Discuss. ㋼
Author Archive for Jamie Spong
There are now two reasons to own a PlayStation 3: Noby Noby Boy and Heavy Rain.
Seeing as I’ve already spent half a post talking about the latter, it’s time to examine The Young Man of the Twin Nobs.
But first, a little personal history. It’s been about 10 years since I was given a Christmas gift of a Nintendo 64 console and a handful of games (Banjo-Kazooie, GoldenEye 007 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time). Now, when I was a child, I was, like many children, stupid. Although I had figured out by this point that consoles needed to plug into a television to work and didn’t communicate via power sockets,1 my grasp on reality and its associated concepts was tenuous at best. So, when I fired up what critics had called The Best Game Ever, I was content to roam the Kokiri Forest, talking to the various inhabitants, walking, jumping, collecting rupees, picking up rocks, throwing rocks, more jumping, listening to Navi and so on without continuing to the rest of the game. I was vaguely aware that there was more to explore — I had, after all, read the manual which talked about all kinds of items that I didn’t have, like, for example, a sword — but that didn’t bother me. Besides, there was this one location that had a frightening boulder scaring me off.
I should probably point out that I have a terrible fear of things in video games. Like monsters. And insects. And glitches. And polygons. To this day, I won’t go near games like Half-Life or Bioshock. I’d always disable items in Super Smash Bros. Melee in fear of getting an appearance from a Like Like or Redead. And Banjo-Kazooie is still the scariest video game that I’ve ever played. Scarred me for life, it did; after one particularly shocking scene (played by Brother whilst I watched) I was reduced to rolling on the corridor floor, trembling, whimpering “they’re crawling on me”. True story. But, as usual, I digress.
The point that I’m making is that when one plays a video game for the first time, be it as a child, a curious parent or a technophobic senior, one doesn’t care about advancing to the next level, unlocking any of the achievements or upgrading one’s character. One cares only about having fun. And this, I believe, is the essence of what a video game should be. The moment that one is forced to do something in a video game, it stops being fun. When it stops being fun, it stops being a video game. It becomes a job.
In my mind, a true video game does not force the end user to do anything. It may gently guide the player to the next destination or give the player some ideas on what to do next, but my favourite games are the ones that offer freedom. Burnout Paradise is one of my most favourite games of recent years, and it’s not hard to see why: The player is given a car and placed in a city. And that’s it. Of course, there are objectives; you can unlock different cars, you can compete in races, you can discover hidden locations, you can perform stunts — and, in my personal favourite mode, you can slam into other cars, shutting them down and sending them to the junk yard. But it’s all optional. There aren’t any menu screens between you and the city. You can start the game and just drive. No obligations. No messages telling you off for going the wrong way. No game has better captured the pure joy of driving since the original OutRun.
It’s important to note that a game like this can only work properly if it’s coded properly. For me, a game needs to feel good to play, to experience. Sloppy programming and poor execution have ruined too many exciting game concepts. Staring at the word “Loading…” on an otherwise blank screen is not fun.
So what of Noby Noby Boy, then? A software toy criticised for its lack of focus? A game that many would describe as an “ungame”?
Noby Noby Boy has been misunderstood. So-called “hardcore” gamers have looked at it, maybe tried it for a while, before moaning that there’s no point to the game and going back to playing Call of Duty or something. But they’re missing the point. The fact that there is no point is the point. Wait… No, let me rephrase that.
Designer Keita Takahashi (also the man behind the Katamari franchise) has stated that when he’s done designing video games he would like to design playgrounds. And that’s exactly what he’s done with Noby Noby Boy. Although he’s stated that he’s not entirely happy with the finished product due to lack of budget, the game nonetheless is a well-produced physics-based playground. The player is given control of BOY, briefed on the controls and left to explore the rest of the game for themselves. The graphics are beautiful in their simplicity. The soundtrack is diverse, consisting of a range of pieces played by a single instrument, further pushing the simplicity idea. The control experience is great (Noby Noby Boy being the first time that I’ve ever used a PlayStation controller for more than a few seconds); barring some problems with the L3 and R3 buttons (which may or may not be the fault of the controller) it really adds to the experience, really giving one the sensation of space and free movement. And although there are Trophies2 to earn and an overarching long-term worldwide goal of stretching enough for GIRL to reach other planets, that’s not what makes the game engaging.
Noby Noby Boy takes one back to a very primal stage of their gaming life. Much like the fun I had exploring Kokiri Forest in Ocarina of Time, Noby Noby Boy presents players with an infinite number of randomly generated worlds to play with. This is a game that perfectly embodies the spirit of a child given their first video game. This is a game that shuns obligation; a game that gives the player complete freedom to play and have fun. Let me emphasize that. Play and have fun. How many games today allow one the pure, unadulterated joy of playing and having fun? Sure, you have open-world sandbox-type games like the annoyingly prolific Grand Theft Auto series, but few of them — perhaps none of them — are as much of a joy to experience as Noby Noby Boy. In this sense, Noby Noby Boy’s focus on fun pushes it much closer to my definition of a pure video game than any other.
So, if you, like me, are tired, disgusted or put off by the complex, miserable, unrewarding nature of hardcore gaming, or just looking for something a little different, Noby Noby Boy may just prove to be one of the most happy, fun and joyous experiences of your life.
If you will let it. ㋼
Ooh, one more thing. There’s an iPhone version of Noby Noby Boy coming out really, really soon (assuming that Apple’ll allow it on their App Store). Judging by the incredible preview videos that they’ve placed on YouTube, it’s shaping up to be the best iPhone and iPod touch application ever made. So now you’ve got a reason to get yourself one of those devices.
Most — all, actually — of the images in this post were taken from Eurogamer.
- Coincidentally, the potential of home power sockets to transmit data was realised a few years later with the HomePlug standard. My mind was ahead of its time. [↩]
- The PlayStation equivalent of Achievements. [↩]
Recently, some copypasta sauce spread over an Internet or two proposed that there are two types of anime fans. The first type enjoys story, substance and animation quality et cetera, and the other kind enjoys lighter, character-driven series and doesn’t care so much about where the story is headed.
Like most generalizations, this is complete rubbish.1 Different people like or dislike different things for different reasons. There are several qualities that may make a series seem good or bad, each entirely subjective. At least, that’s an idea. By my reckoning, likes and dislikes (in my case, at least) occur more-or-less at random. But I digress.
About a year ago, the sequel to Kiddy Grade, which had previously existed only as a pilot episode and some sketches, was greenlit for a full-fledged series. Now, I believe that Uta∽Kata is the best non-Giant Robo anime ever made, so although I wasn’t the biggest fan of the original Kiddy Grade I was really looking forward to this new series from gímik, the production triforce behind all aforementioned (non-Giant Robo) titles. I even made a blog post anticipating it!
It didn’t live up to my hype. Of course it didn’t. Things tend to not. But I continued watching. I sat through episodes filled with in-jokes and references that remain impenetrable to anyone who doesn’t spend most of their life on Nico Nico Douga. Sure, there was plot, centimetring away under the everyday antics of the maids-who-are-actually-secret-agents, but it lacked the interconnectedness of Kiddy Grade, the subtle foreshadowing of Uta∽Kata.
One (half-)episode was nothing but a string of Lucky☆Star-esque voice actor-related gags. I’ve said that the presence of Norio Wakamoto is never a bad thing, and, well, it wasn’t. But I maintain that it was a thoroughly pointless episode; it introduced no new running characters, had no effect on the overall storyline and was never mentioned again.
But I persisted.
I’d watched the original Kiddy Grade. I’d watched Uta∽Kata. I knew that we were being lulled into a false sense of security, building to a massive plot turnabout.
And then it happened. Two major characters died, leaving our heroines without idols/mentors. Sad. Moving.
Meh, I thought.
It seemed that after eight or so episodes of nothing really happening, attempts to shake up the formula didn’t faze me. Maybe I thought that it should’ve been this way from the start. Maybe I was just in a bad mood that day. Either way, the series did become generally less painful to watch after this point, even though the overlying plot still didn’t make much of an effort. You could say that I had the mindset of a “Type A” anime fan at this point.
After an episode of mourning, episode 11 gave us a look into the lifestyles of the antagonists. (There are a bunch of characters in this show.) I thought it was a great episode; it may’ve been low on plot, but it was low on unfunny gags, too. Plus, we got to know the bad guys a lot better. They have feelings and stuff! Who’d've thought it?
Episode 12 added some much needed plot, featuring some well-appreciated continuity in the form of acknowledging the original series, revealing what happened to the principal members of the original cast and definitively linking both storylines. This is it, I thought. The halfway point in the series where everything changes. From now on, everything’ll be deadly serious.
The next episode was a beach episode.2
As beach episodes go, it was okay. It turns out that some computer broke down which trapped them there and they had to fix it or blow it up or something in order to save everybody. But the story isn’t why I find it notable. (No, neither was the mandatory dress code.)
As this episode played out, I found myself emotionally connecting with the main characters. I smiled along with them, cheered them on; they looked so cool in the denouement when they defeated the whatever-it-was terrorising the other characters that they were keeping their ES-Member-status a secret from until now.
And it was then that I realised that, for perhaps the first time ever, I wasn’t watching a show for the story. Sure, I enjoyed the plot and I continue to look forward to seeing where it goes, but that’s not why I care.
Over twelve hit-and-miss episodes, I had shared the adventures of these two girls. Together, we dealt with the strange situations that we were placed in, and, with time, it almost felt like we had become friends. It didn’t matter that they just happened to be a pair of young, good looking female-types; it was their personalities, not their bodies, that won me over. Going back over the older episodes looking for screenshots for this post, I found myself appreciating the show a lot more now that I knew.
I cared for these characters more than I cared for the series that brought us together.
And I still managed to write this whole post without mentioning their names. ㋼
- “Every generalization is false, including this one.” – Mark Twain [↩]
- Technically a holiday resort episode. [↩]
I feel violated. ㋼
This year, the city of Leeds was lucky enough to host the Northern arm of the Eurogamer Expo 2009. As Leeds is conveniently located inside the jurisdiction of the provider of my bus pass, attendance was a no-brainer. I’m not what you would call a hardcore gamer, but my interests in video game theory and technology more than qualify me to leave the house for this.
Now, I’m particularly interested in the idea of the video game as a storytelling medium. (Which explains why I spend so much time and money on visual novels. The attractive female characters are just a bonus.) At the expo, I got the opportunity to play a wide variety of games, two of which caught my fancy in regards to the use of story.
One game that I was lucky enough to have a go on was the upcoming Heavy Rain on the PlayStation 3, a cinematic “game noir” (if you don’t mind me coining a phrase). Many attempts have been made in the past to give one the experience of playing through a motion picture, and, by watching the following videos, it would seem like Heavy Rain, with its high-definition film-grain effect and meticulously motion-captured cast fresh from the uncanny valley, is the closest we’ve ever seen.
Unfortunately, Heavy Rain works much better when someone else is playing it than it does when one plays it for onesself. The control scheme, in particular, is a large point of contention. The character is controlled by the right trigger; pulling the trigger makes him walk/run/tiptoe, and steering is accomplished via the left thumbstick. As you can see in the above video, this takes quite a bit of getting used to.
Sometimes, little icons appear on screen, corresponding to the PlayStation controller’s bizarre, unintuitive circle, square, ecks and triangle buttons or gestures to be performed by the right thumbstick. In itself, this isn’t particularly innovative: these little actions have become known as “Quick Time Events” (no relation to Apple’s QuickTime technology), and they formed the basis of early “interactive movies” such as Dragon’s Lair (a game which Heavy Rain director David Cage has downplayed similarities to). Perhaps a more apt comparison would be the Shenmue series; heavily story-driven games with a plot that develops through both interactive cutscenes and event flags scattered throughout the world. Of course, Heavy Rain’s “sets” (read: levels) are on a much smaller scale than Shenmue’s wide, open explorable environments, but that’s entirely the point: the intent is to give the player the full movie experience but still be in control.
But what really impressed me about this game was the potential for plot branches. These two videos show only one direction for the story to take. As I watched others experience the demo, I saw many other possibilities. And these are more than just changes in dialogue; in this one scene, the developers programmed many different possible ways to distract the robber, calm him down and reach the scene’s conclusion. In my playthrough, I accidentally knocked a bottle off of a nearby shelf. According to another report that I read after the event, it’s possible to pick up this bottle and knock the robber out.
In the video you see above, our hero talks to the robber, eventually convincing him to leave (I love how the shakiness of the options represents the character’s inner nervousness), but this was not one of the outcomes I saw at Eurogamer. If you can’t get him to calm down, the player must attempt to wrestle the gun from him. I managed to get shot in the shoulder, but my character seemed fine and the outcome was the same in the above video (only with a slightly broken shoulder). But if the shopkeeper is shot, a similar but significantly different scene plays out as Scott is given the vital clues with the shopkeeper’s final breath. Same outcome, but more dramatic. And though I may complain about the controls, one can’t argue that they don’t feature some interesting idiosyncrasies; in the above scene, the player must continuously hold down both shoulder buttons to keep their hands up. (If you don’t manage to keep them up, you still get the “shot in the shoulder” ending.)
It’s plain to see that an enourmous amount of work has gone into Heavy Rain. I just wonder if it’s all really worth it. Yes, it just may be a true interactive movie, with engaging characters and a plot (based on what little we know of it) that seems decent enough. But the demo that I played had significant problems that may not be fixed by release date. I speak, of course, of the controls. Even if you have full control over your character, there’s not much point if you’re going to be limited by control scheme and set (again, level) design. From a gameplay perspective, it may as well be a string of choices and dexterity tests for all the difference it makes. I’m hoping that I’ll be proved wrong, but it seems like Heavy Rain will soon join the ranks of Fable Ⅱ, Shenmue Ⅱ and every Telltale Game ever made as an experience that sacrifices gameplay in favour of its story.
Which brings me to an example on the other side of the technological scale — and, unlike Heavy Rain (with its tentative February 2010 release date and PS3 exclusivity), one that you can play right now. You see, in the building opposite the show floor, they had set up a nice little indie section, featuring developer talks, 3D gaming demos and a selection of expensive-looking computers running Flash games.
One such Flash game was Ergon Logos.
An extreme counterpoint to Heavy Rain’s high-definition three-dimensional graphics, Ergon Logos is entirely text based. (And no, it’s not what you think.) Reading through its first act, Ergon Logos clearly sets out to be a Braid-esque deconstruction of the classic Super Mario story (princess kidnapped, hero saves her) told through the medium of interactive kinetic prose, but, as creator Paolo Pedercini says, ”it fails miserably and becomes a piece of non-linear kinetic visual poetry written by a teenager obsessed with post-structuralist French philosophy. I don’t,” Pedercini adds, “know exactly what I was thinking.”
Regardless of original intent, what has been created here is, accidentally or not, a deconstruction — an interactive critique, if you like — of the visual novel medium. Let’s put aside the story and look at the delivery. The narrative is presented in a line. The line has various twists, turns, right-angles and about-faces and, every so often, the player is given a choice between two or three directions in which the story can take. All the while, the story is moving at a constant, linear pace, unbroken by pauses or mini-games of any kind. Remind you of anything?
This, I argue, is a novel game in its purest form. Along the way, the player (reader?) is given glimpses of other possibilities for the story, whether the option has already passed or has yet to be. I am reminded of Ever17 (which I admit I have yet to reach the true ending of) and its tendency to show the player shadows of the results of other plot choices within its narrative. In some cases, it is possible to get stuck in an infinite loop, and, while none of its eventualities can be considered a “true ending”, one may feel as if one has hit a dead end at times. At one point early on in the second act, you are given the same option twice at once, going in opposite directions. Just what is one to do? Only through replaying the experience can one see all that there is to see, but Ergon Logos is not designed to be “completed”. It is designed to be read, experienced and to challenge your idea of what makes a game. Even if it ends up doing something completely different.
Anyway, I highly recommend that you play it for yourself a few times. Ergon Logos is free, Flash-based and should work in most major web browsers. I recommend, however, that you close everything else and start a new browser session, if for no other reason than [SPOILERS AHEAD] one of the game’s many endings will deliberately make it (and possibly your computer) crash. But it’s art. So that’s okay. ㋼
That title up there should probably say “Kanon Turned 10”. I started writing this post in May.
But it’s still 2009, and this year marks the 10th anniversary of the release of one of Japan’s most beloved visual novels.
Kanon takes place in Winter. There is a main character and some other characters as well. Some of the other characters are more important story-wise than others, and the main character has to talk to them for the story to happen. (That’s what one does in a visual novel, after all.) Hopefully, I’ve managed to describe it to you without spoiling anything. Please don’t stop reading here.
Kanon is notable for being the first work produced by Key, who would later go on do create Air and Clannad (which you may have heard of), as well as Tomoyo After, Planetarian and Little Busters!.1 (Which you may not’ve heard of. Don’t read too far into any of those Wikipedia articles if you don’t like spoilers.)
Nayuki is my favourite character. This is a picture of her.
Evidently, some people (i.e. Toei Animation) thought that Kanon was worth adapting into an animated series. So they did. It wasn’t very good.2 A few years later, after the exceedingly poorly paced Air TV series somehow became liked by folk, anime megahouse Kyoto Animation made another one. And it was good. So good that they eventually brought it over to North America, translated it into English American3 and released it on DVD, which, due to issues, quickly went out of print. Until it was re-released in a horrible boxset that tries to cram the whole series on four discs and typesets the subtitles in a highly annoying font.
At the time, one could've expected to pay this much for one of these. That's four episodes, y'hear? Well, I suppose that it's better to get 24 episodes for £30 than 4 of those episodes for £200. Even if the subtitles are harder to read.
To further appease the English-speaking fans, an unofficial fan translation of the original visual novel had been in the works for many years; before the story was animated, in fact. After much work by many hands, it was finally released earlier this year for anyone who owns a copy of Kanon Standard Edition, the slightly enhanced re-release.
Haeleth (who I believe started the project) mentioned on his website that HimeyaShop was a good place to get visual novels and the like. So I did. What I didn’t know is that since Haeleth’s now out-of-date page on Kanon was posted, all of the 18+ rated visual novels that they sell have been moved to a separate website, so I ended up with the “all ages” version.4
Now, Japanese programmers do things slightly differently to the way us Englishmen are used to. I’m no hacker (heck, I barely know any HTML), but one can tell from looking at the way that the game installs itself that the Japanese are used to a much different computing experience than us. (Do they not have the Program Files folder in Japan?) Perhaps the biggest cultural difference is that Mac users are generally left in the cold when it comes to visual novels, with most pretty much all of the major releases being Windows-only. This is a problem for me, as I have been a Mac user for nearly three years now.5 With barely any hard drive space remaining on the ol’ MacBook and Brother choosing to use his computer most of the time, there was only one way I’d be able to play Kanon.
I bought a MacBook Pro.
I wanted to take a photo that showed off the anti-glare display because I couldn't find any photos of the anti-glare display when I looked for them when I was thinking of getting a MacBook Pro with an anti-glare display.
I suppose that you could tell from my brief description up at the top that I haven’t yet finished Kanon in any of its forms. But just you wait. The moment Windows 7 is released (and my beautifully cheaper-than-half-price pre-order copy shows up), I’ll shove a Boot Camp installation onto that glorious solid-state drive and have Kanon running better than anyone could’ve imagined. (No, I did not write this post just to show off the new computer. I haven’t even turned it on yet.)
But soft. If you’re running Windows 2000 or XP or so (and have a working DVD drive), you too can experience the story of Kanon — regardless of your knowledge of Japanese.6 As mentioned before, Kanon Standard Edition For All Ages (to give it its full title) can be purchased at HimeyaShop.com. They post internationally! (But they don’t bother to fill out the Customs declaration, so be prepared for extra charges once it reaches your nation’s borders.) If you want the full version with the added nature sequences (which you might as well get, seeing as it’s the same price and the fan translation allows one to disable the sex sections if one wishes), you’ll have to go through ErogeShop.com (direct link provided so that you don’t have to look at the more trashy selections). The English update can be found up here (the link is buried at the end of the second sentence from the top of their section on Kanon). Use 7-Zip or something to extract everything in the “Patch files” folder to wherever you installed Kanon, and that should be it.
Finally, I will mention that at the time of starting this post, there was an ongoing online thing called the Key 10th Anniversary Letter Project, which attempted to collect fan submissions of thanks and congratulations to Key on reaching their decennial year. That date has now been and gone, and I’m not sure what the status of the project is, but it looks like they need help more than ever. If you can lend a hand with managing the project (or want to contribute a letter of your own), please give them a moment of your time. Who knows where it’ll end up?
When I first experienced Planetarian, I was moved to the point of giving a care — not something that comes easily for me. When I finished the Clannad anime series, I felt a similar way. Let’s hope that Kanon does the same.
Additionally, Japanator tells me that today is Moé Day. So this post isn’t so irrelevant after all! Hooray! ㋼
- No relation. [↩]
- Or so I have heard. [↩]
- Nayuki sounds like a man. Still, they got the drowsiness down; in the Japanese version, she just sounds like a duck. [↩]
- Many Japanese visual novels, particularly the kind where there’s one guy and more than one girl, contain sex scenes. (Hence the nickname “erotic game”, or “erogé”.) Having sex isn’t necessarily the goal of the story; these scenes range from being tightly integrated into the storyline to just thrown in there to tick the box. (“Game’s not selling well? Add the obligatory sex scene and watch the copies fly off the shelves!” --The Thought Process of the Common Erogé Producer) Kanon falls into the latter category, and versions with the naughty bits removed completely were released without any major changes to the storyline. Incidentally, neither of the animated adaptations feature such scenes. [↩]
- My excuse: They don’t make Logic for Windows anymore. [↩]
- Not that it’s a brilliant translation; the names are written backwards, with the first name last and vice-versa (for what I can only assume are unavoidable technical issues), honourifics are bizarrely ignored & transcribed without any explanation and certain words and phrases are left untranslated and highlighted in purple. If you click on them, it tells you what they mean and why they decided that it was a good idea to not translate them. They might’ve fixed all of this in the latest patch, though. [↩]
Summer is over. It has been for some time, it seems.
I did not have the best summer ever. It was pretty good, though.
I stopped posting updates because I was lazy. By the time I got around to it, I had done a bunch of stuff that I couldn’t remember, or wasn’t interesting, or was too much for one post or something like that. So I didn’t.
I gave up on my goal of a different ice cream every week. In fact, I have gone back to a diet consisting primarily of instant noodles, still the cheapest foodstuff on the market despite the price going up by 12.5% due to the Recession.1
I went to Scarborough. I forgot my sunglasses. I played Outrun 2 SP. I ate fish and chips.
I watched Macross Plus. It was good. It made me want to watch the rest of Macross.
I purchased an Xbox 360. It was a good thing that I purchased it at that time because the price rose shortly afterwards. It came with Burnout Paradise, Trivial Pursuit, Sega Superstars Tennis and Hasbro Family Game Night. Burnout Paradise is my favourite. My gamertag is spongbros.
I went to Ayacon. It was brilliant. I took photographs. I started tagging and labelling them, but then I got bored and stopped. Feel free to browse, but you’ll have to figure out what’s going on in them for yourselves. You could make a game out of it.
I watched Robotech: The Macross Saga. It was good.
I am back at college. I have a lot of work to do.
I’ve been looking through my photographs and have received much nostalgia. (Many of my Flickr uploads were set to private until I tagged them; I never did, so I never made them public. Maybe one day. They won’t mean much to you, anyway.)
I continue to like girls. They continue to feel indifferent towards me and/or not exist. It’s better this way.
My favourite song is We Built This City by Starship. I am listening to it right now on Spotify premium. You should too.
I hate analytical writing.
I ordered the 2006 re-translation of Macross. Somehow, I get the feeling that it will be good.
- Was 8p, now 9p. [↩]
Every so often, I go on a holiday.
A few days, often a week, usually with my family.
We stay at quaint seaside holiday cottages and second-least-expensive hotels. Nice places. The weather usually shines on us.
We rarely travel abroad. The one major difference that I’ve noticed between British hotels and foreign hotels is that British hotels will always, no matter where you stay, provide one with a kettle, a couple of mugs and a small selection of teabags and instant coffees at no extra charge.
Douglas Adams must’ve known just how hard it was to get a good cuppa abroad when he wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which generic Englishman Arthur Dent travels to the end of the universe (which, apparently, has a five-star restaurant) but cannot, for the life of him, find a decent cup of tea anywhere other than his home planet (which is destroyed within the first few minutes of episode one). But I digress.
Anyway, because Wi-Fi still isn’t as commonplace as indoor plumbing, going on holiday leaves me without Internet access for a while.
For someone who uses the Internet on an almost constant basis, there is inevitably a period of acclimatisation. For the first day or two, my mind’ll still probably be focus’d on whichever “hilarious” YouTube video I’ve decided to like lately.1
When I discovered Twitter, I thought that it was a brilliant way to circumnavigate the exuberant charges charged by the mobile telecoms by sending one text message and having it pop-up on several people’s phones at once. Then Twitter switched off text notifications for UK users. Fine, I thought. I never talk to people anyway. I’ll just use it as a blog that I can update with my phone. Then Twitter moved their UK number to Ireland, meaning that not only were status update texts not covered by Orange’s bonus top-up promotion, they were twice as expensive. Naughty. This summer, I found myself with a new problem: No signal. I had completely lost the ability to tweet.
To say that I was isolated from the technological world would be a lie; an exaggeration at best. With the gradual phasing-out of analogue television, Freeview is now the norm — the bare minimum, really — and just about every household is now at that stage, even the quaint seaside holiday cottages; where there was once a charming CRT tuned to Tyne Tees in the corner, there now sits the cheapest flat-screen on the planet, connected to an error-prone digibox and a DVD player that I haven’t dared to touch. Also, I now have my iPod touch, which, while not entertaining the mobile Internet capabilities of its far more prolific, far more expensive iPhone bretherin (which I wouldn’t've been able to use anyway due to the lack of signal), plays music and video just fine (in anticipation, I loaded a bunch of Pani Poni Dash theme songs and a couple of YouTube videos on there before I left2) and, with the latest barely-worth-the-asking-price updates, lets me write blog posts on a sofa by the fire3 in a cottage on the coast of Northumberland. And, as is to be expected in this day and age, I will eventually be offered Internet access in some form, whether it’s a terminal in the hotel lobby with flies buzzing around it, a creaky AOL dial-up account on a dear old relative’s laptop computer with Accessability settings enabled and stern instructions to not “break” it or a pay-by-the-half-hour service at the local book depository.4
But this summer, I didn’t.
Earlier this year, when I went to Italy, I used the hotel’s lone Internet access point once. And that one usage just served to aggrivate me. You see, humans are remarkably adaptable creatures. So, when taken away from the Internet and given oh, say, three days to adjust, one becomes used to this arrangement.
And one feels at peace.
One has been freed from the burdens of checking one’s email, flipping through one’s unread items in Google Reader, being annoyed by the people on Twitter one still unaccountably follows, worrying over how many hits one’s blog gets, searching for the latest deals from RightStuf and so on. All those YouTube videos and games of Minesweeper were tearing whatever was left of my attention span to shreds. Just a few quiet days of reading, walks on the beach and eating Auchtermuchty-type sandwiches5 and I’m a new man.
And one makes a vow.
That when one goes back home, things’ll be different.
No longer will one be a slave to technology. Feeds will be unsubscribed from. Friends will be unfollowed. Games will be uninstalled. And, remarkably, computers will be shut down once in a while.
Because, as it turns out, the Internet just makes one’s life worse.
And then you get home and Google Reader tells you that you have 1000+ Unread Items and you start to blast through them and the seasons rotate and history repeats itself and life goes on. ㋼
- You can check my latest favourites in the sidebar over there. But you knew that already. [↩]
- Some transformation sequences and two versions of Keyboard Cat. [↩]
- It was a particularly wet day. [↩]
- Incidentally, I can highly recommend Barter Books in Alnwick if you ever find yourself in Northern England. Tea, biscuits, Internet access and over a quarter of a million second-hand books. I got a nearly-new copy of The Salmon of Doubt for £2.20 (which’ll be why I spent an earlier paragraph discussing THGTTG), and it even came with a free bookmark. [↩]
- Haggis and bacon. A new candidate for Best Thing I’ve Ever Eaten. [↩]
In the first episode of the flash-in-the-pan Lucky☆Star anime, the girls discuss, among other foodstuffs, soft serve ice cream, noting in particular that one is always left with an amount of creamless cone to munch upon at the end. They reach the consensus that the disproportionate ratio of the frozen treat to the wafer cone diminishes one’s ice cream experience.
Konata demonstrates a workaround. “While I eat, I do a push-and-shove thing.”
The main thing that I learned from this episode is that the ice cream technology that us Yorkshire folk have enjoyed for years is far more advanced than that of Japan. And it’s thoughts like this that make me feel really good about living here.
As an example, observe this standard-issue regular rolled cone. (This week's flavour was Strawberry, by the way.)
As you can see, unlike other brands, even when you've cleared the top…
…the ice cream just keeps going…
…and going…
…and going…
…and going…
…all the way down to the very last bite. No push-and-shove things required.
As Brother neatly put it, “what you see above the cone is only the tip of the ice cream berg”. No, I do not work for Ripley Ice Cream, nor do they sponsor me.
I had a dream about Lucky☆Star a night or two ago. I was back at college, and I’d just discovered that all this time I’d had accommodation available to me as part of my package and I hadn’t been using it at all (or even aware of it). It was a shared room with Konata, Tsukasa and Kagami also living in it. So I checked it out. Kagami (who appeared to me in this form) was the only one there. We had a discussion. That’s all that I remember.
And I don’t even like Kagami.
In further anime news, it seems that I’m not the only one out there determined to have the best summer ever. Haruhi Suzumiya, whose on-again-off-again anishow recently restarted with repeats interspersed with a seemingly random splattering of new episodes every so often, has been doing her bit by enlisting the assistance of her ever-so-loyal SOS Brigade in their latest episode, Endless Eight. Much like my mental to-do list (the completion of which these Best Summer Ever posts seek to log), Haruhi brainstorms a series of events and activities (such as hitting baseballs with baseball bats, going fishing and appreciating fireworks) to do within the final two weeks of their holiday together.
If any of this seems familiar to you, it’s because Haruhi’s latest arc invokes what TV Tropes calls the Groundhog Day Loop. Due to my rudimentary knowledge of the Endless Eight storyline, I put up a brief episode review with the intent of repeating the episode review in next week’s post in order to confuse the masses. However, next week’s post never happened. For one reason and another, I couldn’t be bothered to finish this update in time last week. And so the blog went over two weeks without an update. If I could go back and do it all over again, like in Haruhi (incidentally, there have been four episodes of Endless Eight so far, in which almost exactly the same events take place — Brother expressed concern that eight episodes of Endless Eight would be produced), nothing’d change. This is what I do in the summer. I put things off in favour of other things. And although I have done a wide range of blog-worthy activities over the past two weeks, I barely remember any of them. So this post’s going to seem a little uneven as I try and recall all the major events over the past fortnight. Okay. Here goes.
Better get the week before last out of the way first, as I remember it the least. It didn’t get off to a very good start. Monday (which started out with fog÷mist) was focused on writing the previous week’s Best Summer Ever update and filling in my student loan application. And waiting for the post to arrive. (It didn’t.) I don’t remember exactly what I was waiting for, though.
After biding my time, I finally selected the best day to leave the house and go to Harewood House using that membership card that I purchased way back when to encourage me to leave the house more often. Unfortunately, the best day also happened to be one of the hottest days of the year so far. Normally I’d go to Harewood’s on-site planetarium (which I’d really like to do a post about in the future) to get out of the heat but, as it is still term-time for many of the good boys and girls of the world, it was booked out for a school visit. So I had a walk around. The Harewood grounds weren’t as big as the map implied — I felt slightly ripped off, in fact — and I completed a circuit without too much trouble despite the torrential sun. I really should’ve made the most of it (or come back on a slightly less temperate day); not only has the average temperature dipped now, but my bus pass has run out. A day’s bus fare, incidentally, is over £6.
As I may not have already mentioned, I am a subscriber to Popular Video Rental Service. I first signed up after being impressed with the selection of anime titles on offer, and have continued to work my way through several decades’ worth of cinema history. My most recent rentals from the past couple of weeks include The Castle of Cagliostro (which hadn’t aged well, particularly in the soundtrack department. If the Japanese soundtrack of Laputa was anything like that, I’m not surprised that they fixed it for the American release), Osamu Tezuka’s Metropolis (a fantastic retro-futuristic spectacle that I highly recommend), The Big Sleep (the original version, apparently famous for not making sense. It made about as much sense to me as anything else I watch) and The Karate Kid (which left me quoting many of its lines. “Show me sand-o floor” indeed).
Overrated developer Telltale Games released the first of a series of all-new Monkey Island games. After initial disappointment at the control system (hint: use WASD), I really got into the game — and then I got stuck. Then I got unstuck, and I continued playing until Brother booted me off his computer so that he could have a go.
After much waiting around, Gurren Lagann (the first nine episodes, at least) is being released in the UK. Four episodes in, and it’s really little more than a standard shōnen anime (albeit with faster pacing and robots). Still, time will tell.
I went to a music concert. The band that played was The Orchestra (previously known as ELO Part II), a band based on the Electric Light Orchestra. Most of the songs that they played were ELO songs.
I only managed to fit in one round of Ripley Ice Cream this fortnight, and that was mainly so that I could take those photos at the top. I’ve been inactive a lot of the time, and am now obsessing over my weight and overall health, so I expect to eat less junk food in the coming weeks. Incidentally, Japan’s annual Soft Cream Day (which commemorates the introduction of the frozen delight to Japanese audiences inspired by Independence Day-celebrating North American people occupying the nation at the time) was held the day before I purchased my latest ice cream. According to Wikipedia.
I played Wii Sports again for the first time in several months. My arm has hurt ever since. I think that I have damaged it somehow.
Me and Brother went to York in order for him to pick up a top hat. Apparently, Brother now cares about what he wears. Personally, I see clothes as a necessary evil, and don’t spend much time worrying about them. We had lunch at Little Bettys, which cost £24.35. Normally, I wouldn’t spend more than one tenth of that amount on lunch, but it’s Bettys. You’re paying for quality.
Over the past couple of weeks, I ate fish and chips a combined total of two times.
And that’s pretty much all that I can remember. I tried looking at my recent photographs (which are on Flickr; I’ll think of names for them later), but they didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t already know. Most of this week, the fifth week, was spent working on or thinking about working on this very post, and preparing for the summer holiday. Really, just me in bed browsing the Internet, getting up only to eat, use the lavatory and watch Top Gear. I’d normally say something like “don’t expect any updates for the next week”, but seeing as it’s taken me nearly three weeks to finish this post, you wouldn’t be expecting one anyway. Yes, like everything else in my life, these posts have become a chore. I no longer wish to continue these “weekly” updates, and will instead switch to a “just update whenever the heck I can be bothered to” régime. I dunno. Maybe I just need a week away from the Internet to truly relax. There’s still a chance to save this summer. The rain is over (for now) and with a week in Northumberland, hopefully I’ll be able to turn this around.
Wish me luck.
Oh yeah, and I got my results from college. I won. ㋼
It seems that I’m not the only one out there determined to have the best summer ever. Haruhi Suzumiya, whose on-again-off-again anishow recently restarted with repeats interspersed with a seemingly random splattering of new episodes every so often,1 has been doing her bit by enlisting the assistance of her ever-so-loyal SOS Brigade in their latest episode, Endless Eight. Much like my mental to-do list (the completion of which these Best Summer Ever posts seek to log), Haruhi brainstorms a series of events and activities (such as hitting baseballs with baseball bats, going fishing and appreciating fireworks) to do within the final two weeks of their holiday together.
I'm sure that this is a reference to something, but I'm not sure what.
This week’s adventure proved to be one of Haruhi’s less supernatural endeavours, providing a refreshingly down-to-earth episode with nothing out-of-the-ordinary to be found. No idea why they called it Endless Eight, though.
Watching Haruhi and her merry friends get up to all kinds of vaguely summer-related antics (in the space of only two weeks!) has made me realise that I haven’t been making the most of my time. This week did NOT live up to last week and I didn’t manage to do everything that I’d planned. Also, I forgot to bring my camera, so don’t expect any further images for the time being.
I became curious as to whether the flavour of the week at the Ripley Ice Cream parlour at the Valley Gardens in Harrogate was the same as the flavour of the week at the Ripley Ice Cream parlour at Ripley. So I walked down to the one at the Valley Gardens. This week’s flavour: Lemon. Hmm. So I walked on until I found a bus stop and a bus on its way to Ripley. I found them both, and after a short journey on a busy bus, I arrived just outside Ripley’s flagship “world-famous” ice creamery. I thought that I’d just pop in and pop out again, as the bus back’d only be a couple of minutes away. This week’s flavour: CHEESECAKE. Cheesecake flavoured ice cream!!! I had stumbled upon The Greatest Known To Man. Without thinking, I immediately ordered a handmade rolled cone with a fudge stick and a hot chocolate dip. (I’ll go into the ice cream extras in a later post.) They wouldn’t let me on the bus with the ice cream (yes, I tried), but it was worth it. Or so I had thought. Maybe they pulled the wrong handle, maybe it was just a poor flavour. Either way, I couldn’t distinguish it from vanilla. Probably serves me right for something. I’d better stick to mixtures of the two flavours in future to be on the safe side.
Then I went to Knaresborough. I saw some wonderful things. I forgot to take my camera. Maybe I’ll go back with my camera and take photographs of wonderful things.
Every so often, I eat fast food to remind myself why I don’t eat fast food. It was for this reason that I stopped off at the only KFC in the area on the way back and treated myself to what they call the “Fully Loaded Meal“: one piece of fried chicken, one fried chicken burger, one side dish (I chose corn), chips and one drink (I chose Diet Pepsi). I’m used to having my chicken roasted, so the fried chicken surprised me with the tenderness of the bones. I was able to chew and swallow them with almost no problems. The corn was incredibly hot, the chips were distressingly plain and the burger had too much mayonnaise. Whatever my opinion about the meal itself, I’ve had cravings for fast food ever since. Next time I’m in Leeds, fast food’ll be on the agenda. Oh dearie me.
The only other times I left the house this week were to pay in a cheque and to visit Newby Hall with Father. These times, I did remember to bring my camera. But I didn’t take that many photographs. They’re on Flickr, but they’re in the wrong order because Flickr Uploader is rubbish.
I finally got around to playing those Wallace & Gromit games I got ages ago. I was disappointed that a British license was being developed by an American developer — Telltale Games, famous for the Strong Bad point-an’-click-em’-ups and the recent Sam & Max serieses — and, sure enough, Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures Episode 1: Fright of the Bumblebees {gasps for breath} paints what is unmistakably a foreigner’s view of England. It didn’t help that, with my experiences with their games, Telltale is notorious for releasing bug-riddled glitchfests. In this case, I managed to unwittingly trigger a game-breaking bug in the very final scene, meaning that I had to go back to my last save point and sit through several minutes of unskippable cut-scenes. Employ better testers, Telltale. Hopefully you’ll’ve learned your lesson before the release of Tales of Monkey Island.
I started watching Kiddy Grade again. Now that they’ve got all of the character introductions out of the way, the plot is the focus the focus is on the plot. And, for the sake of said plot, the series has taken the radical direction of firing Lumière and Eh! Claire from their GOTT jobs. I’m not sure what the economic climate is like within their expanded universe, but it’ll be interesting to see whether or not they find employment. Missing the point aside, I’ve really been been really enjoying this series. I’d do a full post on it, but there’s nothing I can really say about it that’s much more substantial than “standard science-fiction (but that’s okay)”.
I now have copies of the only four volumes of the Corrector Yui anime ever released in English. I may never watch them.
I flicked through the first few lines of Ever17 again. That racoon-dog haunts me. Never played it? Fix that. It’s less than £20.
Brother made a new blog post. Read it.
Uh… That’ll do. The upcoming weather forecast looks good enough. Maybe some rain. I welcome it. ㋼
- The original Japanese broadcast of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya was out-of-order. This new episode order sorts them out chronologically, meaning that any new episodes that take place in between the older episodes have to fill in the gaps. [↩]
