The Guild Wars 2 trailer dropped today. ’nuff said…

IS beatable! Now, granted, I used a map so I wasn’t hopelessly lost, and I did die 5 times more often then I did in the original quest, but really, once you get your blue ring, white sword, and a few heart containers, it’s not a TON harder then the original.

Also, beatable and still very fun is the Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. I beat this one with no maps or guides in 2-3 sittings. To the best of my knowledge, I remembered or stumbled upon all the secret items, with the exception of 10 pieces of heart containers… which are not as dire in this game as they were in the first.

Lastly, after not playing the game for probably over a year, I booted up Super Punch-Out. I went 16-1 with my only loss to the last Bruiser brother, who I promptly rematched and beat. Also notable was my new world record on Gabby Jay, keeping in mind the old record was a high bar to reach.

I broke down and purchased the Rydia and Yang chapters of FFIV:TAY.

Rydia’s was fun. There were 2 really cool character appearance. I did have a complaint about one thing, but unfortunately, it’s a spoiler, so I can’t talk about it. This one took me about 3 hours to finish.

Yang’s was only ok. You primarily only control 2 characters, one of which is old, and one is new. This one was also short, taking me around 2 hours to finish.

Palom and Edge’s chapters are available. Porom, Edward (the spoony bard), and the Lunarians are released August 3. The final chapters are released September 9. I’ll probably pick those up in the coming weeks.

I was bored Sunday morning, so I busted out the original Legend of Zelda. I created a new character named “Memory” and decided to play the game from memory – no online maps to show me all the “it’s a secret to everybody” or, perhaps more importantly, my way around Death Mountain.

It started off well enough, except no one would give me bombs (”10th enemy has the bomb,” my ass!). So after about 15 minutes, I got frustrated and went to level 1. I believe I died in here, which, with only 3 hearts isn’t that sad. Beat it on my next try, and came out with 80 rubies. I used that to buy bombs and a blue candle. Then, wouldn’t you know it, monsters started dropping bombs!

With my new tools, I found 3 “secrets to everybody” (including one for 100!), and 3 heart containers, which was enough to get me my white sword! While in the area, I also got the letter. I finished off level 2, and had enough cash for the blue ring, which made levels 3 and 4 even easier.

I then went for my remaining 2 heart containers, my magic shield, the power bracelet, made a quick pit stop in level 8 for the magic book, and went for my magic sword. While in the area, I did level 6, and then went back for arrows and found I was just shy of enough money for my bomb upgrade in level 5 – but you know I wasn’t skipping that, so I walked around killing those damn blue knights until I got enough money for it!

I knew I needed bait and 100 more gold for bomb upgrade for level 7. For the second time, was finding myself short on cash! I was missing my map because I knew there was at least 1 (actually 2) more 100 ruby “secrets” out there! I found 1 or 2 more minor ones, but also found a door repair! I finally grinded out enough cash and beat level 7 and 8.

Up to Spectacle Rock I went! My first time in, I only had a blue potion with me. My shield was eaten (stupid ham!!), but I got the silver arrows. I then accidentally stumbled upon Ganon who, since I had already taken my potion, tore me apart.

I got healed and got a new red potion, but forgot to buy a new shiled, and went back in. Because I didn’t have the shield anymore, the blue ghosts were tearing me apart even worse then normal. I managed to get the red ring, found Ganon again, but I was out of potion and he quickly beat me.

The third time, I got my shield back, and another potion. By this time, I also had a good mental map of the place. Since I didn’t need any more items, Ganon was the only thing on my mind! The monsters could sense that I was on a mission, and were dropping hearts all over the place. I made it to Ganon with full health and a full red potion! 30 seconds later, I had Ganon’s triforce in hand, and Princess Zelda was rescued!

All in all, a fun time with an old game!

I have since looked at this map (which is really cool!), and found where my missing treasures were located. I’ll remember them for next time!

Also, after looking at that map, I noticed some interesting things such as how close the green fairy pond is to the starting point, and that level 2 is much further away from it then I remembered!

Sometime last week, I noticed a new Wiiware (a downloadable game designed for the Nintendo Wii) called Final Fantasy IV: The After Years. Final Fantasy IV, or Final Fantasy 2 in America, is one of my favorite games of the franchise. It has fantastic story, characters, music, etc., and I logged quite a few hours playing that game.

For those of you that don’t know, even there are numerous games bearing the “Final Fantasy” name, each incarnation is generally not a continuation of the next as you typically see. They generally don’t use the same characters, plots, maps, worlds, etc., and instead all tend to share a similar overall unifying theme (the world is in peril, you need to save it, you embark on an epic quest, etc.), which serves as the continuity between games.

So when I saw a “sequel” to FFIV which did include all my favorite characters on a new quest, I was excited! I downloaded it yesterday morning. The plot is essentially that it is 17 years after the end of the first game and 2 of the main characters, Cecil and Rosa, have had a child together named Ceodore. The game begins with you taking control of Ceodore on this test to become a full fledged knight of the Red Wings. The story takes off from there.

The good news is that I, who LOVED the original, was totally satisfied by returning to my old familiar maps, music, and favorite characters.

Or at least I was… until I beat the game on my second sitting. My timer read 5 hours 30 minutes. For $8, that’s a better cost/minute ratio then going to the movie theater, but not great considering I’d still be playing the original FFIV if I had downloaded that for [probably] the same $8 on the virtual console (if it were released yet, that is).

Also, did I say that I beat the game? Well… kinda. I beat what I downloaded. If I want to play the rest of the game, I have to download each additional chapter (13 of them at $3 each) and then buy the final chapters to wrap them all up ($8 extra dollars). So the total cost for the whole game is $36! That’s almost the cost of a new Wii game… and this one is in 16-bit graphics!

You know, maybe I could even justify the cost. But then again, since it’s a Wiiware game, I can’t even send it to Jeff when I’m finished so he can play it. It’s stuck to my Wii. Pretty clever, Wii, but pretty lame too!

The worst part is… I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until I start buying the additional chapters!

This happened when I was very young, so I obviously don’t remember it, but many of the effects of the crash explain some of the things I saw when I was a young gamer.

In the late 70’s and very early 80’s, console gaming was becoming popular. There were way more competitors then I was aware of, including: Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Bally Astrocade, ColecoVision, Coleco Gemini, Emerson Arcadia 2001, Fairchild Channel F System II, Magnavox Odyssey2, Mattel Intellivision and Intellivision II, Sears Tele-Games, Tandyvision, and Vectrex. Many of these had next-generation systems planned too (like the Atari 7800).

There was also stiff competition form the personal computer world with such competitors as: Atari 400 and 800, Radio Shack’s Color Computer, and Commodore VIC-20 and C64.

Each of these systems had its own game library. On top of this, there were issues with game programmers wanting more credit and more money. Activision spun off from Atari in 1979 to create their own games to sell for the Atari. There was a court case, but Activision won, and was allowed to continue. This spawned dozens of clones. Dozens of major companies (including Quaker Oats… I wonder if they got Brimley to do the commercials?!?) created video game divisions who were all creating 3rd party games for all the above-listed systems. They created such nightmares as Chase the Chuck Wagon (which was created in partnership with Purina dog food. Trade in your dog food UPCs for a copy of the game!), Skeet Shoot, and Lost Luggage… which were all TERRIBLY low quality games (go figure).

Then there was the E.T. debacle. Atari produced a video game version of E. T. The Extra Terrestrial, which they overproduced expecting high sales, but rushed to come out, leading to a [FAIL]ure of a game. It had terrible sales, due to word of mouth of it’s crappiness, and since they paid a fortune for the marketing rights, they lost a ton of money. It’s believed that Atari dumped hundreds of copies E. T. cartridges in an Arizona (or New Mexico, depending on your source) landfill.

They even made terrible ports of Pac-Man (which is a practice that continues today). The Atari port led to Atari celebrating “Atari National Pac-Man Day, on April 3rd, 1982″ – an event I’d like to celebrate every April 3rd from now on. Atari manufactured twelve million cartridges and sold seven million units. Ouch.

The market was completely saturated with dozens of competitors creating terrible games. The stores were taking heavy losses from returns of bad products, and the distributors didn’t have any money to return to them. Retailers were selling $30 games (that’d be like an $80 game today) for $5 on clearance… just to get SOME money back.

The bottom fell out, and the whole industry crashed.

Years later, Nintendo came on scene. It met serious resistance from retailers who considered video games a “fad.” They renamed Famicom to the NES, and made wording changes so that it wasn’t a “console,” it was an “entertainment system.” ROB the robot was added to marketing so it was more like selling a toy.

The other big difference was that Nintendo fought against 3rd party game creation. They used a control chip so that only Nintendo licensed games (the Nintendo Golden Seal of Approval) could play on the NES (except for that crazy Quattro Adventure game). I basically understand it like a region code on DVDs. They also limited 3rd parties to 5 games per year, and made them pay for manufacturing up front, so if the game bombed, Nintendo wasn’t at a loss. They got around competition laws by saying they were doing it to protect the quality of the games.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Source: Where else.

Tetris turns 25 today.

This article says it best:

Tetris die-hards know the feeling: The game makes us stare unblinkingly at the screen for hours. It makes us yell at the inanimate display when we accidentally drop a block one square off. Its Russian folk-song theme worms its way into our ears and lingers all day. It makes us yearn, more than anything, for just one long, vertical piece.

and:

For one, playing the game is an exercise in futility. You can never win. The game is set up so that the blocks fall increasingly faster, until it catches up with you. The goal, then, is the continued pursuit of besting your previous high score. (This is classic addict behavior — “I want my highs to get higher and higher.”)

When the first European settlers arrived in North America, the natives that they found here were in the Stone Age.

They were crafting tools out of stone (think arrowheads) and had not yet discovered the wheel. (Have you ever seen an ancient Native American hand cart?) They had also not yet discovered how to make items out of metal, a skill that had been developed in Europe and Asia several thousand years earlier.

I’m reading Michael Medved’s The 10 Big Lies About America, and the first lie he tackles is the popular notion that this nation was founded on genocide.

In this section, he quotes a professor from Yale:

“[...] Think about those stories you see in the news about some headhunter in Borneo who’s surviving in the jungle in a loincloth and suddenly he sees a plane overhead. He’s never even seen a knife or a shoe or a wheel, for that matter, and all of the sudden he’s looking at a plane. The next thing you know, his tribe is discovered and here come the doctors, the missionaries, the anthropologists. Well, the tribes can’t just disappear into the jungle. They’ve made contact. So whatever happens next, their old life is finished. If they fight the modern world, they lose quickly, or else they try to accommodate to it and end up swallowed by more advanced and powerful culture.

[...] The outcome can go only one of two ways—either sad or horrifying.”

To put it in a geekier perspective, imagine you’re playing CIV. You are exploring the ocean and come across a new continent. All you find there are a couple of size 1 or 2 cities and some wandering barbarians, but a lot of good spaces for cities and some resources you don’t have yet. (Hey cool! Furs! +1 Happiness in all cities!)

Their tech tree seems to consist only of hunting, mysticism, fishing, archery, and pottery. You’re researching railroad, or maybe replacable parts.

You’ve got musketmen. They have warriors.

How many milliseconds does it take before you’ve got a boat load of musketmen on the way to take over that continent?

And after you’ve sacked all of the cities and are producing settlers to fulfil your manifest destiny, do you set aside any of your new land for soverign nations for the prior inhabitants? Uh, no.

The book obviously makes its points better than I could, otherwise I would have written it and Medved would be coming up with CIV analogies. I’ve only finished the one chapter. We’ll see if more posts are warranted as I continue my reading.

Why, in The Legend of Zelda, was the maximum rupees 255? Why not 250? Why not 999? Well, there are exatly 8 good reasons. And they are all 1’s. 11111111, to be exact. One byte expressing the number 256. The number of rupies you hold in The Legend of Zelda is stored in a single byte, representing your current rupees, 0-255. Brilliant.

This also explains why there are 256 levels in PacMan. There was only one byte used to store your level, so when you beat level 256, the game tries to calculate the next level (actually, the next “fruit”) and corrupts the screen. Zelda was a little smarter and ignored any digits past 256.

It’s all so simple and beautiful.

Source: SydLexia – my new favorite site.

OK – I heard this news story on the radio as I was waking up this morning. All I can remember from that early in the morning is that I heard something about researchers finding something positive about Tetris. I was all ready to make a post called “Vindication^2″ but then I read what their findings were, and I don’t like the subject matter as much anymore.

So it turns out researchers think that playing Tetris can help with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). They are thinking of using this method to help troops coming back from Iraq.

Here is where it gets a little disturbing:

In the study, conducted at Oxford University’s Department of Psychiatry, 40
subjects between age 18 and 47 viewed a 12-minute film that included horrific
images of physical injury and death. After a half-hour break during which
subjects were kept busy filling out forms, 20 of the subjects were set before a
computer screen to play Tetris for 10 minutes. The remaining 20 sat quietly with
nothing to do.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the Tetris players reported fewer flashbacks
to the gruesome scenes of injury and death than did the do-nothings in the
10-minute period of play. But in a daily diary all subjects kept for a week
after the viewing of the film, Tetris players reported fewer flashbacks to the
film’s upsetting content than did the group left to entertain themselves in the
movie’s wake. Tested for PTSD symptoms in the lab a week after watching the
film, the Tetris players showed significantly less evidence of trauma than did
the control group.

And yet, the Tetris-playing group’s memories of the events in the film
were perfectly intact, the researchers found. Apparently, they had simply lost
their power to horrify.

So while it’s helpful and kinda cool, I was hoping the story was going to be about how people who play a lot of Tetris have higher IQs, higher income, or a higher chance of developing super powers.

But what this does mean that if you ever find yourself in a disturbing situation, go play Tetris. It will take your mind off things, I guess…

Source: AM news show and this article.