Anki
An amazing little piece of (free) software also available (for $25 cash) on the iPhone. The idea is to study before you forget. Has changed how I look at studying and how I retain information.

All Japanese All The Time
A very interesting site about a guy buy a guy. Only instead of being the guy that he was in America, he decided to be a Japanese guy. In America. Results turned out pretty good for his Japanese skills. Worth reading.

Remembering the Kanji 1 & Remembering the Kanji 3
If there’s anything I’d like people to get out of my presentation it is the chance to experience these books. They definitely changed my Japanese studies in the most positive way out of anything I have done. Book 2 isn’t needed, I find.

Reviewing the Kanji
Basicaly contains a web-only version of what Anki does, but the real resource here is the ton of user submitted stories for remembering the kanji. Great if you’re stuck on coming up with your own story for the Heisig method.

A Dictionary of Basic/Intermediate/Advanced Japanese Grammar
Three excellent grammar books which give you good insight onto when and where to use a smorgasbord of grammar.

Guide to Japanese
A marvelous crash course into Japanese grammar with things explained with a Japanese sense to them.

JDIC
The web version of one of the best available Japanese-English/Whatever dictionaries.

JEDict
Mac only software that uses the above JDIC. I use this every day.

Antimoon
A website on how to learn English. Why this is important is because the ideas here work for learning any language.

Time Boxing (Wikipedia)
I’ve given two articles on this one since timeboxing is an amazing strategy you can use to completely change how much you get done. Heck, I’m using timeboxing to write this article!

Nico Nico Douga
The Japanese YouTube, so to speak. Contains a wide array of videos. A free account is required.

Chiba, Shiga, Saga!
YouTube link to one of the videos I showed at orientation. There are some related ones, but watch out as some contain language. Mostly the word “shit” but, I digest.

World of Golden Eggs Season 1 & Season 2
This show probably got me jump started into Japanese humor and comedy. Completely bizarre and even questionable at times the series does not disappoint. The exact episode I showed was episode 15 from Season 2.

I’m sure I missed a lot. There’s a lot out there. Some of it is of questionable quality, but I firmly stand behind those I linked above.

Best of luck in your studies!

Ah, passwords. The bane of many a child with sloppy handwriting and impatience. I can’t remember when I first saw the game Kid Icarus, but I think my friend Paul had it. It was a weird looking game. Really colorful monsters with a pitch black background. And that’s all I remember seeing. It always felt like one of those games Nintendo wanted you to like but no one was sure if they did. Pit, the protagonist, was in the Captain N show. I also remember reading about the game in Nintendo Power several times, so it isn’t as if the game wasn’t pushed. I didn’t have it, though, and my aforementioned friend was the only person I remember having it.

Pit and his game felt like a bastard child that no one wanted. The game never became a series and drifted off into oblivion until Pit was brought back for Super Smash Brothers Brawl and now for one of the first Nintendo 3DS games as we have recently learned. Which, to be fair, looks pretty dang cool. Almost like Sin & Punishment but with angels and limited flying. I’ll probably get it with my 3DS if it’s a launch title.

But what of the original game?

From what I know about the NES version of the Kid Icarus, the above password is one that lets you jump ahead to the final boss fight completely powered up. The Japanese version of Kid Icarus, known as The Mirror of Palutena, was a Famicom Disk System game, meaning it had no need for passwords or confusing button presses to continue after death¹. This is the version I played², so did not get the average experience that most Western gamers did. I also got it about 20 years later, but let’s not be too picky on the details here.

That said, I went into the game knowing many people hated it and left loving the little bastard. It’s a weird game, but a fun one. The challenge is balanced in a way that it actually feels like you are really becoming stronger as you proceed. This sounds like a given for any game, but in this case it really feels like you go from a complete weakling to a crusher of the damned. Honestly, I’m not sure if that the later levels are actually easier or if it’s just because of the power-ups gained along the way, but I’d wager it’s a combination of the two. It’s just a really pronounced feeling in this game.

It’s such a mash up of other game types that I can’t help but think this is what polarized a lot of folk against the game. Horizontal and vertical scrolling levels with fiendish jumps, particularly in the vertical levels are combined with dungeon levels to explore every four stages comes off as a sweet combination. The shooting requires a good deal of precision especially considering your shots do not go very far and usually pack not much of a punch. And the aforementioned exploration levels add a nice change of pace. They do, however, contain one thing that can only be described as pure terror.

This one thing, something that every gamer from this game’s generation should know even if they didn’t play the game, is the Eggplant Wizard. These assholes toss eggplants which, if strike you, turn you into an eggplant. It is perhaps one of the most annoying status aliments I have ever experienced in a game. You cannot attack. Your only option is to find the hospital where a kind lady will remove the curse. This may not sound that bad, but when you are exploring a dungeon and suddenly walk into a room and an eggplant flies into your face a sense of terror unlike any other sets in. Only one thing goes through your mind.

I must avoid this vegetable.

Failing to do so, you may as well restart the stage right then and there. Sure, you could hop around and make your way to a hospital. But you’re an eggplants. It’s embarrassing. The music that plays while you are inflicted brings even more shame. It really is degrading. Nothing is as satisfying as successfully dodging the barrage of eggplants and getting the necessary shots at the wizards to take them out and continue your journey.

I mentioned prior that it is a short game. And it is. In total there are 13 stages, none of them particularly long. But learning the way the game plays and being able to make it through these stages does take some time. Time that feels well rewarded once you finally make it to the end of the stage.

Despite playing it many, many years past its original release date, I found Kid Icarus to be a great game. Quirky to be sure, but a fun game well worth the time spent.

1. Actually, there’s no reason the NES version had this. But let’s pretend this is the reason.
2. Via the Wii’s Virtual Console.

Welcome to my currently in progress play diary or Last Ranker!

There was urine on the seat.

Now, that’s fine. I’m not going to sit down to urinate in public, so I’m perfectly fine with just doing my business and getting on. It’s just pee, and I’m about to see some of my own. I will note, although, that it always seems that someone else’s urine is an unfortunate shade of yellow. Unfamiliar and terrifying.

My issue is when I leave the bathroom and someone is waiting to use it. Now they will assume I am the culprit soiling toilet seats and leaving them that way with reckless abandon. It makes me sad to think someone might only remember me as “That guy who peed all over the toilet.”

But it gets worse.

I’m not going to clean it up. He’s not going to clean it up. And the guy after him is only going to assume the previous man left the urine there. This creates an unnecessary chain of urine related worries that I’m just not sure if our health care infrastructure is prepared to deal with. There is, of course, one simple solution.

Your bladder, you’re wiping.

You, seat urinators, are causing a vast quantity of unneeded distress in the world. Stress that is ruining lives and reputations. Not to mention making minimum wage earning folks wipe up your pee. Sure, they have gloves and chemicals, but that doesn’t make it any better. Clean up your pee. Make the world a better place. This should be what Smokey the Bear teaches children. No one is really starting forest fires these days, anyway.

Oh, and I didn’t find the drinks, which is why I’m writing about real urine rather than drinks that possibly taste like it.

Finished? If your answer is “Video games, the 80s and Japan” then congratulations! Go play Game Center CX Arino’s Challenge right now. It was released in the states as “Retro Game Challenge.” Last year saw the release of the sequel, which has unfortunately not gotten a localization just yet. But the sequel is just as awesome as the original, rest assured.

Game Center CX is a Japanese television program about various video game related thingamabobs, but the most interesting segments are the challenges performed by the host Shinya Arino. These challenges are generally to complete older video games. Since Arino isn’t the best gamer ever, rather than watching someone completely dominate a game, we are presented with an average gamer trying his best to complete games. The results are often hilarious and always entertaining. The show coupled up with Bandai-Namco to produce these two games based on this premise, and they are awesome.

You, the main character of these games, are transported back in time and are forced to play old video games to free yourself. You’re helped along the way by magazine hints and tips and the occasional wise-crack from a young Arino. Unlike the show, the challenges aren’t to beat the games¹ but rather perform certain tasks or get to a certain point in the game. While not the most elaborate challenges, why the game really shines is because of how amazing the games made for these games are.

Although the show features classics, the games feature games made specifically for them. GCCX2 starts off with a Pac-Man clone, and then features a wide variety of games including a Kung-Fu clone, Tetris-clone, text adventure, RPG, platformer and more. The best part is that these games do not simply replicate the experience, but often add new ideas that make them fantastic games in their own right, games that I would have likely bought on their own were they released back in the 8-bit and 16-bit eras. To have these games all together in one place is quite a marvelous thing.

That said, it’s not without some problems. You have to the challenges in order and complete all challenges in one game before you can play the next. Were they to give you a few games at once with challenges that could be done in any order I believe they would have captured the feeling they were going for in a much more efficient way. It’s easy to get stuck in one game and loose a bit of motivation to keep playing the game since there is only one way to proceed. This ended up being less of an issue for me in the GCCX2 as it felt like the first one, although I’m not entirely sure why. Perhaps it was being used to the pattern from the first game.

All in all that ends up being a minor issue because the games are so fun that I didn’t really mind pushing through to complete the challenges. Were we to get a third game in the series, I would hope they opened it up a little more like I suggested, but were it to be similar to its predecessors, as long as it had quality games in it, I would be pleased.

1. Although such a challenge does exist at the end.

Six years of television, which I viewed in five, makes LOST easily the longest television program I have ever watched during its original run. It was quite a ride, one with a good deal of ups and downs, but definitely one I won’t be forgetting anytime soon. When it ended last month, it really felt as if a phase of my life had ended as well. It was a show that entertained me in ways I never thought possible and even managed to create¹ some friendships that I would have otherwise never had.

It was a great show.

The ending of the show pleased me. I knew it would be hard to end, but the last scene was brilliant. Now, the build up to that may not have been perfect, but it was honestly better than I expected. When they finally went down to the nitty gritty and explained the island, I knew it wouldn’t please me. It’s one of those things that was probably better left unexplained. Yet, so many people were clamoring for an explanation. Perhaps even I would have been disappointed had there been none.

I do think, although, that perhaps giving an explanation to everything would be a bit too much which is why I’m glad some things weren’t clarified entirely. Leaving me with a few things to still mull about was a good idea. A lot of my enjoyment of the show was not just in the viewing the mysteries, but the thinking about what possible explanation there was. Really, I didn’t care all that much what the explanation was, but it was the process of consuming and then digesting these mysteries that made up a lot of the fun of the show.

That, and the characters. What a cast. Seriously. Never did I love or hate characters as deeply as I did those in LOST. The best part that I’ve only gathered by talking to other viewers of the show is how much they managed to appeal to a wide variety of people. Everyone I know prefers or dislikes characters differently from me. What a wide variety you as a character creator have to make to achieve such a thing!

I’m not going to sit here and bore you with my own theories on the show. I’ve seen enough arguments about the ending already to know that not everyone is going to feel the same way. What I will say, is that if you watched LOST and gave up at some point, jump back in and watch it to the end. I found where the creators of the show ended up to be amazing considering where and what they started with.

And for those of you who have yet to watch it, I do heartily recommend it. You’re lucky because the way it was ended any “spoilers” don’t really ruin the journey, which is easily the best part of LOST. You’re also lucky because I found LOST best watched in clumps, where the starting and stopping was entirely at my discretion. Watching it weekly caused a few annoyances, especially in the earlier seasons where the pacing was not as brisk. Having to wait to watch this show definitely dragged it down for me. But when I was able to take a season and watch it at my own pace, I enjoyed it much, much more. Now that people are able to do that with the entire series, I’d say it is easily the best time to give LOST a shot if you ever had the slightest curiosity.

It’s a long show, but I doubt you’ll regret it. I know I don’t.

1. And endanger!

And people would love to take away that chance from you¹.

I just played Portal last month for the first time. Truth be told, I already knew that “the cake is a lie” and that “something” happened. So when the big twist occurred in the game I couldn’t help but not be as shocked as the players who got to the game day one. Nonetheless, it was quite an interesting move. Until someone told me, I had no idea Portal was just billed as a simple puzzle game.

Simple may not be the correct word, but at its core the game is quite simple. In the game there are two types of portals. Blue and orange². Enter the
blue portal and come out of the orange. Enter the orange and come out of the blue. What can go through the portals is not just limited to the player character, though. Energy bullets, boxes, even melodramatic gun turrets³ can be sent through. So simple, yet these kind of simple rules always allow for complex puzzles to be created. Since gravity matters, all sorts of extravagant jumps had to be made. Since you eventually had the ability to create both portals on most surfaces, accuracy was required to guide those energy bullets to their proper energy bullet receiving container. So Portal was definitely more than just a puzzle game, although the action bits were minimal at best.

I didn’t find any of the puzzles particularly challenging in the sense of figuring out what to do. Doing it, although, could often be quite the pickle. Being able to time my jumps or creation of the portals was not the norm in the later half of the game and I found myself having to try again and again. This, although, did not diminish my fun. What did, although, was the pacing of the game. Portal is short. I think it took me about four hours logged, and I’m not sure if that counts the time lost when replaying after death. But for a short game, it felt like it took too long to get going. It introduced the various gameplay mechanics bit by bit, which is great for learning, but for the first quarter, if not more, of the game my interest was diminishing puzzle after puzzle. Finally with the introduction of the aforementioned turrets did my interest start to pick up again. And truthfully, it was just in time. Whether or not this was a design choice by Valve is a mystery to me.

My last complaint is the end of the game. After going through this game solving puzzles the entire time to have a “boss fight” at the end felt like a bit of a cheat. Out of place. Sure, this boss fight was a bit like a puzzle in its own right, but still a bit too action based for my taste. It didn’t feel right. That’s not to say I have the answer to what would feel right. Ending the game after a puzzle like the ones prior to it may not have been as satisfying as destroying a boss, especially considering what the boss was in terms of the game world. So perhaps in terms of what Portal was going after, the end was proper. I just felt like something was a bit off about it.

So, they’re making Portal 2, I hear. This has a great chance of being fun, I’ll grant it that. But being anywhere near Portal in terms of taking the experience and giving a twist seems like a task only the brave or stupid would take. Valve will probably not manage to entertain people in the way they expect to be entertained after the first one. But then again, given that the first Portal used its twist to give exactly the opposite of what was expected, maybe that is entirely the point here.

1. The irony here is that I’m going to potentially spoils some of you. Such is life!
2. Red?
3. Yeah, it kinda freaked me out when they started talking.

Why?

Final Fantasy 13 is one kind of RPG that I’ve always wanted.

To me, some of the most fun in the Final Fantasy games have been the bosses. They tend to feature a pattern, almost like a musical rhythm, that repeats over and over. Your job is to get in sync with this rhythm and stay in sync. Doing so will allow you to deplete the boss’s health points before it brings you to the game over screen. FF13 managed to make every battle like this. Basically, a boss rush RPG. I’d had the thought before and was quite shocked when I realized Square-Enix gave it to me.

What is wrapped around this system is a set of multimedia that ranges from average to excellent. The graphics and music are quite splendid and I’ll leave that at that. The story I could take or leave, but it at least managed to pique my curiosity enough to want to see the ending which is all I really ask. The characters were a tricky part. They are all well known and defined stereotypes, but they played off each other so well. Character types I disliked were treated by character types I liked the exact way I wanted to see them behave. So while it was not a unique blend of character flavors, the orchestration was quite marvelous.

The game proceeds in quite a linear fashion. In story and character progression. Only near the end of both parts of the game do you get some wiggle room. This is where I can understand some great frustration from players of the game. If Final Fantasy 10′s linearity in both game and character progression didn’t please you then FF13′s would do no better, I’d think. But for me, the path that they gave felt so natural, so inclined, that I didn’t feel restricted at all. Had I freedom this would have been the path I’d taken anyway. I never wanted to stop and smell the roses in this game. When given the chance to explore I only wanted to press onwards. When given the chance to branch my characters out, I wanted them to stay on the path they had been given from the start. This natural feeling smoothed over any negative feelings I might have had in any other game with such a rigid progression system.

What really won me over is the game’s fast paced battle system that let me feel like I had exactly the amount of control I wanted. When trying to get into that aforementioned rhythm, being able to select my commands and set up my party member’s AI to help me was entirely painless. While this led to the occasional sense of being overwhelmed, it was being able to keep myself right on the edge of being overwhelmed that gave me the most joy.

If I had a complaint it would be that the game was a bit too slow in unveiling all of the many layers to its battle system, but this had a benefit. While proceeding with the game it often gave you a predetermined party of characters who at that point had a limited selection of classes to choose from. What this meant was that you were forced to work within very finely defined rules to proceed. The key point, though, is that the player is forced to try out many different character and class combinations that I’m confident I would never have bothered with had I complete freedom from the start. By easing me into the system by the time I had freedom to choose my own characters and classes I felt more than comfortable with the game.

So while I was surprised with what Square-Enix actually did with Final Fantasy and how much I liked it, what really threw me for a loop was how difficult the game was. I cannot recall any other game in the Final Fantasy series where I perished as much as this one. Getting to that rhythm was extremely important because being unable to meant my quick doom. Sometimes it felt as if the game was too difficult or unfair, but with a bit of thought to those combinations the game forced me to try previously led to my victory. And I loved it.

Sadly, all was not perfect with this game. They decided to not give money for battles which meant you had to rely on what was given in treasure chests or selling items for your cash. This wouldn’t have been an issue were it not for an overly complex weapon and accessory upgrade system. I won’t bother getting into it, but not being a fan of item creation systems to begin with, this clunky system was easily my least favorite part of the game. Thankfully, I was able to ignore it until the end where I had to use it to give me a boost to do the damage needed for the final boss.

Final Fantasy 13 will never be listed as my favorite Final Fantasy game. But it managed to give a unique experience that I’m glad I had. Would I want the next game in the series¹ to be exactly like 13? No, I’d actually like to see them try something else. Maybe work the Final Fantasy 12 formula into something else that I’d enjoy. But with this game I’m glad to see different things being tried with a series that by all means could quite easily just be phoning it in.

1. That’s not an MMO… Damn FF14

I’m going to start again with my daily uploads. But I didn’t want to lose the photos I had taken. So I uploaded the best of the bunch and plan on getting dailiy photos uploaded again. Wish me luck!

As always, here’s my flickr link.