Category: Pointlessness
<div class=\"postavatar\">
</div>
</div>
On 23rd July, the day it was released, I bought a copy of Dragon Quest IX. I played on it for a bit and then stopped. Not that there was anything wrong with it, you understand (on the contrary: it’s a very good game), but rather because I have a tendency to go through phases of playing things and not playing them, fickle man that I am.
Now though, I want to pick it up again, but I can’t exactly remember where I was up to. I always have this trouble with RPGs, and I must have restarted a whole load of them and lost hours of playing time just because I’ve forgotten where I’m up to and what I’m supposed to be doing (I’ve done it with Final Fantasy XII several times; one day I swear I’ll complete the sodding thing).
What RPGs really could do with is a ‘Previously on…’-type feature, like they have at the beginning of US dramas (usually recapping the entirety of the previous fifteen episodes). I’ve had a bit of a thought on what some of these could look like…
Previously on Final Fantasy VII…
Midgar, sector 7, 8, 9 or whatever.
CLOUD: SOLDIER rock, I really want to be in SOLIDER! Sephiroth is really cool!
Cut to scenes of Sephiroth massacring pretty much everyone in the Shinra building.
CLOUD: On second thoughts, maybe Sephiroth isn’t all that he’s cracked up to be.
Cut to Nibelheim.
TIFA: We grew up here, Cloud, don’t you remember?
CLOUD: Erm… not really.
TIFA: I really fancied you then, too, but for some reason you always fall for the ill-fated whinny damsel rather than the male-fantasy stereotype that I am. Look – I’m in a low-cut top even when it’s really, really cold and I have breasts that would surely hinder my fighting style!
CLOUD: Yeah, that’s great. Hey, what’s in this coffin thing?
VINCENT: It is – Vincent Valentine! I shall say very little throughout the course of this game supposedly so I appear cool and aloof, but mainly so that the writers don’t have to provide the dialogue for a character that a large proportion of players will never find.
CLOUD: Never mind – you’ll get Dirge of Cerberus all to yourself.
VINCENT: Aaarggghh!
Cut to City of the Ancients.
AERITH: I shall just sit here, completely exposed and on my own summoning the spell which should stop the all-powerful, psychotic evil bad guy from carrying out his sinister plot!
SEPHIROTH (for it is he): Hiiiiii-yaaaaaaa!
AERITH: Ooooh, pointy. (Dies.)
CLOUD: Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
TIFA: I’ve still got these breasts, you know.
Previously on Dragon Age: Origins…
Ostagar, before the DLC.
KING CAILAN: I cannot wait to fight those darkspawn! Surely my brash overconfidence and shiny gold armour will more than compensate for my lack of armed soldiers and complete absence of any strategy!
Cut to Cailan being butchered by darkspawn.
KING CAILAN: Oh, dear.
Cut to the Warden, Alistair, Morrigan and a Dog entering Lothering.
MORRIGAN: This is the town of Lothering. It is completely indiscernible from any other town you may have visited in any RPG ever.
WARDEN: Hey, look: a tavern!
MORRIGAN: See what I mean?
Cut to the tavern. A fight breaks out. Leliana joins in and shakes hand with the Warden. Cut to her singing in the camp, lips not quite in synch with the sound.
WARDEN: I don’t suppose you fancy sleeping with me, do you?
LELIANA: Sure thing, as long as you complete my sub-quest first.
WARDEN: (Pumps fist.) Achievement unlocked!
Cut to numerous other scenes of dialogue, often involving characters absolutely covered in blood despite having only killed one hurlock.
Previously on Mass Effect…
Eden Prime.
SHEPHARD: Come back here Saren, you dastardly fiend!
SAREN: Nyah, nyah – you can’t catch me!
SHEPHARD: Never mind, I shall stumble towards this scary-looking Prothean artifact instead.
ASHLEY: Are you sure that’s safe?
SHEPHARD: Yeah, of course. It’s not like it can telepathically communicate with me or anything.
Cut to the Citadel and an audience with the Council.
ASARI COUNCILLOR: You are a Spectre, Shephard. We’re giving you carte blanche to do pretty much whatever you like as long as you end up defeating the bad guy.
SHEPHARD: Cool. Do I get a badge or something?
Cut to the human embassy in the Presidium.
CAPTAIN ANDERSON: Quickly, Shephard, you must save the galaxy from the evil schemes of Saren before it’s too late! We don’t have much time!
SHEPHARD: No problem. Though, if it’s okay with you, I think I’ll spend hours driving around barren planets in my little tank-thing looking for random collectables.
Cut to the Normandy SR-1.
SHEPHARD: So… I can choose to sleep with the hot blue chick or the slightly racist human bird?
JOKER: Shouldn’t you really be out saving the galaxy from those giant killer robot things?
SHEPHARD: This is why you won’t even get laid in the sequel.
Previously on Kingdom Hearts…
SORA: I’m really happy here on my island which oddly has no parents and my friends Rikku and Kairi.
RANDOM ANNOYING FINAL FANTASY CHARACTERS: Don’t forget about us!
SORA: Er, yeah, sure. It’d be great to stay here forever. Nothing can go wrong!
Something goes wrong.
SORA: Oh no!
Cut to Traverse Town and the appearance of Donald and Goofy. They do funny Disney-esque things for a bit whilst Sora goes around beating Heartless up with his Keyblade.
SORA: These evil Heartless, I will stop them!
Cut to a montage of scenes from Kingdom Hearts 1, Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, Kingdom Hearts: 365/2 Days and Kingdom Hearts 2. At random points a voice-over can be heard muttering things about Ansem, Organisation XIII, Heartless, Nobodies and that kind of stuff.
SORA: None of this makes any sense!
LEON: And why aren’t I called Squall any more?
MICKEY MOUSE: Hot dog! Don’t worry, it’ll all be explained in Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep!
SORA: Will it?
MICKEY MOUSE: No.
<div class=\"postavatar\"></div>
</div>
I wish I knew where I was going. I don’t mean that in any kind of pompous, existential sense, I just mean that my sense of direction is shockingly bad. You could take a lemming, stick in a sack, spin it round and around until it was really disoriented and then dump it right in the middle of the most barren area of the Gobi Desert, and it would still probably be able to find it’s way to the nearest yurt quicker than I could.
My wife, Mrs. H., has an innate sense of which I’m extremely jealous, that tells her where she is and which way she needs to go to get to where she wants to get. I, on the other hand, could get lost in my own street. I purchased a sat-nav system several years ago, when they were still very expensive, after spending no less than ninety minutes driving around Nottingham trying to get to a building that I drove past on the wrong side of a dual-carriageway at least six times.
My lack of direction extends beyond the real world, too: just this morning I was playing on Mass Effect 2 and managed to get completely lost at one point, even though the section I was in was almost completely linear. I dread to think of the number of hours I’ve wasted over the years wandering aimlessly around virtual landscapes trying to find where I need to be. Sometimes, admittedly, it’s the game designers’ fault, but it’s usually just me being an idiot.
People like Mrs. H. who do have a kind of in-built GPS system can’t really comprehend what it’s like to not know where you’re going. If an effort to try and explain this, I have created the image below, the first in a probably one-part series of abstract diagrams showing what things look like in my head. This is what it feels like when I am trying to find somewhere…
What navigation is like in my head.
<div class=\"postavatar\"></div>
</div>
I heard on the news this morning that somebody (who turns out to be Nicholas Sze who works for Yahoo) has spent some time calculating pi to a staggering 2,000,000,000,000,000-and-a-bit digits. This is all very well, but it did rather make me wonder that, after you got past about the first thousandth number, couldn’t you just make up a bunch of random digits? I mean, is anybody really going to check? They’d need a pretty big calculator to type the number in, for starters.
This prompted me to create my own Random Pi Generator which you can hopefully see in the iFrame below, or by following this link here.
If you’re interested, you can also read the full news story at the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11313194
<div class=\"postavatar\"></div>
</div>
The Internet is a strange beast: it can horde information from millions of sources and store them potentially forever. On the other hand, it can also be strangely ephemeral; once a page has been updated then the old version is lost forever. That’s pretty much what happened to Back Yard.
It’s rather scary to realise that the original Back Yard was first published in 1997, which I think makes it older than Google. It was my second attempt at a website, after the frighteningly dull PC-1 which purported to be about computery things, but was actually just a whole heap of tedium dressed up in HTML form. Back Yard was intended to be a repository for random, vaguely amusing thoughts and was pretty much a ‘blog’ before the term had really become a common term. It lasted a couple of years and, though it would be a complete lie to say that it was ever popular in the traditional sense of the word, it did have a few regular readers.
For reasons that escape me now, it died a death around about the time I started university for the first time, and though it languished on the CompuServe (remember them?) servers for quite some time, nothing was ever done with it. In 2003 I set up a new website, CityOfOxbury.co.uk, that existed until just last year, though was only updated sporadically after 2005.
Then, finally, last year Back Yard was resurrected from the ashes as a WordPress-based site. As mentioned in my last post, I was never truly happy with this and it was never really publicised so few people ever saw it. Following much (well, some) thought and a lot (a tiny bit) of planning, this, the new new Back Yard was born. Hoo and, indeed, rah.
Whilst in the process of working out what should be in the new Back Yard I decided to take a look at the old version. Unfortunately my old copies of the site appear to lost or, at the very least. stuck on an old floppy disk somewhere, probably in a dusty box buried beneath a thousand unused AOL CDs. Luckily, thanks to the wonders of the Wayback Engine I’ve been able to salvage a version of the old site, and have made it available on the new site for the purposes of posterity. If you feel so inclined, you can see it here. Unfortunately the Wayback Engine hasn’t been able to trap everything, so some things – like old episodes of Doctor Who will have to remain lost.
Reading through it reveals that I appear to have been just as pompous and ill-informed back when I was 16-18 as I am now, which is an achievement of some sorts, I guess. It would seem that I spent an inordinate amount of time between 1997 and 1999 fixing my computer, and indeed I do remember having a fair few arguments with the horrors of Internet Explorer 8. The design of the site is rather hideous, it must be said, and uses frames, if you can just about remember what they are (there’s also font tags all over the place, but the less said about them the better).
I also can’t believe I called her Jenny Ryan. What an idiot I was.