Pretty View

This post is small, just wanted to share with you some pictures I took this Saturday at the Dead Sea.

I took these at Nahal Bokek (נחל בוקק), Enjoy!

Though these panoramas are far from perfect, me being a Photoshop amateur, I still think they are much more fun to view than a series of regular photos.

Fighting the war AFTER the victory!

Chrono Trigger has a very happy beginning... You visit the millennial fair, celebrating a 400 year-old victory in a war between mankind and the forces of evil yada yada yada.

 

The big difference between this story and others comes later on, when you get to join the very same war, 400 years in the past. In fact, you have a significant role in changing the future and affecting it's outcome (and much much more).

However, the part where I really got into this game was when I first found myself in the future. The far future, about 1000 years into the future.

 

A dystopian future is one of the most common settings in sci-fi movies and games. However, after moving through a happy present time period and another medieval time period, I was shocked to see this future.

Robots? Mutants? Ruins?! It is amazing how powerful these clichés can be when used correctly, and is usually not a very believable future. Chrono Trigger nailed it though, and it was more or less what you would expect it to be. For me it was a real shock to find myself in a dystopian wasteland all of a sudden with no idea of how it came to be, coming from a time of knights and swords. This future is so distant from the “present” that I had no way of seeing it coming, and it fits into the story well. Which goes to show that clichés, when used correctly, are not clichés at all.

I will try to post more about this game, but I cannot promise anything, since I have other things to write about that are more… recent. Here are some more screenshots from later in the game where you get to travel to prehistoric times… things are never dull :)

An eternal story

Time travel. Everybody loves time travel stories. Books, movies and video games have been depicting time travelling since the dawn of time… Um… maybe not. But they existed for a long time. Too bad most of these stories are rubbish. It’s not easy to maintain a coherent storyline with time travelling fucking everything up with changes to the timeline. It’s even harder to maintain a storyline with the added interactivity of a video game. Nevertheless, one game in particular did manage to do exactly that: Chrono Trigger.

 

The game is as old as time itself, so I won’t recap the story, since it has been done so many times before. The reason I’m even writing about it is thanks to the Vintage Game Club, which gave me an excuse to play this lovely game again and relive one of the greatest adventures ever to grace a video game console. So instead, I will try and post my thoughts about the game as I play through it over the next few days or maybe even weeks (It’s THAT epic).

Funny thing is that while many people had played this game for the first time on their SNES (Super Nintendo), I have played it on my PC using a SNES emulator. I have downloaded this game without even knowing what I was about to play. I was (and still kind of is) a huge fan of Square (Square Enix these days) and after finishing the unbelievable Final Fantasy VI, I was looking for any Square game I could lay my hands on. Therefore, Chrono Trigger was a completely random choice. In Israel, gaming took a long time to sink in (it never really did, though), so I have never heard about this game before. Lucky me, huh?

Anyway, as I am once again getting ready to begin my journey through the many places and ages of the world of Chrono Trigger, I’m feeling a bit excited. It has been a long time since I have had a great gaming adventure as deep and as rewarding as this one, and I’m looking forward to share some of my views on it.

No Valve!!! Not you too!!!

I’ll get right to the point: Valve has implemented DLC into Steam. Downloadable Content (DLC) was up until now the curse of console owners. Created by the Microsoft war machine (Yup, them again) as a means of milking their Xbox customers, it first appeared on Xbox Live Marketplace. Game companies are creating additional content for games and are releasing it for a small fee, usually less than 10$.

The problem with DLC is that gaming companies began peddling content that is ranging from cosmetic to downright useless. Let me give you an example: There once was an epic game called: “The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion”. Oblivion is a huge game, with tons of content, amazing graphics and it even features Patrick Stewart for about five minutes.So what type of DLC would you expect to be released for such a game? New areas to explore? New noble quests to undertake? How about a nice new shiny armor for your horse? Wait.. WHAT? That’s right. For just a few dollars you could get a horse armor. For your in game horse. You had to actually PAY real world money to buy a fucking horse armor.

Believe it or not, the horse armor is not the lowest gaming companies went with DLC. The beloved EA is selling unlockable content for their games. This means they included the content in the game, and are selling it to you after you have already purchased the game. Could they be any more evil? Yes! They could! The are also selling cheats for some of their games!

I don’t need to explain why all this is highly disturbing. However, up until now PC gamers were treated differently. While the console crowd was always considered to consist of new comers who don’t know any better, as well as veteran gamers, the PC crowd was a bit harder to tame. That is why if an expansion was ever released for a PC game, it was a real expansion, something that added a considerable amount of content, and therefore was usually worth paying for. Also, a lot of DLC from the Xbox made its way to the PC versions of those games, for free, because everyone knew that PC gamers would not pay for unlocking a part of their rightfully owned game; They would fucking hack it!

Or at least, I thought that everyone knew that… As I wrote in the beginning: Valve had incorporated DLC into Steam, their download service. Steam, being the biggest gaming digital distribution center for the PC, now supports DLC. The first game to offer DLC for sale is The Maw, which is the first game ever made by Twisted Pixel Games and was released on the Xbox Live Marketplace several months ago. The DLC includes new levels for the game, at 1.25$ a pop.

While new levels are the least evil type of DLC, the barrier has now been broken. Companies can now peddle their DLC through steam, and it won’t be long before EA starts selling us pay-per-cheat and horse armors. ‘Tis a dark day for PC gaming…

On the bright side, The Maw is actually a really fun game to play!

(Also he’s a ninja!)

Starting off with a grrrrrrrrr..........

First blog post ever, and I'm starting with a rant. And I'm ranting about the only computer company nobody ever complained about before: Microsoft.

Yes, I know. Microsoft is amazing, and I must really be out of my mind to even think that there might be something wrong there. Alas, I'm afraid I have encountered something and I am going to share it with... whoever reads this godforsaken blog.

Horribly outdated sarcasm aside, I have known Microsoft for most of my life. I have been through the early DOS days, I have lived through the multiple versions of Windows and I have endured the bugs, the lies and the unstoppable aggressiveness. However, up until now, I just lived through it all.

So what was it that made me furious enough to actually write about it in a blog? In this case, it is not the 'what', as it is the shameless way in which Microsoft are forcing their product onto me, which is the XBOX360 Controller for Windows.

These days, many games are created with consoles in mind. Controls are perfected for the consoles, making these games much less comfortable to use with the mouse and keyboard. So buying a game pad for the PC is nothing new. Microsoft have released their own controller for the PC. A game that supported a game pad would usually support the MS controller.

However, more and more games that were imported from the XBOX360 to the PC do not support any game pad that is not XBOX360 compatible! Some companies had the decency to at least include some support, but with no default binding for non-XBOX360 game pads!

As I searched through forums for a solution to that problem, most of the answers were along the lines of "just buy the XBOX360 controller". This is the main way in which people are addressing this issue! It just enrages me to see how easily Microsoft is bullying us to use their game pad! It's a small peripheral and it is not that expensive, but why the hell do I have to use it if I already have a perfectly good Logitech game pad?! Even the button layout is virtually the same! Any game that works with the XBOX controller should work with the simplest Logitech game pad!

I took a lot of crap from Microsoft over the years. I don't know why it never bothered me this much before. Maybe it's because I am an avid gamer and something like that is more personal to me. Maybe it's because of the way that Microsoft is not even trying to hide their aggressiveness in this case and still gets away with their dirty trick. Or maybe it's because this is the straw that broke the camel's back, while I was sitting on the camel, making me fall off it and break MY FUCKING GAME PAD!