Oregon Trail

Does anyone remember the Oregon Trail?
I sure do. In fact, I was just playing it only moments ago. That game was so rad when I was a kid. We would all go to the computer lab, and we would either pick between this and the paper airplane game. I would almost always pick Oregon Trail. In our lab, there were two color computers, and the rest were all green and black:

I remember getting to use the color computers fairly often, because teachers have always loved me.

Anyway, what I liked to do was the hunting portion. However, playing it today, I got WAAAAAY bored with that. Of course, the rest of the game isn't that great, either.

In fact, fuck this game!! This game sucks!

I'm sure I'll play it again in the morning.

P.S.
How does a thief steal five fucking oxen in the middle of the night without anyone noticing? This is bullshit!

The best people in the world

I was recently playing Final Fantasy V on my Super Nintendo emulator. It's a pretty good game, and I have loved it for a long time. The weird thing is, though, that Final Fantasy V was never released in America on the Super Nintendo. It had its day on these shores when it was released with Final Fantasy Anthology back in 1999, 7 years after its Japanese release. I don't know how to speak Japanese, yet I have played this game since 1998. This is because someone out there took it upon himself to make a patch for the game that translates it.

I just want to say:

I LOVE THAT GUY!! He's a saint! I mean, he didn't have to do it. He didn't get paid. He obviously knows Japanese, so the translation is even kind of useless as far as he's concerned. What a great guy!

There are more like him. If you go on to almost any emulation site, you can find translations for hundreds of games. God, that's awesome!

God, this is awesome

So check it. Someone in Japan took Final Fantasy X and turned it into an NES game. Oh man, that is soooo kickass!!!



You know, Final Fantasy X really wasn't all that bad. It was just pretty obvious that Nobuo Uematsu wasn't very involved. He wrote that first song. I'm not sure about the second. The game itself was pretty good, too. It just wasn't the best.

P.S.
I can totally play that first song on piano. I'm really quite proud of it.

Just so you know

So, in my second blog, I posted about the ending of Final Fantasy VIII. It turns out that you can find these things on the internet, so here it is. The song in it is called "Eyes On Me." It actually played a fairly large role in the plot. That makes it okay. In Final Fantasies IX, X, and XII, there used some crappy J-Pop song as well. However, those songs were just there to help sell the soundtracks, so fuck those. They sucked anyway. By the time FFX came out, they had become too lazy to even translate the songs for us, so we were stuck with "Sutaki De Ne." What the Hell is that? I don't remember what song they used for XII, but everything else about that game sucked anyway.

Well, here's something very pretty. The music and the animation go very well together. After 4 discs of gameplay, this was a nice treat. Though this is actually only part of the ending, but whatevs.

So I just beat Chrono Trigger again...

This game is awesome, like in every way. Graphics, story, gameplay. Seriously. But that doesn't mean that I'm not going to nerd it the Hell up right now. Here goes.

So, you go through these time gates to specific points of time, hence the name "Chrono Trigger." However it would appear that the gates travel through time along with you, becuase if you spend a day in the year 1000 A.D. and then go to the year 600 A.D., a day will have passed in that time as well. This makes the story-telling far easier. HOWEVER, this rule does not apply to all gates. There is one in a bucket at the End of Time that will take you to the "Day of Lavos,":

Lavos is the last boss. But you see, no matter when you decide to use this gate, it will always be to the exact same moment in time: right when Lavos is attacking the planet. It doesn't make sense. Between the first and second visits to 600 A.D., Zenan Bridge is repaired, but this other gate thinks it can break all of the rules. Lame. Well, whatever. Play the fuck out of this game. It is marvelous. There's a frog knight named Frog! That's awesome!

I miss Nobuo Uematsu

This man is a genius! He's not dead, as the title might make one believe, but rather he hasn't been working as much as he used to. For those of you who don't know, he is the composer of the music from Final Fantasies I-IX. After IX, he left Squaresoft, though he will often work with them as a freelance composer. He worked on Final Fantasies X-XII, but I wonder how much he actually did on those, as the music for both of those sucked hard.

He recently made the music for Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, but I don't have the money to get them. I bet they're awesome.

I was listening to the ending theme from FF VIII this morning on the way to work. I sang along to the best of my ability. After a couple of minutes, I realized that I has tears in my eyes. I'm not sure if it was the music or if it was the fact that I could visualize every second of that gorgeous ending, but something got to me. Quite a bit, too.

I have more music by Mr. Uematsu on my computer than any other composer or band, and I have every Beatles song and all of Beethoven's sonatas and symphonies! 1/20th of my hard drive is dedicated to this man, and I do so happily and without shame of being this nerdy.

Because it is nerdy, but I don't care. This music is flipping gorgeous!

I have to work in the morning.

So, I've been playing a lot of video games lately. I think about them a lot. There really should be more video games based off of the bible. They wouldn't need a religious message or anything. It's just that there are a lot of opportunities for a good time in there. Goliath would be a good boss. so would King Herod. For a while, I thought that the Devil would be the final boss, but in retrospect, it would be the Four Horsemen. They're the ones who are trying to destroy the planet. Of course maybe you could spread those fights throughout the entire game, like in Mega Man.

Then fight them all at once before the last boss, like in Mega Man. You know, Dr. Light does look a bit like God in a lab coat:

And then at the end, you'd fight what the bible calls the Prince of Darkness, Dr. Wily:


Anyway, a couple of things:
1. I really like Mega Man, but not as much as I like Lost, Star Wars, or Dr. Pepper.
2. Everyone else got a blog, so I wanted one, too.