Brainwaves of Sken

First of all, a note about publius.org, which I linked to in my previous post – it’s so neat. I rarely run into sites, ESPECIALLY “.org” sites, where everything is clean and transparent and easy to use. Now, I noted an error when trying to look at “voting machines by region”, but since I already knew my voting machine, it was easy to look it up by name. Other than that, it shows -exactly who you will be voting for, what their campaign contributions are, and the constitutional amendments up for grab in the language you’ll be seeing at the polls. If you live in Michigan, I highly recommend the site.

Unrelatedly, I spent almost my entire evening last night playing Breath of Fire II for SNES. It’s a game I never got around to, back in the day, and man, I regret that now. Playing it on an emulator means I can check a few boxes and get some improved graphics, too – a little interpolation of the pixels, and you’ve got something close to double the resolution of the original. It’s not as good as if it was programmed that way originally, but it’s still neat to see.

As far as gameplay goes – you start out as a child suddenly ‘orphaned’ by a warp to another dimension (yes, it’s an RPG), where you quickly become friends with another orphan who tends to steal things. You don’t play an -entirely- good character, and there’s a little jewel in the corner of the conversation screen that gives you an idea for the quality of person you’re talking to, and how they feel about you. There’s even the concept of race subtly interwoven into the story, where one of the main characters has black wings, and her own family/society rejects her because of them.

I figured it’d be a reasonably quick little game, but it isn’t at all. I’ve collected -many- new friends, and we’ve just built this house in a hidden part of the world which has even more rooms to fill. I keep meeting people across the world who talk about being homeless, and I really wonder if we’re going to have a town build up around us. That would be so neat! Also, there’s clearly beaches across the world that have no function right now -I’m betting we’ll get a ship before long.

Anyway, I really enjoy the slow build of camraderie amongst journey companions. Too many games don’t take time to develop that (just like most tabletop RPG games assume you’ll come up with your own reasons for hanging out). When it turned out we were building a headquarters to live in together, I started thinking about my own friends, and how many many times over the years we’ve fantasized about buying out the train station and spending millions to renovate it for our friends to live in. It just, y’know, gaveme a warm fuzzy I wouldn’t have otherwise had.

I played it just about all day yesterday, and I’m definitely not done. We’re definitely moving past the days of 40-hr avg. RPGs, so it’s kinda nice to jump back in time and experience a developed mission.

I had to explain a few things to my boss about video for the project coming in next week. It’s major, and we don’t have capture hardware here, so we really need them to provide the data for us. It’s been fun to hear him say he doesn’t get it, but use my words with other people he’s speaking to about the project. Who doesn’t like being told they’re the expert in the building on something?

PS – emailing my posts ALWAYS ends up giving me dozens of places where it eliminates the spacing between words. *sigh*

~ by Skennedy on November 6, 2006.

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