#oneaday Day 192: The defeat of Culex 3D

I finished Super Mario RPG's postgame this evening, culminating with a rematch against the most difficult boss from the original game: Culex, who, in the postgame, finally gets his wish and becomes full 3D instead of being a piece of pixel art. To go along with his new look, he also gets a considerable buff in power, putting him into full-on "superboss" territory — though in keeping with the rest of Super Mario RPG, he's not overly difficult, he just needs you to pay attention and stay on top of things.

I really enjoyed Super Mario RPG, and I appreciate that "doing everything" in it took less than 20 hours. I have absolutely nothing against super-long RPGs — over the years, my favourite games have all been pretty lengthy affairs — but sometimes it's nice to play something breezy that knows when to stop. I'm sure Super Mario RPG could have dragged itself out to twice the length if it had really wanted to, but it didn't; the fact it didn't is testament to its good design. Nothing in the game feels like filler, and, outside of the Switch-exclusive postgame (i.e. it didn't exist in the original SNES version) there's really no need to grind at any point, either.

There are elements of the game where you can tell it has 16-bit roots, most notably in its overall storytelling; the narrative of the game is very lightweight, and you don't spend a lot of time getting to know the characters. I was particularly surprised to finally spend some time with Geno, a character that I've been hearing Super Smash Bros. fans bang on about for years, and find that, in terms of actual writing and characterisation, there's not really much to him.

But then this is a Mario game, not anything with pretensions of being high art or literature. To have Geno give overblown monologues at every opportunity would have almost certainly felt very out of place with the overall breezy feel of Super Mario RPG, and I suspect that during development, Nintendo probably had to rein in Squaresoft a bit in order to ensure that the whole thing didn't go too Final Fantasy. The inclusion of Culex may well have been some sort of "if you don't overdo the melodrama in the main story, we'll let you get super-ridiculous with the secret boss" deal.

Anyway, it's not that I feel Geno is a "bad" character as such, I was just a little surprised that he is so beloved when you don't really spend all that much time getting to know him beyond his basic concept. He does have some cool special moves, though, and in terms of power level he's one of the strongest characters in the party, so I suspect it's a bit more of an "all-round" thing as to why people like him, rather than him having a particularly strong story attached to him.

So yeah. That's that. Now to decide what I should play next! I still have Yakuza 5 on the go, and will get back to that some time soon, but I'm also still in a bit of a Nintendo mood. I have a few Nintendo titles on my shelf that I haven't gotten around to yet, so it's a matter of choosing between them — or maybe nabbing something from my wishlist that (I hope) no-one has grabbed me a copy of for Christmas yet. Do I move on to Paper Mario now I'm fresh from Super Mario RPG? Or do I finally bite the bullet and jump into the sprawling Fire Emblem: Three Houses… bearing in mind that I will definitely be wanting to revisit Xenoblade Chronicles X when it gets a Switch release in March?

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 191: Moving online home again?

Annoyingly, it's looking like I'm going to have to uproot this here site and MoeGamer yet again, because my current host has increased the annual price of hosting by literally about four times over the supposedly "introductory" offer I wasn't aware that I was on. Reading around, it seems this company — Bluehost, 'cause I'm going to name and shame — is notorious for doing this, and I am just the latest of many people to fall foul of it. So don't use Bluehost.

Thankfully, I have seen a few recommendations floating around, and I think the one I'm probably going to go with is Zume. This is a UK-based hosting service that comes particularly recommended by the nerds on r/webhosting, plus they supposedly do a free complete migration and you can pay monthly — though of course, as always, it works out more expensive to do that than paying for a year or two up front. Honestly, I think I'd rather have a predictable £10 a month than £X every year or two, though, as that's much easier to budget for.

I'm probably going to start the process for this going tomorrow. Supposedly they'll get the whole shebang done same-day, but it remains to be seen if that actually is the case. This is, I guess, then, your official warning that there may be some unexpected downtime both here and on MoeGamer at some point in the next couple of days.

I wish I didn't have to do this, as moving "online home" is almost as frustrating as having to move your real home. Granted, there's a lot less putting things in boxes and cleaning, but there's still a laundry list of things you need to remember to do — and inevitably an equally as long list of things that you have already forgotten that you need to do. But, well, I'm not paying nearly £300 for a year's web hosting, because that is daylight fucking robbery. £10 a month? Fine. I am 100% okay with that.

Here's hoping that 1) Zume sticks around for the long term, 2) Zume doesn't get eaten by a big corpo that jacks up prices to an absurd degree and 3) the whole migration process goes smoothly. Fingers crossed, and further updates as events warrant.

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#oneaday Day 190: My most confusing relationship

I think sufficient years have probably elapsed since this was a thing that I can probably talk about it without repercussions. If, on the off-chance, the subject of today's post happens to read this… uh, sorry? But you really confused me foe a while, and I think I want to talk about that.

I am, to put it politely, not someone who has had a lot of luck with women over the years. It's probably more accurate to say that I was not someone who had a lot of luck with women over the years, given that I am happily married, but hopefully you get what I mean. There were not many notches on my bedpost before I settled down.

Probably my most confusing relationship began during my first year at university. I had joined the university Theatre Group, and, while I felt quite awkward around a lot of its members still, I had enjoyed being part of a production of "The Scottish Play", and my involvement with the group only grew after that first year.

It was around Christmas time in my first year at university. The Theatre Group had hosted a nice meal down at a restaurant on the Southampton waterfront that doesn't exist any more, and somehow — I genuinely cannot remember how — I had become engaged in conversation with a young woman I hadn't encountered prior to thar evening. I shall spare her real name for the sake of privacy, so let's call her X.

As I say, I don't remember the exact circumstances of how we got talking, but I do remember that the evening concluded with me walking her back to her halls of residence, having a good snog and exchanging phone numbers. It was nice. Although in the intervening years, I have attempted to recall where her halls of residence were — they weren't one of the more "well known" ones in Southampton — and am not entirely sure they exist any more, or indeed if they ever did.

Regardless, I thought that was a pretty swell way to end an evening, and as such we made arrangements to see one another again. With Christmas coming up, I also bought her a small gift — in retrospect, probably too much too soon — which took the form of a small cuddly gorilla because, I believe, she had at some point indicated that such things were cute.

Not long after providing said gift, I was unceremoniously dumped via text, and I thought that was that. Except it wasn't. What it actually was I don't really know, aside from the fact that it really was jolly confusing for… probably three or four years in total.

We took a trip to London together and went to see an art film called Intimacy which had a lot of naked cocks in it, and we held hands throughout the film. She came to the house I was renting on several occasions, and we shared a fair few moments of intimacy, though something always felt a little awkward and off a out them — probably my fault for feeling disbelief that anyone would ever want to do such things with me. And we texted a lot.

I don't remember much of what we talked about, but we did text one another a lot. Initially, because I was quite confused about the nature of our relationship and not quite sure if I should push things, I wasn't quite sure how to act. But over time, I came to feel like I was enjoying these messages — if secretly dreading any time someone would ask "who've you been texting all evening?" and not really having a coherent answer.

There have been times over the years where I wonder what might have been there. There have been times where I have wondered if I missed a great opportunity. And there have been times when I think back on that whole situation and still have absolutely no idea what to make of it all.

So here's to you, X. Our time together may have confused the fuck out of me — and indirectly taught me that communicating clearly is probably the best basis for a solid relationship, even if it can be difficult at times — but I certainly think back on it fondly.

As the fat disgusting mess I am today, I think I'd probably be ashamed to show you what became of me, but 20 years ago? You certainly made life interesting for quite some time, to be sure.

#oneaday Day 189: A story from last night

I promised you a story from last night, didn't I? I'm afraid it's not super interesting, nor does it involve me personally getting into a hilariously embarrassing situation, but it was a noteworthy part of the evening nonetheless.

For our Christmas do, we started at a cocktail bar in Covent Garden called, inexplicably, Blame Gloria. While we were there, we were taught some basic drinks-pouring skills and also taught how to make a few different cocktails: a Zombie, a passion fruit Martini, and a Blow Job.

It was fun, though everyone retrospectively agreed that starting drinking at 3pm when a significant number of us are the wrong side of 35 was perhaps a misstep, but anyway.

After the cocktails, we took a wander over to a relatively nearby place called The Piano Works, where we were going to have dinner and some more drinks. I did not enjoy this place very much; the food was good (apart from some sprouts with the turkey dinner that were as hard as golf balls) but it was so very loud.

I realise this makes me sound like the worst kind of old man, but as an autistic person I can be quite sensitive to noise at the best of times, and I think my absolute least favourite noise is the sound of a crowd of people all shouting in a futile attempt to have conversations in a room where the ambient noise level is far too loud to make this in any way practical.

In other words, the music was too loud, which meant everyone was yelling, and I found that exceedingly unpleasant. That is not the story; it is just context.

Anyway, after we'd had our food and had sat for a bit, we were ushered on our way so the next bookings could have our table. Several of us headed straight for the door; a few others went via the toilets. I was part of the former group.

After a few minutes, it became clear that the toilet group were not emerging. It didn't take long to discover why: the doors to the bar burst open and out came a screaming, crying woman that several people — both bar staff and friends, from what I could understand of the situation — were having trouble calming down.

"GET YOUR 'ANDS OFF ME!" she screeched. "YOU'RE BEING FUCKIN' 'ORRIBLE TO ME! I 'AVEN'T DONE NOTHING WRONG!"

This sequence of phrases repeated itself over and over for a few minutes, then she added "I WANNA SEE A POLICEMAN" to the mix. She was furious about something, but I couldn't really work out what. She was angry at the bar staff and the people who were presumably her friends, but primarily for them taking her out of the bar; I could not glean what the situation actually stemmed from. I suspect it was just "she was being a little too drunk" and she had been encouraged to move on.

The screeching and wailing went on for a good ten minutes or so, during which time the few of us who had managed to escape were ushered a little way down the hallway to get away from any potential "incidents". Someone finally managed to do something to calm her down, though, and by the time she finally tottered down the stairs and into the street, supported on either side by the people I assume to be her friends, she was giggling.

The whole scenario was a tad unsettling to watch, to be perfectly honest. I know this sort of thing tends to make for "funny stories", and immediately after these things happen, everyone tends to just sort of shake their head, go "bloody hell" and then attempt to make light of the situation, but it can be quite scary to be in the vicinity of something like that happening. It felt like there was quite a real risk of the screeching woman becoming violent, so kudos to whoever it was (and whatever they did) that managed to calm her down a bit.

I've been absolutely trollied in my younger days — I tend to stop well before I become foolish nowadays, on the rare occasions I do drink, because the depression tends to hit first — but I don't think I've ever been in such an absolute state.

Well, there may be one possibility. The only time I've been drunk and had absolutely no memory of what I did was on my brother's stag night many years ago, when I supposedly got so hammered (underage, too) I was sick on a waiter's shoes. I have no memory of this, though I do very much remember the hangover (my first, in fact!) the following day.

Even then, though, I don't think I ended up screeching and yelling at people. One might argue yakking on a waiter's shoes is worse than that. My situation probably also made people around me feel a tad unsafe, and I should probably be grateful to my Dad, who I believe is the one who managed to get me back to the place we were staying safely.

This ended up being about me after all, heh. Well, I don't make a habit of being like that any more. That was a very long time ago, and, as I say, I tend not to drink much now anyway. And when I do, I tend to find "sad drunk" hits faster than "silly drunk" these days. Which is a bit of a shame, but probably something we all need to come to terms with as we get older.

So that's my story. It may not have been super exciting, but I hope it painted a bit of a picture of my experience with London nightlife!

#oneaday Day 188: Afterparty

Work Christmas do today. We started at 3pm so I was pretty much tapped out physically and mentally by 7pm, so I'm now safely ensconced in my Travelodge room.

This does, of course, mean that I won't have any particularly embarrassing stories to share — unless you count tapping out early as "embarrassing", in which case, get over yourself, some of us can't handle more than a few hours in a noisy environment without our synapses frying — but I do have something else to share thanks to stopping in at a dodgy off-license on the walk from King's Cross station to the hotel.

Dessert Skittles! I wasn't going to let a novelty like that just slip past unnoticed, so it's time for an impromptu taste test. Here are the supposed flavours, as outlined by the packaging:

If that's hard to read, we are promised Cherry Cheesecake, Choco-Orange Cake, Blueberry Tart, Lemon Pie and Strawberry Ice Cream. Let's get crackin' with the snackin'!

Cherry Cheesecake: Very cherry-y, which is not a flavour I typically associate with Skittles. Not actively unpleasant, though. There's a strange aftertaste — which I assume is supposed to be the "cheesecake' part — that doesn't quite work for me, but on the whole, these are Pretty Okay.

Choco-Orange Cake: The first one of these I tried, I didn't like at all, because it just tastes like an orange Skittle gone wrong. Orange Skittles already exist, after all, and are good. It's the "choco" part that is the problem, particularly as the "choco" and "cake" part of the equation are added without any real chocolate or cake being involved. A second go made this one much more palatable, though, so don't give up on these if the first one tastes a bit funny.

Blueberry Tart: An actually pretty convincing blueberry flavour. No real trace of the "tart" part, but who cares? Skittles are about the fruit flavours. Like the cherry ones, blueberry isn't a flavour I would typically associate with Skittles, but it works. Probably the best so far.

Lemon Pie: This is another example of them taking a Skittles flavour that already exists and making it slightly worse, this time by adding a slight meringue flavour. Not the worst thing I have ever put in my mouth, but just straight up lemon Skittles are indisputable better.

Strawberry Ice Cream: And another instance of messing with arguable perfection. These are the red Skittles, but slightly worse. Again, not actively unpleasant, but not as good as the regular flavours.

On the whole, then, Desserts Skittles are a resounding Not Bad. I don't think I'd grab them again if regular Skittles were also on offer, but they're not going in the bin, let's put it that way. Nope, they're going in Mr Tums to soak up some of the many cocktails from earlier while I watch some garbage on TV.

Thank you for indulging me this fine evening. I do have a story I can tell about this evening (that isn't about our group) but I'll save that for tomorrow. For now, comfy bed, sugary snacks, chronic flatulence and trash TV. Good night!

#oneaday Day 187: Anxious mess

I've been an absolute ball of pent-up anxiety for… probably a few days this week, if I'm honest, but it's been particularly bad today. As is often the case when I find myself getting panicky, there isn't really a concrete root cause of it, but there are plenty of factors that haven't helped.

I'm having one of those times where everything just feels a bit overwhelming, and I feel like I can never quite get "on top" of things. It's not necessarily having too much to do or think about, more a disproportionate sense of how "important" everything is.

The rational part of my brain knows that nothing I'm presently fretting about is important or worth worrying over, but when your brain enters panic mode, none of that matters; it just builds and builds and builds until you feel ready to burst.

Like, right now I'm typing this on my phone and the inaccuracy of the keyboard is winding me up way more than it would do under normal circimstances.

I think being ill hasn't helped matters. Part of what I've been worrying about is whether or not I would be better enough to attend tomorrow's work Christmas activities. They should be fun, but they're also filling me with a certain amount of trepidation and social anxiety, and worrying over whether or not I'd be well enough to attend has just been making me feel worse.

But I'm going to try and clear my mind, get some sleep, then go and enjoy myself tomorrow. I get to take a trip to London, then enjoy making cocktails, a nice dinner and then some evening drinking and socialising. And no worrying about travelling back late from London, as we have a hotel laid on for us. So that will be nice.

It will be nice. There's no need to worry. Then at the weekend I get to go see my brother because he's making one of his occasional trips across the pond back here, and see my parents for a bit (prior to seeing them again at Christmas!)

Everything will be fine. I just need to keep telling myself that. None of what I have just outlined is any reason to be uneasy, scared or anxious. So I just need to calm down, chill out, relax and sleep.

So let's see if I can achieve at least one of those.

#oneaday Day 186: Alpha male

One of the reasons I was quite keen to get my hands on Evercade Alpha, the latest product from my place of work, was to give Getting Into Fighting Games an honest go. I've attempted to do this a few times — I even bought Street Fighter 6 on launch — but have always ended up bouncing off for one reason or another, and the notoriously impenetrable nature of the genre hasn't helped matters.

This evening, I sat down and had a few goes at Street Fighter Alpha. And I actually had a good time! I won't say I was especially "good" at it, and the intricacies of the genre still elude me somewhat, but playing with good quality arcade controls on the Evercade Alpha made the whole experience feel a lot more accessible and intuitive than ever before.

I think one of the things that confuses me most of all about fighting games is how each character has an absolute shit-ton of moves that you can perform: with six buttons and an eight-directional joystick, that's already a lot of possible moves, and then add command inputs or charge moves into the mix and you have an overwhelming variety of possibilities. My biggest question when pondering fighting games from afar has always been "how the hell do you decide what to do when?"

I don't have an answer to that just yet, but even with just a few games of Street Fighter Alpha I started to feel things becoming a bit more intuitive. I moved away from my SNES-era strategy of only ever using the heavy attack buttons, and found success with some speedy jabs and good use of projectiles — which are much, much easier to pull off with an arcade stick, if anyone were still in any doubt about that. I felt like I had a reasonable grasp of "the basics" with Ryu, and I gave Rose a bit of a go, too. She's rather more complicated to use, from the looks of things, but I actually had my overall best performance out of several shots at the game using Rose. I don't know that I'd go so far as to "main" her just yet — I'm nowhere near the level where I even contemplate having a "main" — but I'm definitely intrigued to try her out a bit more and get to grips with what some of her moves actually do.

Because I think the answer to my earlier question — "how the hell do you decide what to do when?" — comes with experience. The more you play a character, the more you understand what each combination of button and direction does, and that, in turn, gives you a better idea of what might work well in different scenarios. You'll get a feel for the different moves' reach, power level and vulnerability to countering, and, over time, you'll (theoretically) be able to make snap tactical decisions in the middle of a match.

I'm nowhere near there, yet. But I'm actually looking forward to spending some time learning. I don't have any grand designs on being a competitive player or anything like that, but it would be nice to be able to play at least a couple of fighting games to a level beyond basic button-mashing. And, so far, Street Fighter Alpha has felt surprisingly accessible, with its relatively limited roster and fairly straightforward mechanics. Plus the art style is great — and only gets better later in the series. (But the later Alpha games also get considerably more complicated!)

So yeah. That's what I've spent my evening doing. I was going to play some Super Mario RPG, but by the time I'd finished wrapping Christmas presents earlier, the amount of time before "I should probably go to bed" had elapsed to such a degree that playing some short-form arcade stuff was probably a more sensible idea. So that's what I did.

And now, I should probably go to bed.

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#oneaday Day 185: 'Tis the season for Nintendo

As I alluded to the other day, I've been spending my time playing Super Mario RPG on Switch for the past few days. I rolled credits on it this evening and am very happy I took the time to play this. (There's a surprisingly extensive postgame that has been added to the Switch version, but I will be waiting until tomorrow to check that out, as it's getting late.)

One of the reasons I decided to start playing this is that the holiday season, for me, will always be associated with Nintendo. I'm not exactly sure why, as there was only one Christmas where I actually received something Nintendo-related under the tree — a Super NES with Super Mario World — but I've continued to make that association ever since. I think it goes along with how I associate Disney movies (the good ones) and Star Wars (ditto) with the holidays, too; fond memories of times gone by spent with family.

And Nintendo, it can be argued, has a fair amount in common with the House of Mouse. They're both gigantic corporations that absolutely dominate a particular industry. They both do business in a way that the particularly anti-capitalist people really don't like. And they have both, over the years, put out some absolutely magical pieces of work for people to enjoy: pieces of work that don't necessarily require you to engage your brain too heavily, but which are nonetheless extremely memorable and enjoyable.

Take Super Mario RPG. By console RPG standards, it's short, simple and very easy. You can roll credits on it within 12 hours. But every bit of the game feels like it's there for a good reason. There's no filler, no grinding, nothing that feels unnecessary; sure, there are some minigames you can engage with to a frankly obsessive degree that reward you with some optional items that aren't at all necessary to beat the game, but if you're just playing the game through to enjoy it, nothing feels out of place, nothing feels like it's actively getting in the way of your enjoyment.

And the presentation is wonderful, too. Sure, the Switch may be creaking a bit in its old age, but after a few minutes with something like Super Mario RPG it just doesn't matter. The music, in particular, is astounding. I hadn't realised it was the work of Yoko Shimomura, but in retrospect it makes a lot of sense — particularly with the newly orchestrated arrangements found in the Switch remake. The ending theme, in particular, was beautiful; it was like a full-on orchestral finale to something you'd watched in the theatre — with a touch of honouring the original by starting with the SNES mix of the music, then bursting into full orchestra by the conclusion.

(Don't ask why the creator of that video felt the need to brag about it being "4K" when the Switch only outputs 1080p, and a significant proportion of that end sequence is deliberately heavily pixelated.)

Anyway, I had a lovely time with Super Mario RPG, and I will be taking a look at the postgame stuff tomorrow. I'm happy I've finally played this — even if it wasn't in its original form, which, let's not forget, never came out in Europe back in the day — and now I feel suitably equipped to take on the Paper Mario games without feeling like I haven't played "the original". (I know Paper Mario is a distinct series from Super Mario RPG, but both it and the Mario and Luigi games count it as a common ancestor, so I've always wanted to give it a go.)

So that's that. If you're in a holiday funk, fire up a Nintendo game. I can guarantee it'll put a smile on your face remarkably quickly.

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#oneaday Day 184: Deprecated feature

I went into my Amazon wishlist earlier today, as I know it's the first port of call for several family members when trying to determine what to get me for Christmas, and I was a little perturbed to discover that it is seemingly not possible to change the order of the things on your wishlist any more. Or, to be more accurate, you can rearrange the order of the items in the first three rows in Grid view, but everything else doesn't respond to clicking and dragging like it used to.

I did a little research online and, indeed, it seems that Amazon deliberately removed this a while back. It's a "deprecated feature", apparently.

I always find the idea of "deprecated features" bizarre, because inevitably the features that get "deprecated" are ones that are actually useful, and in many cases they don't actually get replaced by something with similar functionality. In the case of Amazon wishlists, aside from the Grid view exception I note above (which I suspect is a bug) you can now only sort them in various automated ways, or you can push something to the top of the wishlist by going to its product page and "re-adding" it. You can also move it to another list and then move it back to the original list. Both of these are, I'm sure you'll agree, inferior to being able to just drag the damn thing to the position you want it — or, indeed, click a "send to top" button, which I'm sure also used to exist.

Modern software — be it stuff you run on your computer or that which powers billion-dollar ecommerce platforms — seems to be full of stuff getting "deprecated" without any real net benefit to the user. The usual interpretation of this is that the creators of said software want to discourage users from doing something in favour of doing something else with a similar function. But in Amazon's case I'm really struggling to see why I might be discouraged from reordering my wishlist into whatever order I want… particularly as there is no real alternative, aside from the rather clunky options I've just outlined.

There's a lot of discussion going on right now about how tech is genuinely getting worse year on year, and it's not just people "getting old". The writer, blogger and tech commentator Ed Zitron does some great work in this field, and I encourage you to check out his blog Where's Your Ed At and his podcast Better Offline, because while both paint a bleak picture of the tech landscape as it exists in 2024, some of you might find it reassuring that no, it's not just you, things really are getting worse in terms of usability and overall functionality.

As for me, well, I guess it's time to go re-add some stuff to my wishlist so it gets pushed to the top!

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#oneaday Day 183: Plague day with Mario

Felt particularly rough this morning when I woke up with a raging headache and a cough that could wake the dead. I was hoping to get some The Dagger of Amon Ra recorded this weekend, but I rather wisely decided against doing any today; we'll have to see how I feel tomorrow.

Instead, I spent a significant chunk of today playing the Super Mario RPG remake for Switch. I've never played Super Mario RPG in any form, so I've been curious to try this for a long time, and something in my head makes an inextricable association between the holiday season and Nintendo games, so I thought I'd start it up and see how I got on with it. After all, what was originally a collaboration between Squaresoft and Nintendo was sure to be fun, right? And people always seem to be making references to both the game and some of its unique characters.

I've been very impressed so far. It's a lot of fun, and it moves at a brisk old pace, as RPGs that originated in the 16-bit era tend to, but that doesn't mean it feels like it's rushing things. Rather, it's paced well so that you're constantly moving forwards, exploring new areas, meeting new allies and discovering new items. And, pleasingly, the game is a lot more than just running from story trigger to story trigger; there are some actual puzzles along the way to solve, too, along with some light platforming. The only thing I'm not a super fan of is the Hidden Treasure system, where equipping a particular accessory just tells you that there is a Hidden Treasure somewhere in the room you're in, and then you just have to flail around hoping you headbutt it by chance.

As one would expect for a modern Nintendo title, the soundtrack is fantastic. I don't know the original Super Mario RPG soundtrack all that well — aside from a couple of MIDIs I downloaded in the late '90s to use in Klik and Play projects — but we have a fully reorchestrated version of the full soundtrack to go along with the updated visuals and the re-translated script. No speech, of course — it still doesn't feel quite right to have a talkie Nintendo game — but the writing so far has been concise and pretty witty. Perhaps not to the same degree as Paper Mario, which is a series that essentially built off the back of Super Mario RPG, but I wanted to play this one first before I jumped into the Paper Mario titles for the first time. Yes, believe it or not I've never played one; my wife Andie has played most of them, however.

Anyway, Super Mario RPG helped make an otherwise fairly unpleasant day — the weather has been awful here today, too — fairly tolerable. And I even made some time to get all my Christmas shopping done earlier, too. So that's good. But now it's probably a good idea for me to go back to bed, and here's hoping I feel a tad better in the morning. Not only do I want to record that The Dagger of Amon Ra playthrough, but I have the work Christmas do in the week, and I'd rather not still be coughing my guts up and feeling like a roasted dog turd by the time that rolls around.

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