the battlefield, and will have to do so in order to attack enemies and avoid attacks. Your buddies are computer controlled, but you can control what they do by issuing orders such as fall back, go all out, all attack the same monster, keep some skills in reserve, what spells can be cast, etc. Your friends are fairly competent, although you will have to keep an eye on their stats. You can also plug in some controllers to have friends play with you, although this has limited appeal since the camera is trained on whoever holds Controller 1.

The main characters in the game are all distinct and unique. Their avatars are large and colorful, and definitely stand out against the decent locales. There are a few camera issues, most notably in the battles (although that’s really only an issue if you’re playing with more than one player) and on the overworld map. The camera will follow the contour of the land, but will not change its distance from your character. Because of this, should you walk by some mountains, the camera will go nearly directly overhead, leaving you very little ability to see where you’re going. In dungeons and towns, this is mostly alleviated by having the camera in a fixed location or putting it on rails. Of course this also means that you cannot move the camera to get a better view of the lay of the land. Thankfully, this urge to move the camera came up very few times during the course of playing through this game. The views that I was presented with were for the most part spot-on.

The back of the box states that this game has eighty hours of gameplay. I managed to complete the main story in just over 40. I looked over some of the side quests that I skipped over, and I doubt that they will take me an additional 40. Perhaps I can pad that by another 20 or so. One feature that helped immensely is the Synopsis. The Synopsis gives you a summary of what’s happened up to the point in the game you’re in, and gives you a slight push toward your next objective. I found this to be absolutely indispensable after I took a two-day break from playing and was able to pick up right where I left off without trying to remember what I had done two days prior and what NPC I was supposed to talk to next.

What RPG would be complete without cutscenes? There are two lengthy pre-rendered cutscenes (one at the beginning and one at the end), that are in an anime style, which is a refreshing change from the computer-generated cutscenes I’ve grown accustomed to seeing. Most of the plot-establishing cutscenes are shown using the game’s engine, and several of the more important ones have competent voice-overs signaling that you should pay extra attention to them. Most of the voice-actors are veterans with numerous works under their belts, and will likely be recognized by players and animation geeks. The character of Kratos, for example, is voiced by Cam Clarke, who voiced Die Fledermaus in The Tick animated series.

Tales of Symphonia is a solid game. It’s got just enough old-school RPG elements mixed in with new features to make for an enjoyable experience.

Recommended.

Since it seems to be the new thing for all the cool kids to do, I would like to take a trip down the old memory lane and relive some of my personal gaming highlights of the past year.

Biggest Time Sink

World of Warcraft ate fully half of my year. Although there are things about the game that I really liked, especially coming off of a Final Fantasy XI sojurn, I realized one day that I wasn’t updating my website, playing any other games, or really doing anything else except playing WoW and going to work. So I kicked it to the curb. I haven’t fully gotten my gaming legs back yet, but they’re coming.

Biggest waste of money

For a few months there, my sister site, the Closeout Warrior was a place for me to chronicle my habit of picking up just any old gaming trash that I could find for less than $10 and giving it a review. Due to my severe lack of free time, I was unable to keep it updated like I would have liked, but the games that I featured were very often the worst of the worst (with the occasional very rare exception).

Out of the couple of dozen games I played specifically for that site, the one that stands out to me has to be Midnight Outlaw 6 Hours to Sunup. There was nothing (NOTHING!) good about this game.

Biggest Disappointment

I like to think that I have an ability to pick out a game that will be a good match for my likes before I read any reviews. I like to think I know what I like well enough that I can glean from the preview media whether I think I will ilke the game and I don’t need some reviewer to tell me what I should think of it. None of the games I bought for less than $10 were really a dissapointment. I kind of knew when I got them that they were going to be pretty bad. You very rarely will find a game new for less than $10 that isn’t. So those weren’t really letdowns.

The biggest letdown I had this year was Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix. Since I’m a pretty die-hard Nintendo fan, this was my first opportunity to play DDR at home on a system that I actually own. Don’t get me wrong, DDR:MM is a decent game, but it has some serious shortcomings that really put a dent in my enjoyment of the title. The game was too easy (I had all 29 songs unlocked by my second playthrough), about half of the songs were classical pieces or taken from operas (Carmen sounds good and everything, but is a bit out of place), and there weren’t very many songs to choose from (29! 30 if you count the ending credits… which I don’t).

Biggest Surprise

It hasn’t all been doom and gloom. There have been a few games that I bought, fully expecting trash, and got a decent experience out of. My best example is Denki Blocks. I found the game buried in the back of my local EB Games and picked it up for $5. Turns out to be a decent puzzler (although one I play horribly).

Most fun project

In writing this site, I like to try and do things differently than most people, and I usually have fun doing it.

Earlier this year I wrote The List, A Day in the Life of a Gamer (or, How I Spent My Vacation), and completed my second Game Box Resume project. All of which I had a blast doing. I can’t choose between these to be my favorite… so I won’t.

All told, it’s been a very interesting year for games and gaming, and next year looks to be even better with the (we hope) launch of the PS3, Revolution and a new Legend of Zelda game, and that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

I wanted to leave the picture of the stray cat I found up on the page until I was able to find him a home. Since I have done just that, regular updates will now resume.

It’s Christmas.

I’m taking the day off from administering the site.

Please don’t break anything.

I found a cat last night sitting out in the cold and the rain.

So I brought it inside.

Let’s hope that if he has an owner that he steps forward. I’d hate to have to keep this little guy.