#oneaday, Day 51: Final Fantasies

Picked up Final Fantasy XIII today, but I’m not going to talk about it too much just yet. I want to do a proper “first impressions” post. Suffice to say, though, I’m enjoying it so far. It has been extremely linear so far, as people have been saying, but it’s certainly not a worse game for this fact. So far all the characters seem appealing, and the dynamic between them, now they’ve all met each other, is shaping up to be interesting. I look forward to seeing what happens.

I wanted to talk about my memories of the Final Fantasy series generally, as it’s a series that will always be close to my heart for a variety of reasons. I’d never even heard of it prior to Final Fantasy VII’s release, but I was intrigued when I heard my brother discussing it and he mentioned the oft-quoted fact that it was “one of the only games that had ever made anyone cry”. It sounds trite now, of course, as everyone knows what FFVII’s “big shock” was, and the moment has lost its emotional impact. But I remember playing that game for the first time and not knowing what was going to happen – so when that moment at the end of Disc 1 came, I genuinely felt something. It hadn’t been spoiled for me. I knew something tragic happened at some point in the game, but that was it. I wasn’t prepared for them to kill off a main character like that. It was, of course, even more traumatic for the fact you could rename every party member in FFVII, so it was like someone I actually knew died. (Shush. I was young and stupid.)

Of course, killing off main characters isn’t something that FF has traditionally shied away from, but being unfamiliar with the series prior to that moment, I wasn’t to know. In fact, not only was I unfamiliar with the FF series, I was unfamiliar with the RPG genre in general, my only real experiences with it having been Alternate Reality on the Atari 8-bit (which, when I played it as a young child, I really didn’t understand) and the dreadful Times of Lore by Origin on the Atari ST. Neither of them had gripped me, perhaps because of the deficiencies these games held in the narrative department. Alternate Reality just didn’t have a story full stop (besides that which you made for yourself) and Times of Lore was just… well, crap. So, suffice to say I hadn’t felt particularly inspired to pursue an interest in the RPG genre – not until FFVII turned up, anyway.

A particularly fond memory of VII comes from one long summer when my folks were away in America for a few weeks. It was the first time I’d been left home alone and, among other things best left for discussion another day, my friend Woody and I spent a lot of time playing Final Fantasy VII. At one point, we played it for thirty-six hours continuously, whacking each other over the head with couch cushions when the other looked like they were falling asleep. Eventually, we did pretty much both pass out, with some peculiar dreams and talking-in-sleep going on. The tequila probably didn’t help matters.

We fell asleep as we were in FFVII’s Ancient Forest looking for the Apocalypse Sword prior to the endgame. I remember falling asleep to the music there and it infecting my brain. I can’t hear that track these days without thinking of the peculiar sensations of sleep deprivation, slight drunkenness and square eyes from staring at the TV for too long.

It was some time after discovering FFVII that I decided to explore the rest of the series and uncovered the world of the music of FF. I managed to track down some scans of the elusive “Piano Collections” books for FFIV, V and VI online and tried playing them. They’re wonderful arrangements – actually properly written for the piano, rather than simply transcribed – so the performance of them has become something of a trademark of mine over the years. Hearing any of those tracks always fills me with a sense of deep joy and nostalgia – not necessarily for the games as such, but because they remind me of times past – of good times with friends, of things that happened around the same time as me playing them – all sorts. Playing the games themselves has much the same effect. It’s actually been many years now since I played FFVII, VIII or IX. Although they are now somewhat aged, I don’t think the soft spot I have for them will ever leave me, and I’ll always carry the memories of what I was doing when I played them. (FFVII – that long summer. FFVIII – first year at university. FFIX – visiting my bro in America one Christmas.)

Yeah, I know. How lame to tell a Final Fantasy story. But I don’t care. 🙂

Changing Course

Hello everyone and thanks for stopping by, as always!

In an effort to write more on this site, I’ve decided to change tack a little from past entries. This blog started as a purely personal blog and gradually morphed into mostly games-related stuff. And fair enough, it’s a principal hobby of mine. But I have all these unused categories going free at the top of the page so I thought I’d branch out and try to write a bit more on some other topics to give all of you lovely readers the opportunity to get to know me a bit better in some other areas. Plus, you never know, I might even pick up some more readers along the way – this was clearly demonstrated a while back when I reviewed Haunted Stereo live at the Hobbit (cue Pingback on myself… ’cause no-one else ever links to me :)) and I met a whole bunch of fine new folks as a result.

So from this week forwards, this blog will be… a blog, as opposed to a games blog. You’ll still find games writing here, of course, but there are plenty of other things I’d like to talk about. My last few video games articles have also been posted over on Bitmob, so do go check me out (and comment!) over there if you like what you see. You’ll also see a couple of my articles on Good Old Games, which should be your first destination for picking up… well, good old games. Check out my articles on Rise of the Triad and Simon the Sorcerer.

Right. On to other matters.

My Dan and Charlie project that I discussed in my last post has been proceeding nicely. It’s been fun to “roleplay” these two characters and imagine the situations they have been getting into and how they interact. In practice, it has also been an interesting experiment in separating out various facets of my own personality into two separate people. Those who know me well will have already spotted this, but I also think it’s a potentially interesting way of telling a story from different perspectives. My research on the subject is admittedly limited, but does anyone know if anything similar has been done before, outside of ARGs such as Perplex City? (Perplex City is, I confess, where I got the idea from in the first place, although those characters’ stories were rather less mundane) I’d be intrigued to see how other people have approached it.

That’s it for now. Like I say, this change in approach is largely an excuse to get me writing more on a broader variety of different topics, so assuming I have a bit of self-discipline about this I’m sure I can find something interesting to say on a semi-regular basis. I hope I don’t disappoint. 🙂

A Jedi in New York: Day 2

A short post tonight as it’s pretty late and we’re both exhausted! It’s been an interesting and fun day today, though, as we had another long walk and took in a Broadway show – specifically, Avenue Q, which proved to be both hilarious and touching.

Acquiring tickets for Avenue Q was less easy. Our New York Passes supposedly got us money off Broadway tickets if purchased through a ticket seller called Applause. We could have phoned them up to order, we later realised, but after waking up later than we’d intended and wolfing down some breakfast at, again, the Ritz (omelette today… tasty but not quite so enormous as the pancakes portion) we decided to pay Applause a visit and pick up some tickets.

Why Avenue Q? Two reasons. Firstly, we’d played a song from it in the last local pantomime that I’d taken part in. The song was “Purpose” and I found it pretty catchy, but knew nothing about the show it was from. Secondly, I remembered that Rampant Bicycle had mentioned the show a while back, along with a number of entertaining-sounding songs such as “The Internet is for Porn” – and also something about puppets. Puppets? I was intrigued.

But I digress. The offices for Applause were actually in an anonymous-looking office building of the type that bigger companies rent out tiny rooms in when they need a tiny bit more space. The depressing loss adjustment company I temped with for a short while (which, incidentally, made me come perilously close to hurling myself off a tall building from sheer boredom… despite tall buildings not being easy to come by in Eastleigh) hired out a tiny office to put their typing slaves (including myself) in. They rather naïvely supplied everyone with wireless Internet access, however, so I spent the majority of my time when I should have been listening to boring, slobbery old men dictating their boring, slobbery old reports about small hairline cracks extending from skirting boards to the ceiling surfing the Internet.

The point of that? Wandering down the corridor to the Applause office put me depressingly in mind of that horrible place. Fortunately, once we were inside we were greeted by a typical-looking ticket window, which is kind of the last thing you expect to see behind a door in a place like that. We were greeted by a friendly woman who sold us some tickets and gave us our discount, promising that we’d be able to pick up the tickets at the theatre half an hour before the performance that evening.

There’s no amusingly tragic end to this story, if you’re waiting for one. We picked up our tickets, we saw the show which was, as previously stated, great fun.

Also today we had planned on visiting Central Park Zoo (another attraction we could get into with our Passes) but the walk to Applause had been a long one so we decided to simply stroll around the park and enjoy the scenery. There are plenty more photos to come from there.

Tomorrow we are going to head for the Zoo and possibly one (or more) of the museums on our list.

M.U.L.E.

Many people who have been playing video games and mis-spending their youth (and beyond) as much as I have will have one game that really sticks in their mind from the “good old days”, that they like to return to as much as possible and are gratified to discover that it’s actually still good.

Some retro games hold up better than others. Some age gracefully despite limited technology. Others remind us just how far we have come since those early days of one-man programming teams. Others are so well-respected that they spawn modern-day remakes or sequel after sequel… or endless variations on Xbox Live Arcade.

My particular fond memory is for an early EA title for the Atari 8-bit range of computers named M.U.L.E. This game involved four colonists from a diverse range of species attempting to make the best use of the resources a small planet named Proc Irata had to offer… yes, that planet’s name is indeed “Atari Corp” backwards (and this wouldn’t be the last time Atari Corp would have their name used as an element in a game, with Red Rat’s Laser Hawk following a few years later pitting a lone chopper against the forces of the “evil Proc Irata”. One wonders if Atari had any say in all this.) and, as these things tend to go, to make as much money as possible by the end of a period of time that was set according to the “difficulty” level. I use the term “difficulty” loosely as, unusually, the difficulty setting in M.U.L.E., rather than simply making the computer players harsher and cheaper, it actually added new layers of complexity to the game.

M.U.L.E. was played on a month-by-month basis, with each month being a game turn split into several phases. First up was the Land Grant, where a cursor moved over the single-screen landscape of the planet one plot at a time, and players competed simultaneously to be the first to press their fire button to claim a plot. Different plots were good for different things – mountains were good for mining, the river valley running down the middle of the map was good for food production and everywhere else was good for energy production. This stage, despite its simplicity, was teeth-gnashingly frustrating in the way a good board game is when someone pips you to nabbing, say, the sheep port in Catan.

Next up, players took it in turns to actually manage their plots and assign them to particular purposes. This was done on a strict time limit, so players had to make decisions quickly. In order to assign a plot, players had to outfit one of the titular M.U.L.Es for energy, mining or food production before taking them out onto the map and dropping them into a plot, taking care to place them carefully, otherwise the M.U.L.E. would simply escape. In this phase, if players had time, and if they were playing on one of the higher difficulty levels, they could also attend a land auction for an additional plot of land, scan an area for its suitability for mining the more precious minerals and finish their turn by wandering into the pub to receive a “gambling bonus” according to how much time they had left.

Next up was production, which was sometimes preceded by a random event affecting production of one or more of the resources. This could be anything from sunspots increasing energy production to a pirate raid stealing stock from the colony’s store. This random element added some tension to the game and also meant that someone who looked like a runaway victor could have their big plans scuppered at short notice, which was always immensely satisfying.

Finally came the auctions, where players were able to sell their surplus stock either to other players or the store. Auctions were handled in an interesting manner, with players setting buying and selling prices by walking up and down the screen. If two players met, they would exchange goods and money until one or the other moved away. If no players wanted to buy or sell, goods could also be bought or sold from the colony’s stores (for very high or low prices respectively). After the auctions, the four players were ranked according to their net work before the whole process repeated again another five to twenty-three times.

So that’s how M.U.L.E. works, and its simple yet elegant mechanics, along with its good sense of humour throughout, make it a game that’s still fun to play today. Interestingly, though, none of these things are the reason why I remember M.U.L.E. so fondly, because I was much too young to understand how to play it properly when I was first introduced to it.

Rather, two things stick in my mind. Firstly, there was the music.

I defy you to not be humming this masterpiece of the POKEY chip all day. Evoking an appropriately adventurous sci-fi feel (in my mind, at least), M.U.L.E.’s theme is one of my favourite video game themes of all time.

Secondly, there was the “characterisation” of the game. In The Squadron of Shame‘s podcast, we’ve often discussed the merits of having a truly immersive game world. And M.U.L.E’s, while simple, worked brilliantly. Each alien race was distinctive and had its own character, despite only having about three or four frames of animation at most. The fact that this strange little world had its own curious rules, such as catching the little white dot (the “Wumpus”) on the map rewarding you with extra money, made it all the more appealing to be a part of – and made you feel a little sad when the ship came to pick you up on the last turn.

M.U.L.E.’s a game I remember fondly for all the wrong reasons – yet fortuitously, it still plays very well today. I highly recommend exploring its curious charms – ideally, with three other people.