So, for the last few months, I've enjoyed Wii as a... um, new platform for playing GameCube games. Then, I got Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which was ultimately just improved Melee and the Serious Players could just stick to GC controller.

And this week's new highlights for me: Metroid Prime 3: Corruption and Tomb Raider: Anniversary. Both will need more rambling in due time, but here's some rambling on the topic of Controlling The Games. Of course, I was a little bit sceptical about how these much-raved-about Wii controls really work in real life, but my fears have subsided.

A while back, there was some Æncyclopædiæ drama over Chris-chan (aka Christian Weston Chandler). I'm not really commenting much on the issue, having had similar (but deinitely not as spectacular and not as severe) issues as this guy, but I'm just saying that I found the Sonichu audio books pretty... unique. And at parts hilarious. I sure hope this guy gets over the, ahem, issues, one way or other.

Anyway, I'm not posting about that - I just mentioned that because looking at the case reminded me that I still haven't completed Pokémon Sapphire. So, in the weekend, I played good few hours of the thing. Yay. So here is some aimless rambling about a Grown Man Playing Pokémon, a bit Analytically.

I'm not necessarily completely coherent today, so apologies if this article is too weird to handle.

Finally managed to sign up to Veoh. So, here, I finally uploaded a video from late 2004 or so: Me defeating Metroid Prime, in, uh, Metroid Prime, GameCube's finest game, for the first time. I should have uploaded this somewhere earlier, but I didn't want to burden archive.org and YouTube only wants 10-minute vids. Anyway, my play style here displays some unprecedented clumsiness, never before seen but sometimes repeated. (I think I was just getting tired that day - this was my third or fourth try that day...)

For me, the last week marked the end of GameCube gaming... well, GameCube gaming on a GameCube, at least.

Here's the complex, remarkable and weird tale on the last few days of SSBM on the Almighty Cube, and how I moved from the Cube to that fantastic new white box thing. Warning: Horrenduous flash photography also included. Another warning: Nothing works.

This post might need a little bit of explanation to go with it, first. I've sometimes had to post jaded observations on how some things are awful. This post is not intended as a flame; the point is that this is an observation.

And the observation is that I've grown tired defending the Ultima series. Now, don't get me wrong... I'm just admitting excess zealotism, and is a part of healing process.

Life of the Party is the tenth level of Looking Glass Studios' Thief II: The Metal Age.

The level is just about perfect in two respects. First of all, it's a great example of how Thief series gameplay works, and is an example of an outstandingly put-together level that has tons of goodness. The level has everything that makes Thief great: Humorous dialogues between guards and other NPCs, lots of nooks and crannies to explore, lots of stuff to steal, and interesting architecture...

Secondly, it's almost an iconic example of a genre. If you wanted to make a game about thieves in a mediaeval fantasy world, Life of the Party is just about the greatest example of how to do it. Thieves dancing through the rooftops!...

A discussion on Slashdot again reminded me of one of the most odd game copy protection things I've ever seen.

Ages ago, I got a game collection for Commodore 64 called 2 Hot 2 Handle, which had - I think - Shadow Warriors, Total Recall, Golden Axe and Ivan Ironman's Super Off Road. (Whoa, memory serves me well, if MobyGames is to be believed.)

Now, I think Shadow Warriors and IISOR worked fine, but Golden Axe and Total Recall had curious feature: the copy protection clankered the drive a lot, which could mean only one thing: A busted disk.

With a little help from my father, the thing was sent back, by mail, across the country, to the store it was bought from. Some time later, the thing came back with a note that said something like "The games are okay! If they don't work, turn the disk drive to its side." With a helpful diagram, too! (I think I'll scan it and put it here if I find it. =)

I think they just returned the exact same disks, because the game definitely did not work - but once I flipped the drive to horizontal position, yep, the thing worked just fine!

(As a side note, "Shadow Warriors" is not the same thing as Shadow Warriors, aka Ninja Gaiden. I bet a lot of people got disappointed. =)

Update, March 18, 2006: Yup, obviously, I could find the thing. Scan is above. Also of note that I was still confused about the whole Shadow Warriors thing: Both of the games were marketed as Shadow Warriors!...

Here's a random Finnish term: "rappiokalastaja".

That would mean "degenerate fisherman", kind of like "rappioalkoholisti" means "degenerate alcoholist". I invented this absurdness as, ahem, an preposterously absurd insult that will be likely to amuse rather than anger. (Though I was kind of thinking of Pentti Linkola while I cooked this term up years ago.)

The whole thing was invented as a part of spicing up Magic: the Gathering games. Years ago, some bored sysadmin at MTV3 Internet reconfigured the hostnames of the dial-up machines so that each of them had some insult, ROT13d. A lot of nasty but also a lot of preposterously clever insults. (A Usenet message describing them is in google's archives.)

I printed out the list, it took 2 pages, and my sister and I both shouted these things from our own pages when we did Nasty Stuff™ in the game. We also came up with a lot of new really weird insults. I typed this little piece of gem, for some reason, on Commodore 64. This one was clearly the best of the insults on that file though.

We haven't played MtG much lately, but the "rappiokalastaja" bit still lives. My sister is addicted to Animal Crossing, where, of course, fishing is a very important part of the game and a great source of income. "Time for more degenerate fishing!"

Well, just a random bit of in-jokery that still lives on. Unfortunately. Just thought of rambling about this, because I just got really addicted to Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life - finally got amazed enough to play 'til the third game day. Needless to say, I soon became a degenerate fisherman myself, though luckily so far, I haven't caught anything in that game. =)

But I don't think we both are really degenerate fisherpeople yet: at least we haven't yet got games that were specifically about fishing...

Around 1997-1998 the game world was in roar. 3D stuff was coming, and it was coming fast. And I was there, waiting for one particular game to be released.

The particular game was Crack dot Com's Golgotha. I had really enjoyed CdC's first game, Abuse, and when I heard Golgotha was supposed to be something like "Quake meets C&C", of course I was excited. I had played the Golgotha demo already, which had lead to one of the most hindsightually amusing fanboyish mispredictions I've ever made.

"Golgotha sure looks sweet. When Bitboys releases their 3D accelerator, I'll get it to play Golgotha."

Yes, I honestly thought so. Doesn't that sound amusing? No? Imagine if anyone on this day and age would say "Duke Nukem Forever sure looks sweet - soon I'll be playing it on my Phantom console" in dead seriousness.

Fortunately my attention span was quite short, which enabled me to be distracted by a game mag ad hawking dirt cheap 3DFX Voodoo cards, which soon enabled me to play Quake the way it's meant to be played. And, of course, Golgotha demo ran extremely sweetly.

Well, Golgotha was coming up slow (I kept myself amused by reading Jonathan Clark's .plan - I still remember him rambling something about somebody getting an inflatable balloon "as big as a person" as a birthday present), so soon, I was playing another game that seemed to look and sound and play like what Golgotha was meant to be.

Battlezone.

I played Battlezone pretty intensively for a few months. It was definitely a game that I... ...er...

...I have very vague recollections of the time I spent playing the game. Only now I'm starting to remember some memories from what the game really seemed to be about. Seems like I was so awed by the game that it might have been traumatic in some form, and that's why I buried in my game shelf and haven't been able to touch it since. (That, or the fact that I've been needlessly worried about DirectX compatibility. Or the fact that on my machine DirectX was busted for a long time.)

What can I say? Battlezone was definitely one of the most amazing, really really complex, yet definitely action-packed games I've ever played. Extremely varied gameplay, multiple different modes of play. Great graphics. Great music.

The game was just simply too far ahead of its time that it fried my mind.

And, regrettably, the game seemed too far ahead of its time that it wasn't a big commercial success either, which means that now that we are ready for such games, none will be made.

If there's one game that should be dragged out of the cabinet, Battlezone would be it. I heard they made a sequel. I think time might be ripe now for Battlezone III. Just a thought.

This night, I had my first look at Ultima V for a long time.

Ultima V was the first computer role playing game I played. It was the Commodore 64 version. Okay, it was a warezed copy and the disk was actually broken, but I played it more than I played the warez copy of Pool of Radiance, which had copy protection questions I couldn't answer. I did get to move around, and apparently got stuck to something called combat.

But with Ultima V, I also had what could be described as a "zen moment". Most of the Commodore games weren't particularly in-depth. I remember being confused around the time when I first tried the game. First of all, the game loaded from disk for a very very long time. Then came the mysterious intro about some guy called Lord British and the game been "translated" by "Dr. Cat" - well, my friends thought that was the clever pseudonym of the warez team guy. (A hint for latter-day researchers: It wasn't.)

After the long load game the "graphical amazement" phase. There was this amazing-looking metallic "Ultima V" logo. And underneath it, a breathtakingly neat graphical trick: "Warriors of Destiny", fading in in fiery letters.

And then came the intro sequence. It took me a while to make sense of it. There was this non-interactive movement. Then my feeble brain started to understand something:

This was a story.

I didn't know what was happening in the story. This guy moves around, then he goes through this blue door thing... then there's this another guy. I was confused. Confused.

Then there were these scary black-cloaked things. (where the heck did they come from?) They... shot this one guy here? That stick figure that represented the fallen guy was so sad. Then these black-cloaked people left. And I was positively joyous as this sad-looking lying stick figure got up, and together, these two men went to the hut.

Sat down. Obviously discussing something.

Then I found out that the game actually had a written version of the story, that described all of this in detail. It is still, I think, among the best graphical introductions in Commodore 64 games. It got me to the proper mood, even when I didn't know English too well at the time, so I was confused about a lot of things. I could decipher many things. I still remember being amused about Shamino's comment to Iolo: "Open the door, thou son of a goat, before I donate all my blood to decorate thy doorstep!" That goes right along with Maniac Mansion's "Don't be a tuna head!" line to the Most Mysterious Lines a Young Student of English Language Can Encounter. =)

That all was in late 80's, I think. Fast forward years and years and years.

Somewhere around 1996. Some summer around there, I had finally got a legitimate PC version of Ultima V, and I felt the game was awful. Well, this was from the infamous Encore "Ultima 1-6 Series" CD-ROM which was among the most evil things Electronic Arts ever cooked up. The perfect testament to shovelware. But all that is irrelevant - the PC version really was awful-looking with its rasterized graphics! It was also nearly unplayable due to lack of frame limiting, and the keyboard problems. (Year or so later, I found the technical notes about the latter, it now works just fine...)

I goofed around the game a lot. I didn't know much about what the hell was happening, because I didn't bother to re-read the awfully-dithered intro that hurt my eyes, and there was no documentation with the game. I apparently found out that you can escape the conversations with just enter key.

And then came the second zen moment.

I got some distant and desolate place. Some kid was there. We talked. I tried to escape the conversation with enter key. The kid thought I was not polite.

I tried to meta-game.
The game didn't like it.

Somewhere deep in my soul, the seeds against playing the games on game's terms were planted. Nowadays, when I'm following a story-based game, I don't even try to "meta-game". I know that if I run away, that kid will think I'm rude.