Life - My Very First Convention

One of my dreams as a nerdy geek* was to go to some sort of a hobby convention/event, such as a video game or comic one. Comic-con over in California would have been too big for my tastes, but something smaller and/closer like a Retropalooza or Games Done Quick. I was especially hopeful when I heard that AGDQ 2017 was set to be in Virginia. Maybe, I reasoned, I could convince my family to go on vacation in Virginia, and I could get to see a tiny bit of it live.

However, two months ago, one of my pixel paintings was seen by one of the gentleman in charge of the Southeast Game Exchange. Long story short, I hear about this from the manager of 1Up Video Games, and sign up for a table at the event.

Southeast Game Exchange Pics (Before and During)

Since it was my first convention, and as a vendor no less, I had little idea of how many pieces to bring. Thankfully, I had a few Sharpie drawings on hand to use as display models. In the end, my assumption of selling out of art was a bit presumptuous. But that's getting a little too far ahead of myself.

The Hilton's event area is a nice, cozy size. With the amount of booths/tables there, seeing everything didn't take too long. My table was furthest right from the main entrance, so I had a good view of the entire event. To my left was a gentleman with a mass of SNES games (and other stuff), lovely perler art, and a couple of kids entering the cosplay contest. To my right was a rather large display from the Tokyo Toybox. (Oddly enough, I never got around to checking out that booth, despite it being right next to me.

There were several booths from various video game merchants, such as Video Game Cavern, the aforementioned 1Up Video Games, and various other independent sellers. If it weren't for the events like the cosplay contest and various gaming competitions, I would have taken it for a jockey lot in a really fancy location. (And I mean that in a good way. I love the jockey lot.) There's so many games, even if I had a bit more money, deciding what to get, and from whom to get it, would have been a very difficult choice.

But it wasn't, since there were at least 2 copies of Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest available for me to get. I managed to snap the second one up before it disappeared.

Now I won't go to jail for playing the worst best FF game!

One of my favorite things was seeing other people's art. As I said before, the guy next to me had some rad perler bead constructions. I passed a vendor selling water color paintings. Yet another person had knitted type dolls available. One interesting booth was full of various buttons and lanyards with characters and symbols on them. Clearly, I will have to step up my game for next year's event.

I didn't go to many of the other events, since I wanted to stay around my table, but I did get to see some of the cosplay people pass by. Next to me were Freddy Fazbear/Purple Man and Link. One person went all out with a full-on Pyramid Head costume. It looked quite heavy, so whoever was wearing it was really dedicated. Other notable appearances included a mom dressed as a member of the Survey Corps from the manga and anime Attack on Titan, Darth Vader, a Stormtrooper, and Star Fox. Again, if I try for the cosplay contest next time, I'll have my work set out for me.

To finish this piece, I'll mention that I only managed to sell two pieces that day, only one being to a person I didn't know. However, the same gentleman showed a shot of my pieces in a vlog he did about the event later on. (You can watch it here. He also gives a nice summary of the goings-on.)

Hopefully, I'll update this article whenever I can get links to photos of the event. Until then, be sure to look forward to Day 3 of my 5 Day Dictionary Challenge!

----

Top photo from http://southeastgameexchange.com

* = In my experience, nerd = someone who likes stuff like comic books, video games, etc... geek = someone who gets hype about seemingly silly stuff. So I get hype about silly video game stuff. :D

Five Day Dictionary Challenge - "Save"

(Part two of a five part writing challenge!)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"You can never save enough" -Jirard "The Completionist" Khalil

A very simple word, and very meaningful for gamers, bankers and theologians alike. (I'll admit, I kind of cheated when picking this word. It was the same page, though, so I'll let it slide.)

For decades, one of the most important features of a game is the ability one's progress, be it a platformer, text adventure or "visual novel." After all, games were longer and often had in-depth stories, unlike much of the quarter-guzzling arcade machines of yesteryear.

One of my earlier experiences with saving (or not, as the case was) involved my first major experience in console gaming: the Sega Dreamcast. We purchased it later in the lifespan of the system, and one of the first games I got was Sonic Adventure.

For a few weeks, we had not yet purchased a memory card for the system. That meant that every time I played the game, I'd be playing through the first few stages again and again. Don't get me wrong - I enjoyed the stages - but it was rather nice when we got the memory card and I was able to finally make forward progress. (What made it annoying was that cutscenes weren't skippable on the original...)

Still, one mustn't forget to save a lot, as the opening quote reminds us. RPGs in particular are a minefield for running into random encounters that could potentially wipe out your party; or crossing past "points of no return" in the story. Being able to save before major boss fights is a veritable godsend to many games, RPGs among them.

There's also "save states," as seen on most emulators, allowing one to save at any particular instant in a given game. These ones are dangerous, as saving at the wrong spot could ruin an entire run. (Plus, some people would consider it "cheating," of a sort!)

I haven't had any particularly gruesome horror stories about not saving, but what about you dear reader? Anyway, I'll sign off before this becomes a mere list of different types of saving and how great it can be.

And remember, you can never save enough!

Five Day Dictionary Challenge - "Jibe"

In a bid to write some new articles for this blog, I decided to make an attempt at a writing prompt. A personal writing "challenge," if you will. So I grabbed a random dictionary from my shelf, found five random words, and came up with it. (Not a very exciting story, hopefully the results will be a bit more interesting.)

The "Five Day Dictionary Challenge" as I'm tentatively calling it, consists of five days of creative content, inspired by five random words found in a given dictionary. To allow for a bit of freedom, I won't require that the word be used in the work, only that I should indicate the inspiration for the piece.

Prologue aside, let's get to it!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So the first word I've drawn is "jibe." For looking it up, I learned of a nautical meaning, having to do with maneuvers at sea. However, I'm sure most people use the definition having to do with "two or more things that agree or accord with one another."

So how to write about "jibe?"

"Say apple" -Wheatley

Food.

Specifically, fun combinations of it! I won't pretend to be a particularly good chef, but I've discovered a few combinations that my family has enjoyed. For instance, the usage of various fruit preserves in slow-cooked soups. A particular favorite is using a bit of apricot preserves in chicken stew.

Tastes better than it looks?

Another is the combination of apple and teriyaki sauce, particularly when cooked over stovetop. Adding the fruit to a beef skillet is particular tasty, and I imagine that it would be tasty to cook just the fruit and sauce together. The sweet of the fruit and the savory of the sauce combine to draw out the flavor of the other.

For when you don't want to pay a fortune for your fix

This last one's a bit of a "gimme," but the combination of chocolate and various types of nut butters. (I use a picture of non-Nutella nutella because the "real" stuff is so expensive! :P ) However, an additional combination on top of that is faux-Nutella and grape jelly.

So there you have it. Three combinations of foods that jibe with one another. Thanks for reading, and be sure to look forward to the next entry in the "Five Day Dictionary Challenge!"

YouTube - OST and Cookies: Sonic & Knuckles Collection

Language - On the Tale of a Word

The Weekend:
Recently, I had the privilege of purchasing the popular indie RPG, Undertale. I was suitably heart-warmed and amused, so I decided that I eventually needed to make a video on it. A review would be too obvious and overdone, so I opted to look at some of the music instead. After all, the soundtrack has 100+ tracks, it shouldn't be too hard, right?

Note: spoilers for all routes follow below, maybe. If you haven't played it, then "Escape" or you'll have a bad tEM, etc... etc...

I figured that it would be good to get in another episode of 16ths before I tried making a video with a different focus. Undertale had several short musical cues I could have looked at, but I chose one pretty late in the game. The track is called "Bergentrückung," a short, non-looping track that plays at the beginning of the fight with the Monster King Asgore. Simple procedure: read about the game, the composer, look at the piece in context and in terms of itself. Easy!

Or maybe not.

Almost none of my usual resources helped. The internet search turned up a single Wikipedia page and a few random Reddit posts. The library I was hanging out in had no German books, and none of the books even used the word, or the supposed English translation. Even after emailing an English and music professor, I was still fairly uncertain.

The wikis indicated that it means "king in the mountain," but the online translators showed "mountain rapture." None of the literature or mythology books mentioned it, but the collection was small to begin with.

Monday:
In a fortunate turn of events, a friend of mine (who works at BMW) had some German speaking friends visiting on Sunday. One of them confirmed for me that Bergentrückung does in fact mean "Mountain rapture." I am still at a loss as to how it could be translated as "king in the mountain," or "king under the mountain." Interestingly, her initial word for the second part (entrückung) was something akin to "escape." Both "escape" and "rapture" came up in my initial online search.

TV - My "Big Three" People Categories

Just last month, the three CW superhero shows concluded their respective seasonal runs. (And Supergirl concluded the month before that - but it wasn't CW at the time.) All four shows full of fun characters, stupid characters, evil characters, etc... got me thinking about my favorite character.

But it's not so easy to narrow it down to just one favorite. For an example, on Prinson Break, the character called "T-Bag" is the worst person ever, but I admire the ability of the actor Robert Knepper to deftly portray such a scumbag. On the opposite side (some might say the reverse) of the spectrum is Kara Danvers, aka Supergirl. Her actor, Melissa Benoist, is just as good at being super sweet and adorable.

So, favorite person (in-universe, I don't follow celebrities' personal lives), favorite character and favorite actor. Heaver spoilers to follow, probably. So be careful.

As mentioned previously, Kara is the best person out of the four shows. She carries on despite setbacks and an awful boss, all while being what the internet calls a "cinnamon roll too good for this world." Plus, there is a good bit of character development, what with being the hero of National City and one of a handful of survivors of Krypton and all.

However, in terms of character development, I'm going with Mick Rory, aka Heatwave (and earlier/later, Chronos.) Starting off, Heatwave was just a pyromaniac that the Flash had to fight. Over the course of Legends of Tomorrow, however, his character shows more emotions than just fiery rage. Motivations are revealed and relationships established. (I don't know how comics fans feel, but I found the Chronos-is-Mick plot point quite interesting.) Considering the ending of LoT's first season, it'll be interesting to see how they work with his character.

For favorite actor, it was a toss-up between Stephen Amell as various "versions" of Oliver Queen during Arrow, and Tom Cavanagh, as several iterations of Dr. Harrison Wells. Stephen manages to draw distinct characters in pre-island and post-island Oliver. Nonetheless, I admire Cavanagh's abilities a little more. (Probably because Reverse-Flash is kinda cool.) He plays Eobard-as-Wells, the original Earth-1 Wells, prickly Earth-2 Wells, and E2 Wells pretending to be Eobard-as-Wells. (And a shapeshifting meta, but that's not as important.) That's a lot of similar, but very different, guys to be in one show!

Just a bit of rambling as I look forward to the next season of shows, particularly Flash and Supergirl.

Cubing - 3x3x3 AKA The "Gateway" Cube

I'm not quite sure how it started. It probably started with one of the various videos that Numberphile did on combinations possible on a Rubik's Cube. Somehow I got diverted to a random review or unboxing (a genre of video I never thought I'd come to appreciate). And then I finally got my election check.

All events conspiring to start me down the road to twisty puzzle inundation. (See, I say twisty puzzle because Rubik's is only one of many brands now.) I tried searching out the Rubik's Cube lost somewhere around the house, but it's probably for the best that I hadn't found it, and not just because the original design is super hard to use. After having seen several cool-looking, fast-moving cubes, I just had to have one.

The pink is milder in person

From what I can tell, cubing is much bigger in China. As such, all of my cubes are from prominent speed-cube brands. My first cube is the MoYu WeiLong - specifically, the stickerless pink variant. Since I don't have to worry about it being competition legal and whatnot, I wanted a non-standard color scheme.

Learning how to solve it was pretty rough. Despite being (what I now know to be) the second easiest NxNxN cube to solve, it took me a week or two to learn and memorize the sets of moves known as "Beginner's Method." The 3x3 became super easy to solve.

These colors, however, are worse in person

I also got a cheaper 3x3 to carry around out and about. Unlike the WeiLong, which I splurged on, the Shengshou Legend was cheap and the quality matched. It wasn't as smooth and the stickers were awful, both in terms of thickness and color scheme. Still, it turned well enough.

After several weeks of playing with the 3x3x3, I finally decided to graduate up. The 4x4x4, I heard, had a point at which it could be solved as a 3x3. It'd be no problem to learn the additional stuff and master that too, right?

I replaced the white stickers with black

Almost.

Thankfully, owing to my experience with the 3x3, learning to solve the 4x4 only took a day, more or less. I SAY more or less because going up to the 4x4 brings a new problem: the dreaded parity error/problem. Long story short, these are situations in which cause certain cubies (the individual cubes on a puzzle) to be in the wrong place. The usual algorithms won't work, so you have to use super long and complex ones to fix the problem.

It's no fun.

One of the fun things of 3x3x3s is being able to amaze and astound random people by solving it multiple times while they watch. With the 4x4x4, I'm just not confident enough that I can fix any random parity error it gives me.

Anyway, I just wanted to share. Cubing is a new hobby for me, but a potentially risky one: I'm at 3 cubes but I'm already looking into getting a 2x2x2, 5x5x5 or even a Megaminx (a dodecahedron).

The challenging and difficult 1x1x1 is also a possibility.

---- ---- ---- ----
Photos from thecubicle.us and speedcubeshop.com

Final Fantasy Quest - The Best Final Fantasy Game Ever Made (Legit, 100%)

Instead of finishing the repetitive Final Fantasy IV: The After Years or the farcical Final Fantasy V, I opted to play the superior Final Fantasy game. No, not VI, VII or even awkward-laughing X. I mean, of course, Final Fantasy Mystic Quest for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

Released in the US on October 5, 1992, Final Fantasy Mystic Quest was not at all given to us because the developers thought we sucked at JRPGs and need a basic game to train with. Rather, it is the true pinnacle which all true Final Fantasies strive for.

Mah boi!

It is the epic tale of Benjamin (most likely an orphan) and his quest to save the four elemental crystals. Like any Final Fantasy protagonist is wont to do. To cut out the fussiness of managing 5 players at a time, the player is given no more than 2 characters to control at any time. And unlike a certain other game, the game is not automatically over if the main character gets KO'd!

Ahem.

In all seriousness, FFMQ is at best decent, and at worst mediocre. The preceding year saw the release of Final Fantasy IV with its epic scope and (relative to a lot of other games at the time) intricate plot of friendship, betrayal and battle. Enemies didn't wait for your turn and bosses were tough. Surely the next game in the series would kick everything up to an 11? (Or, at least, a V).

Enter Mystic Quest. Few would consider this a worthy follow up to IV, or any entry in the series, for that matter. Gameplay was oversimplified and almost nothing like that of the "superior" entries in the series. To my knowledge, there hasn't been a remake of it like the other games.

And yet.

Perhaps time has afforded a more balanced perspective. Mystic Quest, despite not being the amazing V, is still worth considering. For instance, you can jump. There's tools that affect the world map, like a claw-shot or axe. Partners can either be automatic or controlled manually. While I won't apologize for the game's deficiencies, it's unfair to vilify the game merely because it's not IV or V.

What were the things I liked? One notable example is the Focus Tower. The game has no over world in the traditional sense, but the Focus Tower serves as a hub for the different areas to which Benjamin goes. Inside, there are several doors. These doors are unlocked as the game progresses. I admit, it was fun to wonder where each door would lead, and then finally unlock it.

One of the first doors seen, but the last unlocked

Another cool feature are the battle sprites of the enemies. Even in the glorious oeuvre that is Final Fantasy VI, very few enemies have more than one battle sprite. Not so in MQ. Almost all enemies have two sprites, one normal and one battle-damaged. Bosses have more, anywhere between 3-4.

Good thing ol' Flamey had a few spare ribs, eh?

Where's Interceptor?

I wouldn't recommend it before V or VI, but if you have the time and are so inclined, go ahead and give Mystic Quest a shot.

I win again again

---- ---- ---- ----

Whew! This article had been sitting around unfinished for a while! In the meantime, I tried to get a little further in The After Years, but I'm still stuck before a particular encounter with the Mysterious Girl on the moon. At least I get more time to play as Golbez! And I started into VI and Crisis Core.

But enough rambling, I'm off to play that free demo of Final Fantasy XV!

Final Fantasy Quest - The Search for Silly

It's hard to believe the amount of expressions that can be expressed in 16-bit form.

Until you play Final Fantasy V (FFV) for the first time.

Long story short, my favorite aspect of FFV are the characters. Coming off the heels of the played-straight serious FFIV, the zany hijinks of Bartz and crew are a nice change. Yes, sad stuff happens in the game, but the overall tone is more light-hearted. This game is the birthplace of Final Fantasy's best recurring character, Gilgamesh. (Also, heavy spoilers to follow after these lovely pictures).

Haha! It's not like I wanted you to show up, or anything...

*gasp!* The fiend!?!

If you're familiar with this game, what I say next will be no surprise. The job system is pretty rad. A dramatic improvement over the system in FFIII (more on that in a future article, hopefully) the job system in FFV allows a player to assign characters to whatever jobs they want. Skills mastered can be added to other jobs, so you can have a white mage that can brawl, or a monk that can heal everyone. Plus, once a job is fully mastered, it passes abilities on to the "Normal" class that you began as.

However, the best part about the job system is this:

Pirate ninja princess.

I'll say it again: pirate ninja princess. The pirate captain Faris, who is the best and most badass character in the party, can be a ninja too.

Plus, Square did the "pirate captain who is secretly a princess" thing a good ten years before Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.

Not such hot stuff anymore, huh!?

Story-wise, the game is somewhat predictable. The main focus, again, is trying to keep the four elemental crystals intact (and failing miserably). As I said above, the characters are the best part of FFV; namely, how they interact and react to people and events. They may be simple 16-bit sprite, but they are able to express a wide array of emotions.

What even is that pose, Faris?

There are even a number of optional spells and espers, like a few of the Bard's songs, some blue magic and the summons Shiva or Carbuncle. And unlike a few of FFIV's harder-to-get summons, these ones are actually worth finding.

Overall, this is one of the better entries in the series, and it is definitely a viable entry point for newcomers to the series. Even with the myriad of jobs, it is manageable to keep your party powerful, as all playable characters remain in the party, and which jobs you master depends on your particular play-style.

In the Faris screenshot, you could see that I had mastered all the jobs (barring Mime class). This is not a task I would advise someone to do, as it took hours of grinding to accomplish.

Anyway, I'm close to finishing it, having made a good bit of progress in World 3 (out of 3). Apologies for not getting to The After Years, I got stuck and put it aside for a bit. Because I know I love FFVI, I might pause before moving on to that entry.

Until next time, later guys!

Math - My Journey with Choose

In light of recent stormy/controversial political events, why not take a break with something that everyone loves? (Or hates, but how could you possibly hate it?)

Math!

Yes, math. Ever since undergrad, I'd always fancied myself something of a math enthusiast. I don't understand half the stuff, but it's endless fascinating.

Lately, I've been going at a random college textbook I have. College Algebra and Trigonometry (from 1984 no less!) has a nice spread of concepts, including the mystifying sigma notation and the methods for doing matrix operations. Important today, however, is an equation found on the inside cover:

AKA binomial equation, or binomial formula

My interest was piqued when a math channel, associated with my favorite math(s) channel, Numberphile, did a video on the "choose function," which used the above equation to figure out the number of ways objects in a subgroup could be arranged in the overall group.

That same mathematician talked about how spreadsheets could be great fun, so I decided to combine the ideas. Doodling various combinations of 7 choose 2, or 7 choose 5, I saw that some results were the same. For instance, there are 7 ways to choose 1 object in 7 objects, and there is the same number of ways to choose 6 objects in the same group of 7.

Confused? It'll be cleared up soon, don't worry.

Figuring out a general equation proved to be too difficult/require too much effort, so I leaved off doing that. However, observing that the numbers increased and decreased in a steady manner, I did the only logical thing: I made a bar graph from the data. Witness the beauty below:

Extra large for your viewing pleasure

If you do any work with statistics at all, you'll recognized this as the normal distribution. I could go on about how the choose function is related to binomial coefficients and Pascal's triangle, but that would be excessive and redundant, since they're all so closely related.

With my limited skills in mathematics, being able to put things together like this was really fun. For the skilled mathematician, something like this is a given. It is fascinating to be able to take a series of numbers, work some "magic" with them in a spreadsheet, and discover a relation I never knew before.

But I suppose that's the heart of math, then? Using the tools to discover new and cool things?

Anyway, I'll close before I ramble on too long.

Literature - "Suspension of Disbelief" is a Stupid Term

Very often, when one speaks of literature or writing - especially creative writing - the term "suspension of disbelief" or "willing suspension of disbelief" is wont to come up. In a fictional story, we are told, one must suspend his or her disbelief and enter the world of the narrative. The term is stupid and you shouldn't use it.

End of article.

...

Just kidding! The term is still stupid, but there is an excellent alternative, posited by the illustrious JRR Tolkien, no less! In his paper, "On Fairy Stories," Tolkien goes through an in-depth discussion of what Faerie is, what fairies are and are not, and various other topics related to the genre. Important for us are his thoughts on story-crafting in general.

"The moment disbelief aries, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside," Tolkien notes.

Rather than staying immersed in the narrative, you are ejected to the "real world." As Tolkien stated earlier in the paper, good writers are able to evoke "literary belief" in the reader. Only by becoming what Tolkien has termed a "sub creator" can an artist truly create a world to which a reader can ascribe any appreciable level of "Secondary Belief."

For instance, the sign of a good movie is being able to walk out of the theatre, discussing the movie in the terms and lingo of the characters themselves - and giving no thoughts such as "Well, this is a fictive universe, but..." Because the script writer did his or her job well, the viewer is not forced to consider the poor writing and be drawn out of the secondary world.

The idea of secondary belief is especially important to the genre of fantasy. As opposed to the "realistic" literature of the recent century, fantasy literature seeks to create a whole world of its own. Or, as in the case of Star Wars, an entire galaxy of its own. Walking out of the most recent Star Wars movie, my first thoughts were not "Who wrote that," but were decidedly more story based. In-universe, secondary belief type thoughts and conversations (I had gone with family) were the focus that day.

To truly enjoy literature, one must throw away the idea of merely accepting the "inaccuracies" of a fictional world. Instead, by holding a secondary belief, the literature, movie or TV show become alive for us.

----
Work cited: "On Fairy Stories," by JRR Tolkien

Gaming Chronicles - The Final Fantasy Quest

(Please note, there will be heavy spoilers for Final Fantasy IV [and a bit for VI] ahead. I know it's 20+ years old, but I just wanted to be courteous!)

One reason I got into composing and music in general is because of the tuneful work of Nobuo Uematsu. Additionally, Square is even now working on the Final Fantasy VII remake and Final Fantasy XV. What better time to begin a play through of the whole main series? It'd be a fun quest, I thought.

Rather than begin at the beginning, like most would, I began with the fourth entry in the series, Final Fantasy IV. (And it was partly inspired by the GDQ speed run of it at the recent GDQ.)

AKA Final Fantasy IV

I had attempted the game before, on my old Toshiba laptop, but had only gotten so far before quitting for some reason (it was college, so it might have been finals, leaving for the summer, etc...). I had played through 90% of Final Fantasy VI, so who knows.

Released in 1991, FFIV was the earliest Final Fantasy to give the characters ... well, actual character. In prior entries, the playable people were merely blank slates for the player to choose and name at will. However, in FFIV, each character has a defined identity, such as Dark Knight Cecil or his girlfriend Rosa. There's even a spoony bard!

Am I?

One of the things that I liked the most about FFIV is the character arc of Cecil, the main character. In the beginning, he is the Dark Knight, and does the dirty deeds of the Baron Kingdom. Well, we only see one, namely, the theft of the water crystal. Despite this, a few members of the Red Wings (the air force of Baron) object to the deed they had just done. Eventually, Cecil questions the king himself.

An interesting side note: in the original Japanese release, Cecil had a powerful attack called "Dark" or "Dar Wave" that damaged opponents at the cost of some HP. Although removed in the English release, it points to development in his character. As a Dark Knight, his ability is to take damage in order to harm others. Once he became a Paladin, however, his special ability is "Cover," which sacrifices HP to protect another from harm.

However, Cecil's redemption story arc is a bit shorter than it could have been. Even with the unintentional destruction of Mist, most of his arc is completed fairly early in the game. (Or, it felt early on to me.) Without getting too far ahead of myself, I'd just comment that Final Fantasy VI does a bit better job dealing with a lead character struggling with identity. (Both Cecil and Terra are half-human, half something else. Both initially death with being manipulated by a villainous force. Etc...)

What is this HR Giger doing in my Final Fantasy?

Overall, I had a nice time with the game. There were a few annoyances, though. For one, the encounter rate felt really high at times - especially in certain caves. The overall party was a mixed bag. It was cool to be able to use all sorts of characters, but a lot of them dropped out of the party, seemingly without warning. At least it wasn't Final Fantasy II in THAT regard, amiright?

This place was the WORST

For me, I had to do a bit of grinding in the later phases of the game. I didn't manage to acquire all the top weapons (in the final dungeon) but I did get all the major summons and most of the top-tier weapons. Overall, it's a pretty good game, but not a Final Fantasy title I'd start off with.

Tune in next time (hopefully) for a look at Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, an episodic sequel to this game released on mobile platforms.

I win!!

Gaming - Gotta Go Fast!

For the longest time, I completely ignored videos that were primarily watching other people play video games (so called "let's plays" to be exact.) However, during my senior year at college, I was a little bit more charitable. One of my favorite channels (The Completionist) was affiliated with its own LP channel. I discovered that (good) LPs were more than JUST gameplay, but commentary and incidental humour.

Then I discovered GDQ.

I'm sure I hadn't heard of speed-running up to that point, but it was probably for the best. Anytime a GDQ is going on, my sleep schedule is completely wrecked. But I'm getting ahead of myself! GDQ, or Games Done Quick, is a charity marathon run twice a year. Just a few days [weeks now] before this article went up, the winter GDQ, Awesome Games Done Quick, just wrapped up. (Mercifully, they finished around 3:00 AM this time.)

Particularly, I enjoy GDQ for commentary and glitches. If a game is large in scope, chances are there are some wonderful glitches allowing large portions of it to be skipped. For instance, the Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past can be completed in mere minutes by the use of a out-of-bounds glitch. On longer runs, I enjoy when the runner, or the group on the couch behind him or her, provide amusing and insightful information on the game at hand.

(I dunno why, but this was one of my favorite runs this year's AGDQ.) Plus, the charities they do the marathon for are good causes. This recent GDQ ran for the Prevent Cancer Foundation.

Speedruns can be beautiful, such as Super Mario 64 runs - specifically, the poetry of motion that occurs in any of the Bowser levels. Anything with good controls can lead to masterful exhibitions of dexterity and finesse. But enough talk.

Here is the current WR for Super Mario 64 0-star (as indexed on speedrun.com):

Stuff like that is probably why Super Mario 64 is at GDQ so often.

Anyway, that's just a few thoughts on speedrunning and what not. Thanks for reading.