Anyway, I read this, and was rather irked by the whole thing. If you don’t care to follow a link, basically it’s full of stories about people playing co-op Pixeljunk Monsters with their girlfriends/wives/fiancées.

I guess it’s the condescending “Wow, my silly little girlfriend didn’t like videogames and now she sees the light!” tone that goes through every story. Every time they mention “cute” and even at one point “maternal instincts” it makes me a bit nauseous.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with not liking to play videogames – that’s most people for you. Likewise, I don’t think there’s anything terribly wrong with playing them – some people are into that kind of stuff. But when the two meet, and one assumes some sense of superiority over the other, that’s where the problems begin.

I really don’t think these people should be together, to be honest. You’d think a small matter of differing hobbies wouldn’t be a dealbreaker, but the more people I talk to the more I realise it might be. The problem is that it’s a bigger divide than most hobbies – it shows differing attitudes towards entertainment, technology, information, productive use of time and money and in general, having fun.

If your partner doesn’t like your games, they probably won’t like your comic collection, or the amount of money you spend on graphics cards, or they won’t understand why you want to go to a midnight screening of The Dark Knight, or they won’t stop feeling threatened by the amount of time you spend playing WoW (to be fair, the last one gets unhealthy fairly quickly). But the best you can hope for is that they simply won’t care, and that’s already a wedge between the two of you.

It gets worse though. What happens when they actively object? Often, it’s on the grounds of the whole “Grow up why don’t you?” argument – the idea that games are for teenagers. Maybe that’s true – maybe kids are in effect turning into teenagers more quickly, and that people are trying to stay teenagers longer, or whatever. Maybe we’re just more aware of the need to have some fun in our lives, and that the fast pace of modern life requires time to just sit down and relax. Whatever – I’m not too concerned with arguing for either side. My concern is that you like to play games.

But your partner objects. Which leads to situations like this:

Early this year, I purchased a PS3 under the pretense of playing games of all sorts with my girlfriend.

There’s a lot wrong with this. Why does he feel he can’t be honest about what he wants? Why does she control his purchases, in effect infantilising him? And why does that work as an agreement between them? I mean sure, part of him probably wants to be infantilised – the number of guys out there who want to be mothered is a bit scary really. And certainly a lot of girls see dating as a DIY improvement project (and of course, for both situations, it can work with the genders reversed).

So you wind up seeing situations where one party is forbidden to buy [x], or do [x] or whatever by their partner. This is quite common, and it leads to resentment on both sides. It effectively turns it into fishing/drinking/playing poker/buying shoes/going out with the “girls”/”boys” from our parents’ generation, when one of the purposes of hobbies was to get away from your partner. This is the 21st century, and I think nowadays the drive towards forming relationships is less and less for procreation and more for mutual company. And so, if you’re lucky, the relationship ends.

But why date these people in the first place? I mean, I’m not advocating finding someone with absolutely identical hobbies to you, but at the same time, I think hobbies and interests are something important that people neglect. There’s nothing like the experience of talking about something you enjoy to someone who understands it as well as you do (unless you’re one of those troglodytes who can’t enjoy something if their partner is better at it or knows more than them), and not being able to share that with a partner isn’t a good sign.

Unfortunately, people settle. And maybe this person seems okay apart from everything else. But while some differences can be worked out, I think this one goes fairly deep. Deep enough that you end up arguing, and unhappy, and both resentful of the other. And then you find me, but that’s another story altogether.

Maybe I’m talking out of my ass. Maybe I’m just overly disillusioned at the number of people I’ve seen unhappy because of these things (myself included). I’m certainly not discounting the idea that people can get along despite a lack of common interests. I just think internet/gaming/geek culture is a wider divide than most people give it credit for. Not only a cultural or interest divide, but a fundamental difference in mindset and priorities, and I don’t think enough people recognise it as such.

And so I don’t think those relationships are going to last. Maybe it’s a step in the right direction, but for the most part it looks like too little too late.

Edit: You’re so vain you think this post is about you.

That being said, you know, there was E3 and there was San Diego Comic Con, so all sorts of interesting shit out of there. So I guess I’ll write about those.

I’m kind of looking forward to playing Soul Calibur 4 at some point, for some reason I’m not entirely sure of. Maybe it’s the idea of laying the smackdown with Darth Vader, I don’t know. Still need to get my hands on Civilization: Revolution, and tentatively looking forward to Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. That and I need more money. Maybe I’ll buy up on games in September. I apparently have a Rock Band mic waiting for me in September too, which should be interesting. My Singstar skills are pretty poor as it is…

Kind of weird, but then it’s mostly because I got a massive urge to play Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic again. And while I’m at it, Knights of the Old Republic 2. And Jade Empire, also by Bioware and apparently very similar.

Mostly I just want to beat the shit out of stuff as a Sith lord (actually, probably lady – I’d rather be hitting on Carth than Bastila is all), which I suppose can wait till the release of Force Unleashed, but it’s just not the same.

I like the excessive amount of customisation – the lightsaber crystals, the armour options, the various force skills and all that. The characters aren’t ugly like in Oblivion and the combat is fun as hell. Plus you know, actual characterisation. Good stuff *thumbs up*

But yeah, I also want to know what happens next, hence the desire to play the sequel. I know it all goes to shit in the middle when they needed to complete the game to a deadline and so on, but I like the first game enough to warrant playing the second, I think. And Jade Empire is apparently similar, but outside the Star Wars universe. Which is cool – I’m not a huge Star Wars geek by any means.

And then I was thinking I might play around with XBMC too – I was thinking of just getting a Macbook and playing the PC versions of all those games, and then installing XBMC for Mac on it, but would my hypothetical laptop even be able to handle doing all of that?

But yeah, none of that happening as of yet. Just idle ideas still floating around, waiting to be realised. Meanwhile, I just sit here and feel like killing things with lightsabers, and am sad because I don’t have a proper media center.

1. Non-functional USB ports.
2. It’s 4 years old. Old computer is ooooold.
3. Non-Intel, and that’s going to limit a lot of things I do from here on out. Fewer and fewer programmers will bother making things for PPC – kind of like after OSX came out.
4. The wireless card is buggered – I have to be in the same room as the base station, if not only several meters away.
5. The fan makes this horrible grinding noise that doesn’t sound healthy at all.
6. A 1.07Ghz single core processor is far below spec for doing anything these days.
7. The graphics card makes me cry (System Profiler tells me VRAM (Total): 32 MB). Running anime raws is iffy. Playing DVDs: iffy. Using Dashboard: sometimes iffy. Scrolling quickly/changing between windows/Expose: also iffy at times. Playing solitaire- You get the picture.
8. On a related note: 1024×768 resolution. Not cool.
9. 30GB of hard drive space. I have an external hard drive, but I can’t use that now due to the USB ports dying.
10. Battery down to 57% life, and 306 cycles. Apparently a lithium ion battery has a life of around 300-500 cycles.
11. The only audio in is the internal microphone, which means I need to use a USB headset. See item 1 of the list.
12. It doesn’t meet the minimum standards required for Mac OSX Leopard, and I figure I might as well get a new laptop with it included in the price rather than pay for it.

Basically the only saving grace is that I have 1.25GB of RAM installed (that’s the maximum it takes. It started off with 256MB of RAM, which is pitiful indeed), which is stopping it from failing completely when trying to do things. That being said, it’s served me faithfully and well these past 4 years constantly.

So I’m thinking one of those new 2.4GHz 13 inch Macbooks. In white, because the black one is just $120 extra for a black finish. I think I’ll get 4GB of RAM installed when I get it, because otherwise I just won’t get around to it (Yay laziness!). Built in Bluetooth will be useful for syncing with my cellphone. Built in iSight will be useful indeed. I guess I’ll make an XP partition too, I dunno maybe Parallels 3 would be worth investing in.

I’ve been looking up refurbished, secondhand, etc options too, but new looks like the best bet, particularly with the Academic discount. Unfortunately, I can’t really afford it, given I’ve just been overseas and all. Luckily, Course Related Costs can help me out there… Oh Student Loans, what would I do without you?

Naruto: Uzumaki Chronicles

5.0 / 10

The game is worth a play for the diehard Naruto fan who wants further adventures of the characters,but proves an unrewarding experience for everyone else.

Ups: The game has an easy to use combat system and the ninja powers are fun to play with. The appearance of many familiar characters from the TV show gives a real sense of immersion in the Naruto series. The stats system gives a unique way of levelling up that rewards experimentation.

Downs: The random battles and the non-essential missions get repetitive and boring, and that isn’t helped by the bad enemy AI. The lack of explorable areas means the game gets quite old quickly, and there is very little replay value in the game.

I pity the unwary gamer who picks up Naruto: Uzumaki Chronicles drawn solely by the lure of ninjas. The main character is, after all, not some shadowy black clad assassin, but a preteen boy in an orange hoodie with a somewhat grating voice and an attitude to match. While there are ninjas aplenty, they draw not upon the traditional image of stealthy assassins, but rather from the ninja mythology created in the Japanese anime/manga series Naruto.

N:UC assumes previous knowledge of the original work, to the extent that it’s confusing, if not downright impenetrable to the uninitiated. What is a Hokage? Why is one of my ninja’s powers the ability to turn into a semi-naked woman? Eight trigrams 64 what?

However, if you’re an prior Naruto fan, however, you’ll be pleased to know that a large number of your favourite ninjas and favourite ninja jutsu are included in this game. The use of the voice actors from the TV show help the experience feel immersive and make the game feel like a valid extension of the world created in the anime. The game does suffer at times from some awkward English phrasing, though no translations seem downright wrong or too ridiculous.

A lot of terms are left untranslated though, which, depending on your perspective, either enriches the experience or is a result of lazy localisation. Either way, you should go into this game knowing your Sensei from your Genin. It would be ideal to go into this game having seen at least the first 20 or so episodes of the anime, as the game appears to be set sometime around the Chuunin exam story arc.

The game is split up into missions, with only a few of them being compulsory to complete the game and the rest essentially excuses to put Naruto into battle. No matter how quirky the mission descriptions can be (one mission involves fighting monkeys in order to take back a man’s gambling equipment, for example), the non-essential missions boil down to random battles with grunts, and while they increase the length of the game, they also increase the tedium.

Luckily, the controls for N:UC are assured and intuitive, allowing you to easily unleash various ninja powers at the touch of a button and enabling you to mow through packs of no-name ninjas (or monkeys). The skills, including the Clone jutsu, the Sexy jutsu, the Substitution jutsu and the Power Strike are all well implemented and easy to use during combat. Naruto powers up into his Nine Tailed Fox mode when a combo gauge is filled, which is perhaps overpowered, but the boss fights can be challenging enough to require that. The moves are all introduced at the start via a rather hefty tutorial section, which can also be accessed from the main menu. Having virtually all of the abilities unlocked at the start instead of working to unlock and upgrade them removes some of the incentive to keep playing and level up, however.

While the fights can be fought well, there isn’t much point. As mentioned before, the random battles are all against very generic, boring enemy ninjas. The AI controlling these is poor to the point where the enemy will quite often stand still and stare at you instead of fighting. The fun in the fights is instead with the boss fights against the other characters. Here they show off their signature moves, which look good and are adapted well into video game form. It’s also possible to create a party and take control of the other characters. This occurs in a tag-team format, with the L2 button switching in the alternative character. Given the scarcity of healing items, it’s probably for the best that each character has a time gauge for how long he can remain in combat rather than an HP meter. Being able to fight alongside a teammate would have been better, but there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the existing method. A two-player fight mode would have been a fun inclusion, but is only slated to be included in the sequel.

N:UC goes the Kingdom Hearts route of having the enemies burst into brightly coloured balls upon death. “Virtue” balls are dropped, which are part of a rather unique levelling up system. Virtue is used to buy pieces which enable stats upgrades, and those pieces are fitted, puzzle-like, onto a board in order to be activated. Upon filling the board completely, a bonus is obtained, and different boards can be won through completing different missions. This forces the player to play more strategically, and for RPG players who love tweaking character stats it should add an extra dimension to the game.

Despite being called an action RPG, apart from the fighting style there is little action about it. Everything takes place within tiny combat environments, cut scenes or on the world map, and none of these encourage any sort of exploration. The game was first released in Japan in 2005 and it shows. The combat arenas are mostly drab, grey-green slightly blocky forests and grasslands that look more like they were inspired by an FPS than a vibrantly coloured anime.

Unlike the fellow PS2 Naruto game Naruto: Ultimate Ninja, N:UC is not cel-shaded, and thus visually it appears out of place when compared to the rest of the franchise. For a game that relies so heavily on cut scenes, the cut scenes are awkwardly animated, with stiff movements and sharp edges everywhere. The varying levels of voice acting can also get irritating after playing for too long. As a slight aside, it’s interesting to note that Naruto swings his arms when he runs in battle, but has them stuck out like in the anime in the cut scenes. The world map is nice, but hardly a pinnacle of design.

The soundscape of the game lacks the signature sound of Toshiro Masuda, the composer for the anime. The generic oriental background music is acceptable, but means the game lacks the aural punch of the TV show. The lack of the catchy Japanese pop-rock tunes from the anime may also be a disappointment to fans.

N:UC is a game targetted purely at fans of the existing franchise. While the game has many faults and many aspects which could have been improved, it offers a reasonably entertaining and immersive extension to the world of Naruto. The game’s main strength is in the appearances of characters that fans know and love, and the way the game, for the most part, feels like it’s part of the franchise. The RPG elements are generally well handled, despite the fact that the action aspect is lacking in certain parts. Provided you have completed all the missions though, N:UC has almost zero replay value, due to unskippable cut scenes, little interactivity and repetitive gameplay.

For a while, the Naruto TV show went through a phase of playing endless “monster-of-the-week” type filler episodes where the characters never developed and nothing ever really changed, in order to allow the original author to catch up and write more plot to animate. In a similar way, N:UC is unsatisfying. N:UC is an action RPG that is both a halfhearted action game and to a lesser extent a halfhearted RPG, and the two halves do not make a whole. Overall as a game it is neither truly excellent nor godawful, and thus the deciding factor on the amount enjoyment you’ll take from it is whether you love the franchise and the characters enough to play interactive filler material.

I’ll be writing whatever takes my fancy, focusing on anime, gaming, Japan and… general stuff. I have a few ideas regarding what to chuck in here (I have a few orphaned anime-related things scattered sad and lonely across the intertrons that need homes). Theme and layout and stuff might change (the very name suggests it, after all), but then again I’m lazy I suck at designing things I like simplicity so I might just leave it like this.

And… that’s it for now! Wow, that was weak.