"See what happens when you forget to leave a note?"

I never enjoyed driving in the rain. I always get really nervous due to my two accidents on file taking place on the dreariest of days. The weather was like that Monday morning when I was driving down a back road listening to the only cd I own, Building Something out of Nothing from Modest Mouse. I was driving to the local community college to get my application process started.

I am a very nervous person when I get into uncomfortable situations. I clam up, shake uncontrollably and sweat profusely. Sitting down with an advisor I don’t know, talking about a future I can only hope to obtain is a very uncomfortable situation for me. But I wasn’t concerned with the meeting fixing to take place, I was too busy concentrating on the road. I hit a long straightaway when I remembered something cool I accidentally did during a license test in Gran Turismo 4 in the rain. I sped up, pulled the e-brake and jerked the steering wheel in one direction. When my car started to turn away I jerked the steering wheel back pulling my car around, and before the car came to a dead stop I released the e-brake and pressed the gas pedal which propelled me forward like nothing was wrong. It was exhilarating.

I sensibly pulled my car into the visitor’s lot at the college. When I opened my door to step out I mentioned underneath my breath, “no shame, no pride.” With those words out of my mouth, I took my glasses off so they wouldn’t get soaked and pressed forward to the admissions office. The words muttered were words I said in the same under-the-breath way the night before when I finally allowed myself to cry in front of someone for the first time in eight years. And the night before that I said them in a very animated way when explaining to a friend that in the middle of the night sometimes, when I am very lonely, I go to online personals looking at girls I can only assume are lonely, sad insomniacs. I even have profiles made out at each one, but for some reason have too much pride and am too ashamed to post them.

What exactly do I hope to study at this community college? If all goes according to plan, and things rarely do, journalism with a minor in Japanese. That is an afterthought though due to the elated feeling I still have inside me due to actually trying to do something about my future. I hate stocking groceries. I have stocked groceries for five years and that is long enough for someone who yearns to tell stories. The stories I want to tell happen to be about videogames which is why Idle Hours exists. Do I plan on taking my journalism degree and using it for more recognition for Idle Hours as a website? No I do not. Will Idle Hours as a blog, website, or Roguesoft supporter go away? I doubt it. As long as I want to write about pulling a racing game maneuver in my real life car, Idle Hours will be the place to read it because nobody would want to pay me very real money for the story. And these are stories I have to tell. My journalism degree will go to me getting a very real job somewhere that will pay me very real money to write a seven hundred word review on a game like Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex blurb style, with funny captions commenting on the sexiness of cybernetic chicks in spandex. Then, I get to turn around and write a 1500 word review on the game here, where I don’t have to attach a score to the end, talk about how it affected me as a player and talk about how videogames have too many sexy cybernetic chicks in spandex.

But, it’s great to have the ambition in my life for once to follow up all the potential everyone has told me I have had my entire life. Right after I got out of the advisor’s office, I drove home and had to call my old high-school about transcripts and I am here to tell you, it was the worst five minutes of my life. I had to smoke four cigarettes to calm my nerves down enough to dial the phone, but I did it. And the fact a planned Vegas trip might get the axe and the fact Area 51 is a game I may have to pass up are small consequences to the greater story of my life. Those are consequences I am more than happy to take the responsibility for if I can be sitting in a college classroom trying to do something I want in my life which is pursuing my goal of writing about videogames for a living. I even woke up this morning with a smile, because I was up before noon. I took a shower and shaved. Sat down and went over some scholarship forms while I made myself some pancakes and smoked the first cigarette of the day. I think things are going to be alright. Not all the time because things never go right all the time. But ultimately I have enough sense to remind myself I don’t want to stock groceries forever.

And the irony almost knocked me down when I was watching an episode of Filter on the G4 network and saw Jane Pinckard, Brandon Sheffield and Gus Mastrapa all talking about the merits of art direction in videogames. Are G4 trying to get their act together by having people whose opinions I actually care about and take time out of my day to read on their television programs? Or was this just a one time thing?

wes

You had better Believe it. More Randomness.

It was maybe a couple of days ago when I jokingly mentioned in an Aim chat room with random members of the Idle Hours’ crew that, “mobile games are the future of interactive entertainment.” If I recall, everyone had a nice laugh at that. Then I spent the next two days reading GDC articles where real industry professionals spoke at great lengths about how mobile games are the future of interactive entertainment. It makes sense with how handsets have been getting nicer and more technological. Probably the coolest thing I read was a overview of a speech given by the creator of Final Fantasy: Before Crisis which if I am not mistaken, and I may be so please check your favorite news source, is being developed exclusively for Sony Erikson handsets in Japan. Apparently you can fuse materia in the game by taking pictures with the built in camera and depending on the primary color of the photo in question, it will decide the effect of the fused materia. Now that is cool.

If mobile games are indeed the future, and the games make you pay more attention to the world around you, then please, sign me up. It sure beats the glut of games on the shelf in my room at the moment. I am in such a desperate mood for something new. In my opinion the coolest game in the world at the moment is N. It won the Audience Prize at the Independent Game Festival a couple days ago in the Web/Downloadable category. It deserved the accolade. I play the game for about two hours every night.

At first, when Nintendo launched it’s line of classic NES games for the Gameboy Advance I was sort of miffed that they were doing nothing but releasing games they have already released nearly a dozen times a piece even if they were budget priced at twenty bucks. But now, as a person who reads every piece of game related writing on the internet, and having a very keen interest in a form of historical archiving of classic games Nintendo has my approval in this move. I am longing for when my income allows me to pick up the first two Zelda titles so I may play them while I sit and watch movies or especially when I should be working. Matt, I know your reading this, hurry up and give me that twenty dollars for my Atari Jaguar. But if they do not freaking release a classic version of either Punch-Out and Skate-Or-Die in the next batch of games I will be pissed. I am warning you Nintendo. The wrath of the Idle Hours’ crew will be upon your head.

I check Gamespy every so often to see if they have an updated entry in their Girlspy column written by one Zoe Flower. I first came across her writing in OPM when she wrote a piece about Hideo Kojima’s masterpiece series Metal Gear Solid. I really enjoy reading her articles because they really do represent a girl’s opinion on video games. I was talking to James about the Girlspy column tonight and how the first thing any guy would notice about it is how strikingly beautiful Miss Zoe Flower is. One can easily see this if they watch the abomination that is G4 because she is on the channel almost as much as Cliffy B. But I honestly think she represents an important voice in the game industry. A voice that is unabashedly female. Most female game journalists hide their femininity and try to prove they can hang with the guys. Which I think is kind of dumb. They have an opportunity to write about being a legitimate minority in the industry. As sad as it sounds, even though I have no immediate interest in the fact, it is sort of refreshing in some way to read an article about video games in which the writer spends an entire paragraph talking about how she asked Tetsuya Mizuguchi to go shoe shopping with her in a Tokyo boutique. How Mr. Mizuguchi answers the question says a lot to me about him as a person and as a game developer, especially since he was the creative force behind Space Channel Five, which was a very feminine game. If I had a gender change I would be really curious as to what type of shoe he would find nice.

Speaking of game journalism and the like, I have been following as much backlash as I possibly can from that New Games Journalism article the Guardian posted sometime last week. There’s a million links I could post following some of this but I am writing this on a laptop in my living room with no internet connection while I watch Just Married. One of the articles linked in the piece was the same one I linked to before, Tim Rogers’ Dreaming in an Empty Room article from Insert Credit. In the comment section below the New Games Journalism article a veritable thrashing of Tim Rogers as a game journalist took place in which people called his articles “ugly, self-indulgent trash.” One person said, “I would rather have my teeth knocked out with a sledge hammer than read anything Tim Rogers wrote” or something to that effect.

Seventy-Five percent of why this article is available to you on Idle Hours right now is because of Tim Rogers’ “2003 Insert Credit Fukubukoro.” His first entry in the piece outlines a trip he took to Korea in which he played Starcraft in a Korean PC bang. It is the most inspired, self-indulgent, brilliant video game related article I have read in my entire life. People can say whatever they please about Tim Rogers as a writer, but I think the guy is brilliant, and when others say that all he writes is self-indulgent trash, I have to disagree and question exactly what they want out of an article about video games.

Now as a whole, I think this whole New Games Journalism thing is good. As the internet is going to kill print magazines in this industry, the magazines have to do something to offer new content. Every print magazine follows the same news/previews/reviews format. These usually show up in the mailbox after everyone has already checked IGN or Gamespot or Evil Avatar or whatever three weeks prior. The new content should come in the form of a New Games Journalism style. Theory should be discussed. The cultural impact of video games as a new expressive medium should be written about in a smart and dare I say educational way. Content outside of what one could get online in a fresh manner. Sadly when the internet kills print media, EGM will still be standing. Screw EGM. I have never read such a useless piece of garbage in my life. EGM is better used as toilet paper than something one would go to for their news or their evil, worthless reviews. Tim Rogers said Famitsu will stand forever as well. But I can’t read Japanese, yet, so it doesn’t do me any good at the moment. Everyone says Edge is great too, and probably the closest thing print media has for subjective video game writing. So maybe it will stand at the end as well.

I have said countless times that I hope New Games Journalism would destroy all archaic forms of video game writing but now, as someone who honestly has spent more time this past two weeks thinking and reading about games more than playing them, I realize this is stupid. Objective game writing has as much place in the world as subjective game writing. I, as a gamer, need my news/previews/reviews game journalism as much as I need my theoretical, analytical, personal game writing. Just as the film industry has its Entertainment Weekly’s and Film Comment’s, so should gaming have the equal equivalents.

One last thing for the morning. I am a very open minded gamer. There isn’t a genre I know of at the moment that I dislike. But more so than that, I put my personal feelings aside a lot of times, so I can fully try and comprehend what a game is saying and make a judgment on what a game is saying and if the ends justify the means. What I am getting at is I believe wholeheartedly in God. The Biblical, Christian God. With that said, the fact that in Ocarina of Time, the story involves the world as we know it in the game to be created by someone other than the Christian God. But I as a person understand the fact that the game isn’t real, and game worlds can create any story they want. My first multiplayer gaming experiences happened in seventh grade when my classmates and myself played Doom on a lan. The teacher won some sort of grant or something so she had eight computers all linked up. Someone installed the shareware version of Doom on the computers so away we went everyday, when we should have been studying some form of science. Doom has hell-beasts and other assorted demonic things. I was freaking addicted to Quake 3 forever and I can’t think of a stage in the entire game that doesn’t have a pentagram somewhere. But I didn’t let those things cloud my judgment on the games in question. Those games are both masterpieces in every right.

But I can’t figure out for the life of me, as video games now have a whole subgenre called Serious Games dedicated to making real world news event seem even more real by simulating things like presidential elections and assassinations, why no one can create religious games that are at least fun. I remember reading something buried in the Insert Credit archives about how some religious groups are trying to develop playable games. Maybe I should try and find that news bit and see if I can obtain copies of the games and try to review them as someone who believes in the messages the games are trying spread. I think that would be interesting. There’s even a game backed by like the world’s largest hate group called Ethnic Cleansing and although that is one game I will never play despite the fact I have played and enjoyed demonic games in the past, which are games whose messages I don’t agree with, I have read that the game in itself is at least playable.

I was going to finish this up by saying that I take back all the nice things I said about the Minnish Cap and then try and take to task every single Zelda game post A Link to the Past but instead I will just post a link to this review written by one Eric-Jon Waugh of Insert Credit fame, because he does it better than I could ever hope to. I will say, that with the exception of Ocarina of Time, I honestly haven’t finished a Zelda game since A Link to the past because Nintendo hasn’t changed a single thing about them in ten years. And quite frankly I am tired of them. And believe me, I am talking about the freaking Windwaker as well, but absolutely not because of it’s art style which is the most beautiful thing this side of Panzer Dragoon Orta, but because it is as trite a game as I have ever played.

And since I have the internet now, here is the link for the greatest piece of video game related writing of all time.

Good night friends.

Wes.

Complete Randomness

So, I do apologize for telling a few people that they need to check this space for my review of Feel the Magic XX/XY/a small review of my friend Matt’s flakiness. Truth be told, I probably am never going to write it in full like I know I can do because something else always comes up instead. The gist though, is Feel the Magic is a terrific little game and the first time I got to play it was on Matt’s Ds. Then in typical Wes fashion I was going to stop the original point entirely and tell some true story about how Matt tells people he will be somewhere but then just neglects to show up. And on the night he bought his Ds, he was at my house and said he needed to go home for a bit, but then completely neglected to come back, causing Tim, Will and myself to go looking for him at seven in the morning in the freezing cold while listening to the Wu-Tang Clan.
Sega dissolved UGA into Sonic Team. Feel the Magic is a game developed by Sonic Team, but was really developed by the leftover members from UGA, half of which was female. What the game turned into was something Miziguchi would have been proud of and more importantly, a game developed by a team composed almost entirely of females. That is important because for me, it was the first game I have ever played with obvious feminine sensibilities. And I quite enjoyed it.
Last week I traded the new Tenchu game in for Gran Turismo 4. As of last week, I have put over forty hours into GT4 and to be honest, I am burnt out on it. I am longing for something in my gaming life at the moment and I don’t know what. I was thinking of going out and picking up the first Ratchet and Clank game because a good platformer seems like a good idea. I mean, I have had this new Splinter Cell demo sitting in my X-box for the past week but I don’t really even feel like playing it.
I fell out of love with the Mexican girl tonight. Case closed there. I can do those sorts of things, fall in love and out of love girls on a whim, because I don’t really love anyone. Besides, love to me is just infatuation. Funny how things work like that sometime. I know love songs can choke me up. And please, don’t get me started about romance movies. I mean, come on, I am the boy who likes Dawson’s Creek.
But the lack of love in my life can be combated easily enough with my hobbies. Or the things I deem important enough to me. Tonight after getting home, I sat with my little brother and played Twisted Metal 4, for six hours straight. We beat the game three times in a row. Most people would ask me why I was playing Twisted Metal 4 instead of 2. Those people are easily deceived because 4 is a far superior game. The people who mistake 2 as being the best Twisted Metal game are the people who never played 4 because Twisted Metal 3 was so bad. And I honestly don’t blame those people because Twisted Metal 3 was horrendous. I say this as someone who likes Twisted Metal 3 too. As long as it isn’t Small Brawl, the one Twisted Metal game I don’t like, one can’t go wrong.
That PSP Twisted Metal game is looking quite nice. I haven’t seen a PSP game yet though that isn’t looking great. I can’t afford one, but man, I want one. Metal Gear Ac!d alone is enough to sell me. Those pricks on X-Play was talking down about the game due to the card element, but I am the guy who spent seventy-five hours on Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. Card based games don’t suck. Honestly.
And a Darkstalkers collection. I mean, freaking Gamespot or someone said the game is pretty much a direct port of Nightwarriors for Matching Service on the Dreamcast. Which is pretty cool.
All of the gibberish though, I have written, until now was pretty much just to say something to SNK as a company. I refuse to buy a single one of your King of Fighters games from here on out if you do not include King on the roster. You are started to weed her out of some titles and that is dumb. If Will can refuse to buy Mortal Kombat Deception, a game that by all means doesn’t suck, because Striker isn’t in it, I can refuse to buy any of your dumb, backwards thinking games because of your failure to include King. And trust me, for a company who has gone bankrupt now nearly thirteen times, my money means something to you.


wes

Tingle is creepy.

I ate Mexican food for the first time Friday. I meant to write about it that night but after work I came home and fell asleep for a whole three hours. When I woke up I played a few levels in the new Tenchu game, which I recommend if you are like myself and Will and enjoy Tencu games. I went back to sleep after calling Tim and Will to remind them of that night’s Halo party.

The Mexican restaurant in question lies right next door to my place of employment. They have a lunch buffet until three so that was our restaurant of choice for the day. I enjoyed it quite a bit. I can’t for the life of me tell you what I ate at the buffet, except for a taco, but it was all really good. I also found our waitress, or whatever really because we had about four, to be quite attractive. I was telling my buddy Eli Saturday night that we needed to eat there again Tuesday mostly for the food, but also because of this newfound affection. He completely dashed my hopes though when he said I probably don’t have a chance because I am white and she is from Mexico. It seemed almost reasonable mostly so I could push her out of my mind and not dwell on my own ineptitudes.

Someone who has been totally harshing my mellow explained to me awhile ago that Mexican women are no good, but that makes little sense to me. The little it does make involves his own personal past experiences with Mexican women, but those are his experiences, not mine. I would enjoy eating there again sometime though.

So Halo night on Saturday. I really need to buy a digital camera of my own. I used my father’s for the longest time, but the lens broke. I teabagged a couple of people just because there television was within my eyesight and I just wanted to see what it would look like. I don’t think the team I was on won a game the entire night but that was ok. Normally I don’t like Halo or its lackluster sequel. But on this night I enjoyed both games immensely. I think that resides mostly in the company I was in though.

If I owned a digital camera and had the bandwidth here, I would have filmed as much as I could have Saturday night and took many, many, pictures of Ely and Tim drinking, typed up a retelling of the evening after not sleeping for two whole days, put it all in some constructed form, posted it here and called the entire thing an ode to the now late Hunter S. Thompson. Not that I particularly enjoyed his writing per se, but I respect what he did I guess. Doesn’t matter.

Instead of enjoying Halo, I was enjoying Timesplitters 2, on the Gamecube no less. I still stand by that today. I bought Halo 2 that Wednesday. My brother drove to EB with me to get it, and afterwards he rode with me to pick up a Modest Mouse cd and book for my mother. After all of that he called in a pizza, we went and picked it up, drove back to my house and proceeded to sit there and beat Halo 2 co-op in the next six hours. I was left with such a sour taste in my mouth and to this very day, the Live play still cannot relieve it. My brother on the other hand, is in my bedroom at this very moment playing Halo 2 on Live while I am sitting here smoking cigarettes writing this on a laptop.

Since he plays Halo 2 for around six hours a day, I consider myself lucky when I can play the new Tenchu at all. This has allowed me to fall in love with my Gameboy. I finally finished up Chain of Memories, completely, and found the time to beat The Minish Cap. It’s good. It’s real good. But not A Link to the Past good. And that shall be my three sentence review which will stand for all time.

I think I am going to sign off now and watch some college basketball until I fall asleep. I woke up this morning to the beauty of white snow that has now melted. I am looking forward to spring, but am going to miss winter when it gets here. That is why people say to live in the moment I guess.