Exposing my socks to the world

Back in the heyday of the NES, you could hardly move without tripping over some gimmicky controller or another (The NES Advantage, The NES Max, The Konami Laser Scope, ROB the Robot, The Power Pad, the Turbo Touch 360, the U-Force, the Roll ‘n Rocker, the Four Score, the NES Satellite, among others). Were most of these controllers wastes of space? Absolutely. Some of them, though, were quite innovative, and it saddens me to see that the kind of weird innovation that we saw during the reign of the NES is waning.

The weird controller/peripheral phenomenon dropped off sharply with the release of the SNES (notable gimmicks included: the Super Game Boy and the XBand Modem), and became even worse during the N64 years (notable gimmicks included: four controller ports, The Rumble Pak {now standard in nearly every controller} the Transfer Pak, connectivity between NFL Blitz 64 and Arcade, and the 64DD {which, sadly, never materialized in the US}).

What sort of gimmicky innovations are we seeing in the Game Cube generation? So far we have the Game Boy Link Cable, the e-Reader, games like Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles and The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords that use the Game Boy as a controller for the Game Cube, the Game Boy Player, and the (promised) connectivity between F-Zero AX and F-Zero GX.

I know that I’ve put a marked Nintendo spin on this article, but they immediately come to mind when I think of peculiar gimmicks (like the Virtual Boy). This isn’t to say that other companies never tried anything new. Sega tried that completely bizarre Seaman game, and Konami (as well as Sony) is having enormous success with the Dance Dance Revolution franchise.

Is gimmicky innovation dead? Hardly, although it isn’t as prevalent as it once was. Every time some new, weird game or controller comes out, I’ll be there giving it a look over and, quite possibly, buying it.

Let’s just get this out of the way now. I don’t really like fanfiction all that much (for the sake of this discussion, I’m calling ‘sprite comics’ ‘fanfiction’). That isn’t to say that it is all bad. Some of the fan created works are frightengly good, but they still are just fan works. I firmly believe that it’s better for all involved to pour your creative energies into new and original stories.

Fanfiction is derivitave work. It relies on an already established universe for the author to draw upon. The Fan Fiction author has at his disposal a setting, a history, and characters. Anyone who will read his stories won’t need any background exposition because that was taken care of the creators of the original game (movie, television show, whatever). All the ‘hard work’ of coming up with an original set of circumstances is out of the way.

Another problem is that it’s not canon. No matter how good the story is, in the universe of the game (movie, television show, whatever), it didn’t happen.

There you all go saying “So what?” again.

If you read a lot of fanfiction, the lines between what happened in the fanfiction and the canon start to blur in the memory banks. If/when official sequels come out, there are going to be people who either: A. Are disappointed (or even surprised) that something they wrote/saw in some fanfiction or other wasn’t put in, or B. Are angry that something they did write into a fanfiction and they didn’t get any credit for it.

I think that covers the main reasons. I do have other reasons for disliking fanfiction in general, like the weird crossovers you get (like Zangief teaming up with Simon Belmont to take on the Umbrella Corporation or some such nonsense), but generally, that’s it. I don’t want to read what happened after the credits rolled on Final Fantasy VII, or what goes on at Tom Nook’s house, or A Day in the Life of (insert character name here).

A lot of the fanfiction writers are very talented, and it makes me wonder what kinds of things they could come up with if they built up stories on their own instead of relying on others to do the legwork for them.

Since the console revolution of the 80’s, gaming has been fairly mainstream. You’d be hard pressed any more to find a household that doesn’t have some kind of game console (or PC with some games on it). I was thinking about that when it hit me: there are kids out there who’s first system was the N64 or Playstation or even the GameCube or XBox.

I can almost hear you saying, “Duh.”

Okay, so it wasn’t that big of a revelation, but it is important to note that a large number of these gamers haven’t played some of the ‘classic’ games and likely never will.

“So what?” I hear you say.

Okay, so it’s a minor ‘So what,’ but let’s say someone between the ages of 8 and 16 picks up a copy of Super Smash Brothers: Melee, a game that is rife with classic game references. Unless he, for some reason, seeks out the older games that the characters appear in, he’s not going to know where Ness comes from, or that the song from Hyrule Castle is from Zelda II (and remixed very nicely), or what a Birdo is, or… well, you get the idea.

Will this make the game any less enjoyable for him? Absolutely not. You don’t need to know the full character history of every character in the game to get enjoyment out of it, but having that knowledge greatly enhances the experience. All of those connections to the past make the game that much more ‘complete.’

Maybe I’m looking through the Fog of Nostalgia(TM) at this issue. Maybe I think that since I had so much fun playing those games that everyone else should play them too. I’d say that’s at least partially true, but I also firmly believe that several of the games I played growing up were just simply good games. Sadly, they often get dismissed because of their ‘graphics’ or because they’re ‘old’ or for any other number of reasons.

The ‘classic’ games are, however, making a return on the Game Boy Advance, which is certainly a good thing. I just hope they’re successful enough that game companies will keep on releasing them. My NES won’t last forever, I’m afraid.

That’s it. I’m heading off to play some Castlevania.

1. Lucasarts. Lucasarts makes some of the finest games for any platform (at least the ones that I’ve played were really good), but they also make some of the most difficult games on the planet. I suppose that it could be just me, but out of all the Lucasarts games that I’ve played, I have only finished one of them (Shadows of the Empire). On ‘easy.’ For all I know, there is a secret club of gaming elite that you can only join if you finish a Lucasarts game, and you learn the secret handshake shown in the endings of the games.

2. Ghouls’n Ghosts. Anyone who tells you that this isn’t a hard game is insane. This is, quite possibly, the hardest game on the planet. I can’t think of a game that’s harder to finish that’s come out since it did… in 1988. This game requires precise timing to pull off anything. Unless you are a robot made specifically to play Ghouls’n Ghosts, you will spend a lot of quarters on this game.

3. Gradius. I never realized how incredibly hard this game is until I played it. Sure, it’s standard ‘spaceship goes up against 1 godzillion enemy ships to save the universe’ kind of game. The whole ‘you can only get hit once’ kind of thing really ramps up the difficulty of this game, and others like it. I’m really familiar with the opening part of level 1, but after that, my game just falls apart.

4. Text adventure games. You don’t really see these any more. People, I assume, get turned off by the absence of ‘graphics’ and the amount of ‘reading’ that they have to do in these games. I don’t mind the reading so much, especially if the game’s written well, but the puzzles in those kinds of games are truly mind-bending. I was walking through a walkthrough of one of my favorite DOS games, Skullduggery and the solutions to some of the puzzles were so far out in left field that I’m not sure they were in the same ball game. There is virtually no way I would have ever solved them.

5. Gauntlet. Gauntlet is one of my favorite NES games. I still suck at it horribly, though. Maybe I’m so bad at the game because I don’t have the instruction manual. It’s got the same thing going for it that the space shooters do: one (or two) warrior (space ship) going against half a billion monsters (aliens). In Gauntlet, you play until you run out of HP. There is almost nothing you can do that doesn’t make your HP drop. Just standing there lowers your HP. A monster beating you in the head with a club lowers your HP. Stepping on a monster to kill it lowers your HP. Eating poison lowers your HP. You can eat the (non poison) food sitting around the dungeon to gain back some HP, but it keeps on dropping. You need to keep plowing forward. To what end? I have no idea. I can’t figure that part out.

I could probably go on all day about how Castlevania III or Ninja Gaiden 3 or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or your favorite super-hard game is nigh impossible, but I’ll stop here. Mega tough games are a fine thing to have, if the game steadily increases to maximum frustration level. Starting out at full-blown insanity just, well, it isn’t nice.

Sure, a price drop in a console is usually a nice thing. It makes the console more affordable to the masses. However, dropping the price when you are already the price leader is a bad sign.

I’ve made it no secret that I am a Nintendo fan boy. They just made the games that I wanted to play over the other systems. Slowly, though, over the last several years, Nintendo has, I’m afraid, chased off too much of it’s own audience.

Nintendo has the handheld market locked up pretty tightly. They’re keeping the Pok

For no real reason, I added forums to the site.

Unfortunately, that means no ‘real’ update today.

Domain Name: $8/year
Running total: $8

One of the first things that I realized that I needed was DNS (Here is a nice little rundown on what that means). I could pay for such a service, but that didn’t fit in with my budget. I searched around and eventually found out that such places do exist where they provide such services for free. The only problem was that I would have to know a lot about how DNS actually worked. I didn’t really want to invest in a large amount of learning exactly how DNS worked, I just wanted to get something that would work with as little work as possible. I eventually settled on DNS2GO (once they started to charge for their service, I went to the marginally more complicated but still completely free hn.org).

DNS: $0/year
Running total: $8

Now that I had a catchy and trendy name that people could type in and get to my site, I needed someplace to put it. I looked around at some hosting plans and thought to myself, “I have a cable connection to the internet, why don’t I just use that?” This is essentially free, since I’d have a connection to the Internet
anyway, so it doesn’t count. Hooray!

Hosting: $0/year
Running total: $8

Now that I had a connection to the Internet, I needed something to put the site on. I looked around the house and managed to scrounge up enough parts for an almost fully functional computer. I had RAM, a CPU, a video care, a network card, a case, a floppy drive, a keyboard, a crappy monitor, and a keyboard (if you had to go out and buy all the parts that I had just laying around, you would have spent about $40-$50, or you could have called up your computer geek friend and ask him to make something for you). I just needed a motherboard. A Super 7 motherboard (to put it mildly, a good one at a good price is next to impossible to find any more). I lucked out and a computer store locally had a decent one in stock, but he wanted something like $80 for it. I really wanted to get my site off the ground, but that was way more than I wanted to spend.

I caved.

I asked them to get it for me, and the proprietor told me that since it was the last one that I could have it for $60. Yeah, it was cheaper, but my wallet still stings.

Misc. Parts: $0
Motherboard: $60! (Ouch!)
Running total: $68

Okay. Now that we have an assembled computer, what do we do with it? This computer wasn’t nearly the class to run something like IIS (not like I could afford something like that anyway), so I turned to the Free Software solution. I decided to install Linux on the machine (if you’re following along at home, you can use Xitami or something similar on your main machine if you don’t want to bother with learning how to install/maintain a new operating system). After looking through the alternatives, I decided on Debian Linux with Apache. Mostly because it was a distribution that I could install from floppy disks (no CD-ROM, remember?).

Operating System Software: $0
Web Server Software: $0
Running Total: $68

That total doesn’t include all the time I put into learning how to administer my new system. I had never taken on a project like this before, so I was pretty new at everything. Thankfully, everything I wanted to do was documented well enough so that I could get everything going like I wanted it to.

[Fast forward a couple of weeks]

Okay, the system is up and running, Apache is serving up pages properly, and I’m ready to go! Well, sort of. In doing all of this setting up, I didn’t have time to create any kind of site. I really wanted to get something going, and I even spent a couple of days working on what kind of site that I wanted to build. It was then that I realized that it would take too long. I wanted a site and I wanted a site now, so I decided to look at the prepackaged solutions.

I looked around and (after trying and failing at installing Slash, among other things) decided to install PHP-Nuke. PHP-Nuke is an OK solution for a story-telling home page, but it isn’t really customizable if you don’t know your way around PHP and MySQL really well. I managed to learn enough PHP to add a box or two, and found a theme from one of the theme sites out on the Internet, and was moderately satisfied for quite a while.

Publication Suite: $0
Final Total: $68

Cool. We’re in business. I started the site and started promoting it everywhere I could. Since I wanted to keep it as cheap as possible, I relied primarily on word of mouth. I also submitted my site to as many search engines as I could find, and in a month’s time, I was averaging around 100 hits a day.

Since then, a lot has happened. I got an advertiser, I have migrated from PHP-Nuke to Movable Type, I have set up my own email service, my site was defaced once, and my traffic is up to about 400 hits a day. I’ve spent a bit more on promotion since the first couple of months (mostly tee shirts and sponsoring tournaments at AsylumLAN). All in all, I haven’t put too much more money into this site. I’m still under the $100 range, and I’m mostly happy with it now. This site has generated less than $20 in revenue, but that’s not what it’s all about. If you want to make money off of a website, that’s fantastic and I hope it works for you, but I’m not doing this to make money. I’m doing it to have fun. That’s what this project is all about.

Good luck and have fun with it!

There we go. I managed to take all the best articles from the Old Site and migrate them here. If I missed your favorite one, the Old Site will be available here for a while at least.

Time for a break!

1. Collectors. These gamers like to amass stuff. If it’s game-related, they probably have it, or are working on getting it. If you meet one of these people, they are likely going to have some of the most bizarre game-related things that you will ever see. They are good at identifying odd pieces of hardware should you bring them somthing. They keep their stuff in great shape and occasionally play a game or two. Some of them have definate themes to their collections from ‘Everything ever made’ to ‘Nintendo Nintendo Nintendo’ to whatever. They sometimes will go to odd lengths to add to their collection. They frequent yard sales, flea markets and eBay.

2. Enthusiasts. Enthusiasts want to learn, and consequently do learn, quite a bit about games. They read, they play, they probably have several old systems right alongside their new systems. They are knowledgeable and enjoy gaming for the sake of gaming. They may not have the biggest collection you’ll ever see, but they do have some nice games.

3. Players. Players usually aren’t too interested in collecting, per se, but they do have a nice library of games for whatever systems they do have. They might have a system or two from ‘one generation ago’ for one reason or another, but as a rule, they don’t go out seeking anything that isn’t manufactured any more. If they can’t go buy it at Wal-Mart, then it really wasn’t worth getting anyway.

4. Pseudo-players. Pseudo-players want to be enthusiasts, or even collectors, but don’t know how to do it (think of a poseur). This person probably has an enormous archive of ROMs and emulators on their computer for the ‘older’ systems, but none of the actual hardware. He really wants you to know that he’s an ‘old-school’ gamer because he has access to all of these games, but he’s probably only played a tenth of what he has stored away on his computer somewhere. He won’t go and hunt for the old stuff because it ‘takes too much time’ or he ‘doesn’t have any money.’ They might be great people. Who knows?

5. Latest-Gamers. LGs are the ones that always have to have the newest stuff. When the PS2 came out, he sold his PS1 and all his games to finance his purchase. He always has the latest and greatest at the expense of the earlier and not-as-greatest (sorry, I couldn’t think of anything clever to put there). This guy is likely to have Madden 200X and none of the other ones. He likes the trendy, mainstream games. Pretty boring.

6. Casual-Gamers. CGs are the ones that may not even own a system at all. They like to play some games once in a while when they are around their friends, but that’s it. They might have accidentally bought something game related at some point in their life, and maybe even have kept it. They’re usually up for a quick game of whatever’s easy to pick up and play (usually Tetris), but don’t expect a challenge.

7. Anti-Gamers. I don’t like these guys. They hate games and anyone that plays them more than an hour a year. They are usually associated with body builders and sports figures, but those barriers are breaking down, an AG could be anybody.

I think that about covers it. I think I am somewhere between 1 and 2 on that list.

It’d make more sense if you toured my house.

Over the last few years, I’ve done what I can to get my hands on just about every kind of game music soundtrack that I could get my hands on (well, only getting the ‘good’ ones), and I have a smallish collection going (about 15 titles spanning multiple systems). Some of them came free with some promotion or other, some were imports, and some were special orders that I almost had to have inside contacts to get. I’ve even gone through the trouble of making my own CDs by recording and editing the output of my consoles.

Why is it this hard? I have game upon game that have wonderful soundtracks that I would absolutely love to hear outside of the normal game environment. Some of the newer games even have orchestrated soundtracks. It should be relatively easy to throw those on a CD and sell them for however much they think that they’re worth.

Maybe no one buys them. As much as I hate to admit it, I might be in the minority. I’ll go out and get the Final Fantasy IV Soundtrack and play it loudly and proudly in my car all over town, but I don’t know anyone else who does. Of all the stores that I’ve been to, I only know of one store (outside of the Internet) that sells game music soundtracks and that’s Electronics Boutique (well, local to me, anyway). Trying to find them anywhere else without paying a fortune for import fees is next to impossible. Although, importing is certainly a good way to get the music from elsewhere, I hate spending $25 or so on one disc, regardless of how good it is.

Time for me to head out. I need my Final Fantasy VII music fix.