As of today, the forced two-month break period is over, and so I'm free to return to working as a temp for Nintendo the next time they need bodies for a project.  Hopefully, it won't be too long.

Oh, and I've also applied for a full-time position as a product tester.  I'll let you know how that pans out.  Right now, I'm still waiting for the phone call that will tell me whether or not I've made it to the interview stage.  I have to admire the company for promising to call everyone back, even if they didn't score an interview.  That's just classy.

(No, the position is no longer open.  They stopped accepting applications last week.)

I've been a fan of the Dynasty Warriors games ever since one of my college roommates bought Dynasty Warriors 3.  I liked the game enough that when I eventually bought my own PS2 later that year, I requested the game as a Christmas present.  I then proceeded to play the hell out of it.  I eventually traded the game in when DW4 came out, and earlier this year, I picked up DW5 and both Samurai Warriors and its Xtreme Legends add-on.

"Wait, you idiot!" some of you are saying.  "Why did you buy the same game that many times?!"

The truth is, I keep buying each new entry because it's something different.  People knock the repetitive gameplay, the hammy voice acting and the aging graphics engine, but the series does provide new content with each new entry.  Typically, these updates take the form of more playable characters and redesigned stages with a few other tweaks here and there, but some of these changes are signicant.  Musou Rage, one of the new gameplay elements in DW5, for instance, is a very welcome addition that can help level the playing field when fighting a powerful enemy using an underpowered officer.  Samurai Warriors's character development system is based on experience points gained from completing objectives, allowing for level ups to occur in the midst of battle.

As far as the gameplay is concerned, to me, there's very little out there that provides the stress relief that beating up entire armies can provide.  Yes, it's simplistic, but it's simple to the point that I can jump right in and start smacking Yellow Turbans around without any trouble.  I'd rather take a new Dynasty Warriors game than slog through another GTA any day.  There are few moments in gaming that have been as exhilerating as the day I played DW4's Nanman Campaign stage and looked up to see the area map was completely covered in red enemy unit blips, and then fighting my way across half the map to eventually win the stage with only a few minutes left on the clock.  Let's see Tommy Vercetti do that with his samurai sword.

Finally, there are the storyline and thematic elements.  Yes, DW tells the same storyline over and over again, but the presentation differs from game to game.  DW4 featured one long campaign mode for each faction that the player could switch characters in and out of, which was nice, but Samurai Warriors and DW5 do it even better, presenting each character with a series of battles in an individually focused storyline.  It might help to have an interest in and some knowledge of the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms or the Warring States era of Japan, especially since the games take so many liberties, but to one degree or another, the brief stories aren't without their resonance.  In a way, they're like Ikaruga.  Either way, the game is a lot of fun, but by knowing the storyline and comparing them with the histories of the figures that the characters are based upon, the storylines and their endings become that much more interesting.  (In some ways, Ikaruga's Shinra is even like a more fortunate version of Yukimura Sanada from SW.)

I'm sure that this ranting probably won't amount to much.  There wasn't really a whole lot of intent behind it aside from getting some thoughts I have on the series out of my head and into my journal for others to read.  If you read this far, though, you probably deserve something like a cookie, or a brownie, or...ah, to hell with it.  I'm going back to play some more DW5.  :P

After a lot of thought about what project I want to pursue, including some backtracking off of previous statements simply because I don't think that the concept as I'd originally conceived was that viable, I've finally come to a conclusion on what I'll be submitting this year.  There isn't a title for it yet, and only the barest of bones have come into being, but I can tell you this.

It's a fighting game.

The problem with my phone jack has been fixed.  Apparently, the jack itself simply broke down and could no longer establish a connection.  Luckily, the repair guy is being paid for the repair through the real estate company I rent my apartment through, so it didn't cost me a thing.

Yesterday, I received an early Christmas present from my parents in the form of a brand new computer.  It's completely up to date in every way, except for the fact that it doesn't have a high-end graphics card.  That doesn't really bother me, though, since I game exclusively on consoles these days.

The other bit of news, which isn't so much "bad" as it is "annoying and yet strangely hilarious" is that the phone jack that I use for my modem decided to die between the time I disconnected my old computer and connected my new one.  (For those of you wondering, I'm writing this from a public library terminal).  A guy will be coming out to take a look at it on Monday, and it sounds like whatever the problem is should be simple enough to fix without much trouble.  Hopefully, I'll be back on the internet at home not long after that.

Until then, talk to you all later.

I just finished watching the Tekken animated movie a little while ago.  It's the second time that I've seen it (the first being last year).  Long before ever seeing it for the first time, I had always heard from various friends how utterly atrocious it was.  When I finally got around to renting it, it was more out of morbid curiosity than anything else.

And I won't lie here.  It was pretty bad.  Despite its American subtitle "The Motion Picture", the Tekken animated movie was actually a straight-to-video anime production from the mid-1990s, and the quality of its visuals suffer for it.  If the movie is any indication, huge, bushy eyebrows are a dominant genetic trait of the Mishima family line.  I mean, seriously, those things could become sentient at any moment.  Also, some of the character designs simply look weird when compared to how they typically look in the video games.

Despite this badness, however, I came away from my initial viewing of the film unable to really hate or deride it in any severe manner.  Maybe my expectations were set far too low, but over all, the film turned out to be better than I was led to believe.  Over the weekend, I rented the film again, piling it in with a glut of various Halloweenish movies, and I discovered that it wasn't just an odd fluke; the movie is actually better than I had been led to believe.

Of course, it's still not one of the better movies I've seen, but unlike a lot of video game-based movies I've watched.  It doesn't play merry havoc with the plot of the game to the extent that the live action Street Fighter did, and it certainly doesn't insult the intelligence the way Uwe Boll's genocidally horrid movies do.  (Yes, I'm aware that "genocidally" might not actually be a word, but an entirely new set of vocabulary could be conjured just to describe Alone in the Dark.  Anyway, I digress.)

Here is, in my estimation, a list of reasons why the Tekken movie can actually be considered to be decent:

1.  A storyline that actually pays attention to the game plot.  In actuality, it plays out more like an amalgamation of Tekken and Tekken 2.  Some liberties are taken, but there isn't any wholesale rewrite of the entire story.
2.  The film follows the proper characters that are central to the narrative (in this case, Kazuya and Jun), rather than attempting to shoehorn a side character into the lead role (ala Jean-Claude Van Guile in Street Fighter).
3.  There are only a few subplots featuring a few other characters, preventing the film from becoming an unnecessarily convoluted nightmare of spoken cameos (ala Street Fighter, once again).  Most of the Tekken/Tekken 2 characters make appearances at one point or another, but most of them don't even have so much as a single like of dialogue.
4.  The primary plotline is given some actual structure using some flashbacks which, while simple and cliched, is still fairly effective.  Once again, the writing is nothing even remotely Oscar-caliber, but still, it succeeds on elementary levels that most video game adaptations can only dream of.  If the Metroid movie isn't at least this coherent, heads will roll.
5.  Heihachi crush's a tomahawk's blade...with his TEETH!!!

I make no promises or recommendations with these words; despite my feelings on the movie, I can very easily see why a lot of people hate it.  Call it a guilty pleasure of mine, if you will, but I will contend that it has at least a few qualities capable of redeeming itself, and most importantly, it's not Street Fighter.  Actually, hold on.  Let me add one more item to that list.

6.  It's not Street Fighter.

There, I think I've about covered it.

Although I didn't realize it until a phone call after I returned home from work, yesterday was my last day of employment at Nintendo for the next sixty days. Unfortunately, the state of Washington has a law that states no temporary employees are allowed to work at the same place of employment for more than six continuous months. The end of September effectively marked the barrier for me, and so I'll have to look for something else to do until December at the very least.

My emotions on this are pretty mixed, but rather than fill this entry with angst, references to emo music, and bad poetry, I'll just note that I recognize that Nintendo was only following the law, and therefore I have no reason to be angry with them. I'll be calling the temp agency on Monday to sort a couple of things out and see if they have any work I can do until I become elligable to return to Nintendo.

At first glance, most gamers are typically categorized rather broadly. You have your FPS gamers, your PC gamers, your RPG players, fighting game fanatics and so on. Each of these gamers is defined by the sort of game that they spend the most time playing, talking about and anticipating. There are still other ways to categorize players by what era of games that they enjoyed the most. There's the old school (which typically encompasses the original Atari through the Intellivision and Colecovision), the eight and sixteen-bit eras, the plethora of gamers that came on board with the advent of the Playstation, and those that didn't start gaming until the past few years. More derisive is the hardcore/casual line, which is typically drawn by "hardcore" people that feel threatened by "casuals" that only buy Madden, Halo and GTA. What I want to talk about today, however, is different category that isn't discussed nearly as much: those that keep every game they buy in their collection versus those who trade-in games towards others.

Although not as hostile as the worst moments in the hardcore vs. casual crusade, I have seen signs in the past from some people that find trading games in to stores such as EB or Gamestop as ridiculous, if not outright dumb. Occasionally, people on the forums here that state they traded away Popular and Highly Rated Game X are met with responses that in their most polite form could be boiled down to "What the **smurf** were you thinking, you idiot?" Truth be told, a lot of gamers that have traded in games that they liked have ended up regretting it, particularly when that next urge to play that game they enjoyed so much strikes.

Then again, how often has this scenario popped up? A gamer walks into his gaming room, trying to decide on a game to play, ignoring twenty different games he bought, played (although not necessarily completed) and has no honest interest in playing again in favor of one of the more recent purchases that still lights his fire. What good is there in a massive collection when it's comprised mostly of games that won't ever be touched again, or even games that the player ultimately regretted buying? Sure, there might be some people to have that still have that copy of Fantavision they bought at the PS2's launch, but considering what's come out since, are they realistically ever going to touch it again?

This is sort of a quandary that I've run into in the past. Occasionally, when I feel like buying a new game, I'll feel like trading in some older games to help fight the bloat in my collection. There are, of course, those games that I wouldn't consider trading away for the world (ex: Valkyrie Profile, Disgaea, Suikoden III and Ikaruga), and games that simply aren't financially worth tradiing, such as any value lable title (or games like Fantavision, which can typically be found for less than $5 in bargain bins everywhere.) The rest of these choices boil down to whether or not I'll ever actually have the urge to play these games again.

Fairly recently, I traded in Front Mission 4, Lost Kingdoms and P.N. 03 and one other game (the fact that I can't even remember what it was should be a sign of my ultimate interest in it) towards a new game. Of the three games that I can remember, I can tell you that I thought Front Mission 4 was a disappointment, far too easy, and had just been languishing on the shelf. P.N. 03, which I bought for cheap earlier this year, was fun in the short term, but after beating the game twice, any interest I had in it had been pretty much used up. Lost Kingdoms, on the other hand, was a bit of an emotional struggle. This was a game that I bought brand new roughly six months into my ownership of a Gamecube, and I won't deny that I have some nostalgic feelings for the game, but ultimately, I hadn't played the game for at least three years, and I had played too many games of better quality in terms of both technical gameplay and storytelling aspects to have any inclination of going back to it. Sure, none of these games were blockbusters along the lines of Metroid Prime or Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, but then again, I traded in both of those games last year towards Front Mission 4, if I'm not mistaken.

Perhaps I lost the point of what argument I set out to write, but ultimately, I don't think that trading games in is really the blasphemous crime that some people see it is. I enjoy having a collection of games that I enjoy as much as the next person. It's just that sometimes, getting those games I'll enjoy in the long run requires some trial and error.

The Revolution Controller:

Just to get this hot topic out of the way first, how many of you have heard this spiel before?

"Iwata iz st00p1d Nintendo iz teh doomz3d!!!1"

If you're like me, you probably heard this talk (hopefully in a form more closely resembling English) back when Satoru Iwata made his first cryptic comments about the Nintendo DS. If Nintendo wanted to keep competitive with the advent of the PSP, all they'd need to do is create a more powerful Game Boy, weird-ass functions be damned, right? Some people were convinced that the idea of two screens alone (never mind the touch screen functionality) was insane enough to provide concrete evidence that Nintendo had lost its touch with the gaming market and predicted a swift and merciless death for the House of Mario at the hands of the PSP.

That's not exactly how it played out, is it?

So now, the entire scenario appears to be playing itself over again. Nintendo revealed their controller for the Revolution will feature highly unusual motion-sensor functions among other non-standard features. Then zealots began coming out of the woodwork to declare Nintendo's imminent doom at hand, for lo, their inability to stick with conventional standards will be their undoing.

Now, it's perfectly possible that this could be the case. The Revolution might not be the success that Nintendo is banking on, and even if its failure doesn't destroy the company outright, there's a solid chance that the their focus will be forced to turn to exclusive handheld development on the hardware front. Success carries no guarantees.

On the other hand, however, this whole scenario could easily end up playing like a remake of the DS's life story. While the launch might be lackluster from a shortage of titles that make use of the system's unique features, the following months would see more and more titles that not only use the Revolution's innovative control scheme, but use it well in full-featured games that couldn't possibly be duplicated on the PS3 or 360. This intelligent software development would then lead to great sales, resulting in a system that could quite easily compete with both Sony and Microsoft for a fair share of the market.

I'm taking the positive road, thank you very much.

And now for something completely different.

The Lucky Character:

Weird but true: I seem to do at least tend times better on Mario sports titles when I'm playing as Daisy than any other character. This whole cycle began around the time I first played Mario Tennis on the Gamecube. It was interesting to see the princess of Sarasara Land in new Mario-themed games after languishing in the now-ancient Super Mario Land. (It also doesn't hurt that I'm attracted to brunettes, but that's another subject for another time :P. ) After Tennis, I tried out Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour, and gravitated towards Daisy as my main character since she turned out to be a good fit for me in Tennis. Never mind that tennis and golf are two completely different sports; it was a perfectly natural transition, and one that turned out well.

This brings me to Mario Superstar Baseball. Like the other Mario sports titles, this is an easy game to pick up and play, and the ridiculous number of characters from the Mario series gives the game an overflowing amount of nostalgic personality. What's become utterly ridiclous, however, is that I have a horrid win/loss record in Exhibition mode when Daisy isn't my team's captain. I can squeak by OK with some of the other characters, and I've played very little of Challenge mode thus far, but crazy as it sounds, I feel like I'm more likely to win when Daisy is the team's captain, no matter who the rest of my team is. I'm starting to become convinced that she's like a good luck character for me, and at this rate, I wouldn't be surprised if the same happens when Super Mario Strikers is released.

Anincent Battlegrounds + Ancient Genre = Fun

From what I can tell, there just aren't that many people that are interested in the modern concept of the beat'em up. About the only series that's managed to successfully evade this slump of interest is Koei's Dynasty Warriors series. Taking the player onto various battlefields to slaughter enemies by the thousands with a sizeable cast of characters and the repetitive mechanics that the genre has become known for, Dynasty Warriors has managed to sell well, even into its fifth installment despite the fact that every game in the series follows the same basic backgrond story of Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Yet, I can't deny that I love these games. Both Dynasty Warriors 5 and the combination of Samurai Warriors and its Xtreme Legends companion are on my game shelf, having given me more hours of enjoyment than most other action games have been capable of. While the action in these games is repetitive, I just can't say no to taking on an entire army with a melee weapon.

Another point about these games is that their historical aspects intrigue me. Although highly fictionalized, the casts of Dynasty and Samurai Warriors are based on real historical figures from Chinese and Japanese history. No, the Chinese probably never wore anything quite that flamboyant, nor was Nobunaga Oda the dark magic-wielding evil bastard that games like Samurai Warriors commonly portray him as. However, in an odd, romantic sort of way, it's as though these people are able to live on in a sense, as people that probably would have otherwise not known a thing about Nobunaga or Cao Cao can use these games as rough starting guides to the Japanese Warring States period and China's Three Kingdoms era. This is especially true for those that take the time to read the historical archives included with these games, which has in turn inspired me to go search for information on these people in far more encyclopediacally complete sources.

And if none of this makes sense, then you can blame the lack of sleep I'm under from working a 50 hour workweek, plus staying up until nearly 1A.M. to write this post. It might be a good time for me to log off and hit the sack.

The vast majority of my entries have disappeared. :(