005 - Getting Served

Exaggerated, and not exactly what happened, but still something.

In other news, a lot of the pages have been updated. Here's what's new:

- The Games page has Spectre added to the main page. I deliberately did not add Evil Genius, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, or either of the SimCity games. Those I want to do something special with.
- I went ahead and updated the AppleTree, Kmart, and 290 demolition lists. None of which I really did what I wanted to with, but they're there. The AppleTree list mostly has the Waco locations, which all became Winn-Dixie stores before going onto new lives (a closed supermarket, medical offices, and Atwoods)

004 - At the Video Game Store

Based on a true story. The only thing I changed was some dialogue and my reaction.

Speaking of which, I do plan on updating the Games and other sections above, but I'll wait until I complete a bunch of stuff, then batch-upload it.

Spring Break and Other Stories

I've only gone to Dallas just a few times, the first one that I remember a decade ago and one other since. So I got to Dallas again. While I sadly didn't take a lot of pictures or explore enough off of the downtown and surrounding neighborhoods to gauge which is a better city (important to note that Houston is much, much larger geographically while Dallas is hemmed in by suburbs), there are a few notes to take.

- Watched Joe Versus the Volcano, one of the last comedies Tom Hanks did before Philadelphia (see: "Tom Hanks Syndrome"). If you haven't seen it, it's a light comedy with some stabs at how miserable being a working stiff can be (however, it's only at the beginning but is undoubtably the best part of the film). If you have seen it, it has an awfully high body count for what could arguably count as a romantic comedy.
- Went downtown via DART and explored. Ate a hot dog from a food truck on top of Klyde Warren Park, an urban park built over a depressed freeway.
- I also saw the Dallas Museum of Art, which I didn't explore all of (the museum is about four floors, and they actually recommended taking the elevator, though because of a continually ramping first floor isn't at all difficult without elevators). One of my favorite paintings was something called "Sardine" (that one with the cat) by Charles Webster Hawthorne though I can't find anything on the Internet nor even the museum's website about it. Very strange.

I also went to a Fiesta store, which was more of a Hispanic-oriented supermarket than the stores I'm typically used to. There was cheap apple fritters and torta bread (both delicious), some interesting meat products (including a tub of pork fat, which was very greasy, even on the outside), and a little packet of dried shrimp that cost $5 (that I didn't buy, but the apple fritters and torta, yes)

I saw many unique and awesome things along the trip (including some very interesting gas stations) but I'm glad to be home again.

003 - Spitting Image

This one I drew a few weeks ago but never got around to posting it (still learning my way around image editing programs). I have some better ones coming up, some of which are based on real life, some not.

Hyrule Historia

While I am still playing The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, I recently read the entirety of Hyrule Historia, a tome that Nintendo released a few years back. It is wonderful, yet leaves you wanting more. Let me explain. There are three main sections of the book: a lot on Skyward Sword (which I have NOT yet read, need to play it first!) the storyline and the design documents/artwork. The storyline obviously includes all of the games (except the Zelda CD-i games for obvious reasons), which starts with The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, then The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, Four Swords, Ocarina of Time, then splits into three with the "Hero's Defeat" line (A Link to the Past, Oracle series, Link's Awakening, and the two NES Zelda games), what happens when Link continues as a child (Majora's Mask, Twilight Princess, Four Swords Adventures, or the Adult Link era (The Wind Waker, Phantom Hourglass, and Spirit Tracks).

As interesting is that is, it still feels pretty loose, and I can't shake the feeling that the whole thing was cribbed from fan theories (a similar timeline was created by a fan just prior to when this was released, incidentally). Too many races appear and disappear--the Rito and Zora really shouldn't be connected, the Minish should've gone extinct, the lineages of the Master Sword and the Four Sword (the Oracle Series is after Link to the Past, but the Master Sword is supposed to sleep forever after that--made even more jarring in the fact that it's the same Link, although you could argue that putting the Master Sword back "forever" was after the Oracle series). It's pretty obvious that they had no idea what they were doing when they made it, and the increasing "where it fits" every time a game was released make it problematic.

TVTropes states that "The fact that the official timeline presents about as many problems as the average fan timeline is an example of how snarled the series' continuity is. The reason for this is probably that in many cases, not even the games' developers seemed to be aware of the timeline placement of the game they were working on, especially when it comes to the games developed by Capcom."

But there's also some design artwork, including crazy things you didn't notice. Besides some sketches that indicated the developer team liked Tingle way more than you or me (lots of detail there--including some notes on his chest hair), there's also the relation between Ambi and Ralph (spoiler alert--Ambi is Ralph's ancestor, which plays a role in The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages, but in the official art, their eyebrows are identical. There's also some early design for the dungeons in the original NES Zelda. All of these are fascinating--and given how secretive Nintendo generally is, seeing this probably required a lot of pulled strings.

There's some stuff missing--they talk about "rare Zelda games", such as the The Legend of Zelda: Collector's Edition title and the BS Legend of Zelda games (Satellaview). And while Nintendo would rather forget the CD-i games ever happened, there's no mention of Link's Crossbow Training (which was to be a full "gaiden game" akin to Majora's Mask), nothing on the "third game" of what would be the Oracle series, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Master Quest (much less Ura Zelda), or even the very strange Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland? It would've been cool to see some Zelda paraphernalia as well over the years (remember the Zelda board game? No?)

I'd love to see stuff for other video game series (SimCity, Pokémon) but we can't have everything...

Consoles and PC Games, and why the former is dying

I have been of the camp since 2011 (when I gave up for good my unrequited love of Nintendo and faced the future) that the PC is superior to consoles in nearly every way. There's a lot of talk about the "death of consoles", and I don't think that mobile devices are to blame in any way for that (otherwise we would've surrendered to Game Boy and its descendants a long time ago), consoles are killing themselves.

Back in the 4th and 5th generation of video games (the 1990s, from the SNES and Genesis to the N64, PlayStation, etc.), while playing games on DOS or Windows computers did offer a ton of variety and could offer superior graphics than the console offerings at the time, required mucking around with settings to make them run properly, while the other consoles required just a disc or cartridge and you could be off in new worlds in minutes.

In the 6th generation, things got more complicated for consoles, offering new menu features and still loading off of discs. After the GameCube failed to impress, the Xbox and PS2 moved ahead with new features like hard drives, Internet connections, and ultimately patches, which would make them more complicated but also ended up killing what they did best--the plug and play experience. With patches, it allowed developers to use console gamers (much like PC gamers had done) as unpaid beta testers, and everything got worse. Meanwhile, online play undermined the experience of more than one person playing on the TV (you can't do that on a PC), which Nintendo continued to capitalize on and run with when others had abandoned it. It makes even less sense that while N64 and PlayStation utilized split screen, today's consoles are fast enough to run split screen with no lag, and today's televisions can easily give a decent split screen experience that is clear, crisp, and large enough to see comfortably. Meanwhile, as consoles continue to evolve into less of a game console and more of a set-top box that expands the use of your TV, it should make sense that they ought to be more usable than a traditional computer. But I don't make the rules, I just play the games. In the meantime, I can hope I can install the proper drivers so that the PC side of my MacBook isn't a 16-color, 640x480 nightmare. I just downloaded the latest version of the "Network Add-On Mod" for SimCity 4. I heard they included BRT, too. That's cool.