I am trying to do a thing, but it is taking too long. Oops. I will try again tomorrow.
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That really isn’t my problem. I couldn’t help you if it was. I wouldn’t if I could.
Michael Jackson is not a good Nerf gun, apparently, regardless of how many of his body parts are reported to be constructed from the orange, foam-like substance.
“Other farm games”: why are there any, much less if they are reputed for their slowness? I don’t doubt that even a video game about filling a bucket could be entertaining if done properly or merely spammoed to enough idiots in the facebook who forget that actual video games still exist, but I’d still be baffled if an entire genre formed around it. At best, you’ll get a series of Double Dare physical challenges out of it.
I could scarcely grasp the popularity of amusement park simulations, but farms just seem slow and dull. I liked running around with the guy in Harvest Moon until I realized I had to make him buy seeds and plant stuff. Although even more popular to others and more baffling to me are simulations of the yet more mundane, less consequential strictly residential existences of The Sims, and I filled a couple of notebook pages complaining about that which neither you nor I are likely to see in our futures, to our non-detriment, so let us talk about something else.
Great!
< Why is there a life size cardboard cut out of just some guy in this store? I thought it was one of the employees, at first, because of that necklace he's wearing, but soon I knew the truth:
Yes, hopay, I understand it’s one of the characters from the feature film Twineline… but if I had not seen the movie I would not know that. And as somebody who’s seen the movie, I can’t imagine why anybody would want to own a thing which reminded them of it. The guy’s boardsona is utterly ordinary looking aside from his chalky skin, which could easily be a result of it being out in someone’s back yard for a couple years.
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Lavos sez:
BWa-AWWAAWaaAAAWskreeeEEeEEEbwaAAAAaaAASKREEEEeeeEEBWAAaaAAW-AAAw-AAw-AAAaAWWW
Finkeldey Fabrax sez:
You always had such a way with words, Lavos.
A "stay-cation". sez:
I’m impressed he was able to successfully make use of a keyboard.
Finkeldey Fabrax sez:
He had 65,000,000 years to figure it out.
An "e-stay-cuation" sez:
You know, I always thought that was something of an absurdly high figure there–not necessarily for Lavos, of course, but for humanity. I know it’s meant more as a geological in-joke than anything (being the approximate date of the Yucatán meteor impact) but it seems to be stretching the bounds of believability even for an unabashedly fantastical story. After all, modern humans as we would recognize them have only been around for what–300,000 years? Naturally I can accept that a fantasy universe with a drastically different history might have a much longer timescale in this respect, but that much longer? It completely dwarfs the events of the entire rest of the game’s history by a factor of over 4000. What exactly was humanity doing in all that time (aside from trying to crawl its way back from the brink of extinction, of course). I mean, post Zealpocalyspe it only took them about 15 thousand years to re-reach a more or less comparable level of civilization. Even assuming it might take a good bit longer to figure things out the first time (having had to get that whole domesticating of plants and animals down and all hat sort of thing), and also allowing for numerous false starts, that’s still a lot of down time to account for. 650,000 years? Sure, I’ll accept that easily. 6.5 million years is fine as well. 16.5 million? Eh, that’s stretching things, but I’ll let it slide. 65 million? Now you’re getting silly.
What’s more, it really screws up the Sunstone sidequest. So it’s missing in 1000 AD. No cause for alarm–just go back and pick it up in 600 AD. Or even 12,000 BC, it doesn’t matter. After 65 million years, the difference is negligible. It’s akin to expecting your mobile phone’s battery life to be noticeably longer because you left it plugged in for an additional 15 seconds. Come to think of it, why do our heroes even need the stone 100% charged in the first place? They only use a small fraction of its energy, and it seems to have plenty of power left in the ending sequence. This is to be expected—it was supposed to have been something which could power an entire civilization for centuries. Lucca should have been able to make several hundred thousand superweapons from even a partially charged stone.
What this all has to do with Lavos’ manual dexterity, I don’t know.
Finkeldey Fabrax sez:
How about the plausibility that there’d be one pure, traceable blood line through all the ages?
I did think the huge time jump was sort of odd, but I was never science-minded enough to really consider its absurdity. I was too concerned with why each period got the same sized slice of the time wheel. Or wondering how an apparently entire planet with only four towns worth of people living on it for the entire span of its existence had such depth of technology and culture, even just medieval European culture. Maybe also why it didn’t have a totally warped horizon; at such a size there’d be no mistaking its spherical shape. However, the actual layout is an endlessly looping square, which doesn’t make any sense anyway. Chrono Trigger should seek counseling.
I had similar problems with Final Fantasy 8, although that at least had a large enough world area that I could imagine there were lots of cities and nations that nobody ever mentioned, and that the map itself was not the “actual” world, but just a representation, albeit one with elevation and the occasional land mark denoted. That would be an issue in all cames of this type, but this one placed special emphasis on international relations. For a video game.
Finkeldey Fabrax sez:
Pigbuster is right! The line breaks are messed up in the preview. I shall have to investigate that. Oh sigh.
Pigbuster sez:
Sometimes it can be nice to be right, but at what cost?
Also, it would be nice if there was a link on the main page to the Ehhh login page, AKA http://bimshwel.com/woid/wp-login.php, rather than having to navigate to a now-distant entry to do so. As though you haven’t enough to do already! My sincere apologies.
A "stay-ccine" sez:
The “it’s a small world” phenomenon never bothered me all that much, mainly because it’s more a matter of technical limitations that anything. I doubt the game’s creators really intended to suggest that the entire world was that small; it just ended up that way. Most SNES RPGs have only two world maps at most; Chrono Trigger had five, so it’s to be expected that they might be a bit smaller than average, especially considering the game was probably bumping up against space limitations as was. In any case, just as in your example with the other, unmentioned cities and countries, I more or less sort of assumed there were other unmentioned landmasses somewhere off the map (I think maybe some of these may be visited in Chrono Chross? I wouldn’t know myself, as I’m somewhat afraid to play it, having been informed that not only is it not all that good, but it somewhat taints the original by association), and that the whole world-wrapping effect was just for gameplay’s sake. Because logical consistency is essential in our fantasy-based video games, you see.
The whole traceable bloodline thing is pretty weird, though. I guess it’s not intrinsically absurd that our heroes should happen to meet so many people related to the current Guardia royal family, but it sure is awfully convenient (even though the phenomenon pedigree collapse for past generations and the reverse process for future generations does admittedly increase the odds a bit), and more convenient still that these individuals should also happen to hold (in some cases not even hereditary) positions of civic authority. Then again, our heroes may have simply thought it in poor taste to introduce the king to the various nobodies, petty criminals, perverts and hobos they met on their journey who also turned out to be in some way be related to him. That said, the traceability aspect is the real problem here. I suppose I can sort of except that the future elder might be perfectly aware that he’s descended from royalty—god knows numerous people in our own world like to brag about finding a king or two in their own family tree—but there’s no way a pre-literate, stone age society kept lasting records of this sort of thing—especially records that lasted sixty-five million years. So even if Cinema is a distant ancestor of the royal family, there’s no way anyone should be able to know this.
Then again, this is a completely irrelevant plot point that isn’t even revealed until the ending sequence, and doesn’t even matter much then, so this it’s probably an example of one of the creators deciding at the very last moment, “Hey, wouldn’t it be AWESOME if…” and not really putting much more thought into it beyond that. Fortunately the game’s good enough in most other respects that we can ignore the occasional lapse in logic, especially when dealing with a theme as logic-twisting as time travel.
Finkeldey Fabrax sez:
Stacy:
You’re so smart. I really don’t deserve you. I hadn’t considered the amount of “worlds” at all. I’m sure I had in the past, but this time it slipped my mind. I think. Or maybe I was just whining. I don’t remember. The map size doesn’t break the game for me, thankfully. That’s one of those things where I feel like I have to mention it before somebody else does and, I assume, thinks I’m stupid for not seeming to notice. These things define much of my life. Even though I’ve been trying to think of another example for over an hour without coming up with anything. That is how it goes, sometimes.
I want to play Chrono Cross anyway, just because Square generally does not disappoint in the audio-visual department, even when the plot and gameplay mechanics make little sense. Fellow Playstation pseudosequel Legend of Mana jumps to my mind. Unless you mention Radical Dreamers, which is essentially a text adventure, which for some reason I’ve never had more than a scrap of tolerance for. Even the first King’s Quest, which has scarcely anything that could be called “graphics” I found more bearable.
Who is Cinema?
Piggy:
I didn’t like implying that it was in any way necessary for people to log in, but I’ll consider placing relevant links someplace obvious. I do wish I could be in better control of this thing. I think the preview problem happened when I tried to alter the string “comments-text” in all relevant files to ward off a particularly resilient advertisement robot that was getting through the filters by not actually posting links to anything. Just endless quantities of nonsense letter comments which could not possibly have benefited any robot company in any way. They existed soley to irritate me. Eventually they remembered to link to stuff and started getting flaggered again, allowing for easily deletion. Which is good, because my experiment didn’t work at all and I had to change everything back. Evidently I did not get it quite right. Now I need to redownload the 2008 version of Ajax Comment Preview again, because its monstrous 8 kilobyte zip file appears to be about the only thing on my hard drive that I deleted in the past year.
A "stay-cuum cleaner" sez:
I’m not actually that smart; I’m just good at obfuscating. I developed this skill in order to trick my college professors into giving papers which consisted entirelyof awkwardly stitched-together collections of insipid surface-observations with a short and hastily written intro and conclusion much higher marks than they actually deserved. Also, I just finished re-playing the game only about two weeks ago, so these sort of details are still relatively fresh in my mind.
Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever played any RPGs for any of the more recent (i.e. post 1996) consoles, unless you count the Zelda games, which I really don’t. I never really found 3D graphics and realistic textures all that impressive; I certainly have nothing against them, but there’s a certain elegant simplicity about the graphics of the late SNES era which I positively adore. Radical Dreamers, on the other hand, I might actually check out, as I’ve generally heard good things about it, and I typically have a high tolerance for text-based games, myself. I fear I’ve been spending way too much time playing old video games lately, though…
Cinema = Kino, which means precisely that in various European languages. Remember what I said about obfuscation?
Also, would I be correct in assuming that your least favorite character in Chrono Trigger is Robo? Or at least has gradually become such since allowing comments on your website?
Robo sez:
chrono your penis is so small!! click the link to buy penis enhancement drugs!! http://www.downloadviruses.com
A "stay-cant lot" sez:
My, but the lengths the current economic downturn has pushed some people to…
Finkeldey Fabrax sez:
It beats fidgeting about in a field waiting for trees to grow for 400 years.
Zashkaser sez:
I bookmarked this link. Thank you for good job!
Finkeldey Fabrax sez:
Thank you for good bookmark! Though this is actually a “page” and not a “link.” The “bookmark” is a link. Please notify your mad scientist of this at the nearest opportunity.
Vivalkakira sez:
Your blog was of course amazing again even though it was terrifying for me to read what happened to you.You turned what could have been a very bad thing into something funny and positive. Do take care. Also your live radio news broadcast was also amazing.I love you xoxox
Diamond's Jim Café sez:
Yes, Deffy, robot love is a confusing thing.
Pleasuretron 960 sez:
ME WANT UNDERSTAND “LOVE.” NOT UNDERSTAND “LOVE.” MUST TERMINATE WHO WANT STOP ME UNDERSTAND LOVE.
asss sez:
I want to say – thank you for this
corimex sez:
Hope it will always be alive
A cheeseburger named Marvin sez:
Much more polite than one might be led to expect from a person named “asss”.
Finkeldey Fabrax sez:
My delightful conversations with asss are among the precious few things I cherish in this life.
Cheeseburger in Paradise sez:
I’m sorry to hear that.
Hotel Albena sez:
I come relationship an olive department in people power, and the self-determination fighter’s gun in the other. Do not detonate the olive offshoot capitulate from my hand.
Hotel Albena
http://hotelalbena.webs.com/ – Hotel Albeana
billiard balls sez:
A human beings begins cutting his insight teeth the first chance he bites out more than he can chew.