SquareEnix gets Heartless

For anyone who wasn't aware, Kingdom Hearts 2 came out in Japan just before Christmas. In case any of you feel like teasing yourself (except for the twins, who regularly play import games and could play it right now if they were so inclined-- bastards), here's a preview from Gamespot. Be forewarned that they claim (in bold caps) that the second paragraph is spoiler-iffic. I wasn't brave enough to read it myself, since I hate spoilers. We should be able to see Mickey getting down with his bad-ass self on this side of the ocean in just over a couple months' time. The delay seems excessive to me, since I believe the Japanese game has english audio with Japanese subtitles, in order to preserve the lovable iconic Disney voices. In any case, I'd been able to keep my enthusiasm down up until now, but March 1st suddenly seems very far away indeed.

[Note: FYI, for the unfortunate few among you who haven't played it (I think that roughly 1/2 of my regular readers have), the post title is a KH reference.]

If it was Rudolph, I'd have Seen it in Time

I hit a deer on Christmas Eve in my new car. As is our tradition, we were out visiting a specific set of friends, and since my parents were both drinking I was the one doing the driving. On the way home at roughly 11:30PM, we came up behind it, as it was bounding down the side of the highway, and no sooner did I get the word "deer" out of my mouth then it jumped out in front of us. I came onto the brakes hard and swerved over to the opposite lane, but the tires slid on the wet snow and it swerved right along with us, so I hit it pretty square with a "thump!" It slid up over the left side of the hood and kept on going, and we slid to a stop. I said "shit, my new car!" in an exasperated voice as I pulled over to the side of the road and put on my 4-way flashers in order to inspect the damage. Miraculously, there didn't really seem to be any. The only visible damage was my license plate, which had been bent back under the car a little, and which had a tuft of deer hair stuck on one of the screws holding it on. I had managed to get slowed down quite a bit before we hit it, so I was cautiously optimistic.

However, a closer inspection on Christmas morning in the light of day showed us a few things we had missed. My left headlight is bent imperceptibly towards the left side of the car, but the only way to notice it is by comparing the width of the seam between it and the side of my car to the same seam beside the opposite headlight. A quick glance underneath the front shows a small dent below my radiator, and I have no idea how it got there, short of the deer poking it with a stick, since it's a 1/2-foot removed from the front, and there's nothing in front of it that could have been pushed back into it. That's all we know for now-- my dad took some pictures as a precaution, and we're taking it to Wood Motors for a closer inspection tomorrow (incidentally, it is the president of said company who's house we were at that night).

In any case, everyone's fine, with the possible exception of the deer, who may very well have collapsed and died a mile away. It could have been much worse if there had been a car behind us, or a car coming the other way, or if the damn airbags had deployed. And I think I acquitted myself quite well, which I'm fairly proud of. My mother was a little shaken up (psychologically, that is to say, since the impact was barely perceived inside the car), but I think she's over it now. Hopefully there's no major damage hiding beneath the vehicle.

So, anyway, if anyone sees a doe with a stylish "8BIT ME" branded on her thigh, then let me know, because she owes me money.

[UPDATE: Several internal braces and connecting rods were bent or broken (which is why the outside of the car was undamaged), but none of them are essential (provided I avoid any further front-end collisions), so they'll likely stay that way until it warms up, at which point I'll probably have them repaired (which shouldn't cost any more than a couple hundred, I hope). The license plate was straightened without cost or incident.

Also, I remain unconcerned with the doe's ultimate fate.]

HO HO HO-- I'm Going to Eat You, Billy

Short post today-- I'm too tired to talk at length (didn't get home from Vern's until after 2AM), but I found this hilarious and felt compelled to share it with everyone. Enjoy this photo gallery of children being terrified by Santa. Merry Christmas! :-)

Also amusing: Pokemon causes cancer.

A Dark Day in Gaming

Yesterday, I saw a bit of gaming news that made me very, very depressed. Working Designs has shut it doors. Some other people might talk about the death of Black Isle or the end of Sega's hardware days, but for me, this is easily the worst video game news that I have ever heard. Apparently they've been dead for some time, but Vic (the company's head and founder) finally let everyone know a few days ago on the forum, and a little part of me died inside.

Working Designs was special in a lot of ways. It was a company built entirely upon Vic's love of Japanese RPGs, and his desire to bring those games to western audiences. Vic would choose a JRPG that he'd personally played and enjoyed and that had little chance of seeing a domestic release, and then approach the company that developed it and obtain the rights to translate it and release it domestically. It was a small company, employing anywhere from five to a dozen people, depending upon what stage of the development cycle they were in, which is positively tiny compared to the size of most development houses these days, and was fairly small even when it began making games some 17 years ago. Perhaps as a result of that size, Working Designs was always a very accessible company as well. If you wanted to know what they were working on or how things were going, you could simply visit their forum and ask Vic himself. It really made you feel involved in the process. To this day (and, unfortunately, probably not from this day forward), it's the only forum that I visit regularly.

Back when Working Designs began, game translations were often lazy products of Japanese programmers with a passing familiarity with English, and were barely readable messes. Some were more transliterations than translations, and nowhere was this problem more apparent than in niche-market, text-heavy RPGs. But then WD stepped in and showed people how to do it right. In fact, they even went further than that, and made the script their own. They did the sort of things that makes the twins livid, and that even I hate if it's done by anyone other than Working Designs. They'd take the script, and, rather than just translate it, would rewrite it entirely, to make it more accessible to western audiences. They'd rename characters, insert pop-culture jokes, re-dub any voice-work with western voice actors, and re-write and re-dub entire songs in English. It's the sort of stuff that makes me cringe today, but I really thank them for doing it back then. If the hadn't made such things so accessible to me as a child, I wouldn't have taken such a liking to them and be such a fan now that I can afford to be an elitist purist.

And they really pulled out all the stops in other respects as well. They'd update the graphics, add new in-game items or features, and various other bells and whistles. They'd include large hard-bound, full-colour instruction booklets with red cloth bookmarks, soundtrack CDs, and they'd write their own in-house strategy guides for sale separately. They released two versions of most games: the cheap package consisting of just the game and instruction booklet, or the pricey deluxe package consisting of the game and an omake box full of crazy and lovingly constructed extras, from cardboard character stands and medallions to a boxing puppet of the main antagonist.

One aspect of the way Working Designs conducted their business that turned a lot of people off was the delay between games. With such a small staff, and such an emphasis on quality, they were far from quick. Even at their most prolific, Working Designs never released more than a few games a year, and they were often not at their most prolific. They'd release a game to much fanfare, then disappear for half a year until their next one came out, leaving most people to forget who they were or that they existed at all. For this reason, they had a very small but very dedicated fanbase, of which I am proud to consider myself a member.

The delays were much worse near the end, with the wait between games measured in years, thanks mostly to Sony. Sony's approval process was unreasonably harsh, and after Vic fought to get the rights to a gem of a JRPG series, Sony would tell him that they wouldn't allow plain-looking 2D games on their system unless they were in some kind of collection and jumped through a few other hoops as well. Without the steady income of periodic releases, WD just couldn't survive, and in the end, it was the approval process for Goemon (which apparently is almost finished, but Sony still won't allow it to be released) which killed them.

If it weren't for the efforts or Working Designs, I don't think JRPG's would be as well-received in today's market as the currently are. Nippon Ichi might be releasing their own games here now, but I don't think their first games would have sold as well if WD hadn't paved the way. Without WD, I'd never have known the brilliant craziness that was Dragon Force for the Sega Saturn. I might not even have purchased a Playstation were it not for Working Designs. I had placed my bets early on in the previous console generation, and decided that I was a Nintendo 64 man. And I was, right up until Aiden brought his Playstation over and showed me Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete. I went out and bought a Playstation and Lunar the very next day, and never looked back. Lunar remains one of my favorite games of all time-- I can sing both the intro song and the boat song perfectly.

I never knew when I was playing through Growlanser Generations earlier this year that I was playing my last Working Designs games. If I had, I think I might have stopped and appreciated a little more that it was one last hurrah. I'm thankful that I decided in the end to buy the deluxe edition, with the jeweled ring and the deck of cards. If only more people had done the same. Goodbye, Working Designs-- I'll miss you, and the industry is weaker for your departure.

Update: For all zero of you that care, Gamespot did an interview with Vic recently on WD's demise.

Doughnut Hole-some Family Fun

Sunday morning, I got up early to go with my parents to watch some 3-foot tall people play hockey poorly in the cold. And I enjoyed myself. I'm as surprised as anyone.

You see, my little (age 4, I think?) cousin Avery came to town this weekend to play in a Timbits hockey tournament. [Aside: Is it still called Timbits hockey? It was years ago. I'll assume it still is. Tim Hortons is certainly still quite involved, anyway. Now I'm off topic.] I was in a good mood, and I've met the kid no more than a half dozen times, which means he probably doesn't even recognize his own cousin, not to mention that I've come to appreciate being in the company of family in recent years, so I decided to join my parents, who had already attended one game the day before (while I was busy watching Japanese cartoons in a room full of people I hate), for the final game. Now, it might be normal in some families for cousins not to know each other very well, but it's not in mine-- lacking any siblings of my own, they're the closest thing I have. When I was young, my family used to go to visit my mother's side of the family in Chipman almost every weekend, which is how I got to know everyone, but these days I only make it to Chipman a few times a year. And, since Avery is over a decade younger than any of my other cousins, I (and many of the others, I suspect) have never really gotten the chance to know him (although, to be fair, he's only 4-ish, so it's not as if I've lost the chance).

Anyway, back to hockey. Timbits hockey is quite a bit different from what I usually think of when I think of hockey (which, to be honest, isn't terribly often). No score is kept, and play is frozen every 3 minutes for players to rotate into/off of the lineup. The puck often goes one way while the players go the other, and sometimes teammates battle each other for the puck instead of the opposing team. Some of the players like to skate around and watch the bleachers instead of trying to get the puck, and Avery's goalie allowed one goal while he was out of the net waving at his family. At one point, Avery's team had too many players on the ice, but the 6th just wanted to cross the rink in order to take a bathroom break. Avery was a member of the Minto team, with green jerseys that more often than not came down to the players knees, and with players that varied quite a bit in age and skill level. He was pretty easy to spot, since he was the one carrying his stick upside down. :-)

It's not all different, though. Some of the older kids play surprisingly well, and there were a few nice looking plays. When someone scores a goal, he skates around with his stick held up, and at the awards ceremony at the end (more on that later), everyone bangs their stick on the ice in acknowledgement of the recipients.

It really is a very good program. It's not often that I come across something that I can wholeheartedly get behind in such a fashion, and especially something corporate-sponsored, but I can't think of one bad thing to say about Timbits hockey. The kids learn teamwork, get some physical activity, and are taught to emphasize fun over winning or scoring (no scores are kept, and there's no winner). And at the end, every player got a medal. My first thought was that giving one to everyone would cheapen it, but Avery sure didn't seem to mind. He held his up with a smile afterwards and said "Everyone on the team got one!"

I'm a competitive guy by nature, which is why you'll never see me play hockey, because I play to win, and I know I'd have no chance of playing hockey well. That being the case, I often take issue with these kinds of touchy-feely programs that eliminate competition and undervalue the winners. But I think that's a result of the way I was raised. Perhaps if I had played Timbits hockey when I was little I wouldn't be so competitive, and feel compelled to keep score in my head (Avery's team won 5-3 :-P). I think it's great that these kids can just enjoy themselves like that without worrying about it. They've only got a few years left before the world introduces them to the idea of not-so-friendly competition, so they should be able to enjoy it while they can. It's a little depressing to think how different the tone of a game with the same kids would likely be a decade from now, when they're all angry teenagers.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun, and so did the kids. I could have done without my mother glancing over her shoulder every few minutes to make certain I was enjoying myself, though. And I wish I hadn't eaten first, because I had to watch others eat some deliciously old-fashioned greasy rink food. Regardless, it was a nice relaxing way to spend an afternoon, and kudos to Tim Hortons for a positive and enriching program.

Excuse me, Sir-- There's a Taxi in my Soup

Last night, at around 3AM, I, Travis, and Trevor decided to grab a bite to eat at the Diplomat. The place was very crowded given the time, since usually the bar crowd has started to clear out by that hour, but I was commited, and it was either wait or go home. So, we waited, roughly half an hour I think, and watched lots of drunks stumble around and generally make asses of themselves. When we finally did get seated, the wait for our food was actually surprisingly short, so we were eating soon after. The twins each got breakfast while I had chicken balls. The waitress was a bit abrasive, but I would be too after dealing with that level of drunken revelry.

So, we had our meal, and the twins each had a piece of cheesecake for their dessert. As I was sitting there watching them eat, I happened to be staring at the wall behind them when there was a loud thump, shaking the whole wall and sending a sheet of dust down. I stared and blinked a couple of times at the red light that said "George's" before my brain finally processed that I had just watched a taxi drive into the side of the restaurant. Everyone else around seemed to have had a similar delayed reaction, but then suddenly everyone got very loud and came over to see what had happened.

We weren't at one of the two tables that could have reached through the window and touched the vehicle were there a hole, but we were at the next table over. I don't think that anybody was seriously injured, but judging from the way the wall shook and the speed at which I watched it hit, things would have been very messy if it had been going much faster. If I were one of the two people sitting at the table looking at the windshield a foot away from them (and pointed sqarely at them), I think that I'd have been quite a bit more distraught than they seemed to be. Apparently it left a pretty nasty hole on the outside of the building, but when we left the hole was surrounded by cops, not to mention that the taxi was still planted squarely in it, so we never got a good look at it from the outside. According to the loud transvestite at the next table (who incidentally, called the three of us "fuckers" for our refusal to clap when prompted), the fellow had swerved to avoid an accident that would have been worse, but I'm not sure how much credence I should give to the testimony of a drunk transvestite.

So, anyway, although a late-night trip to the Diplomat usually does involve at least one cop car, this time was a little different than usual.