I bought a new laptop. So far, I’ve found that my previous workflow with TextEdit won’t work, so I gotta find another light-weight editor to work with. I’ve found that my previous use of cmd-tab and cmd-> (default: cmd-tilde) to switch between applications and windows within them (respectively) won’t work. I can’t even leave TextEdit in the background without it disappearing from the cmd-tab menu.

I’ve also found that Logic 8 doesn’t work on Lion. That means I can’t work on music on my brand new laptop. Sure, there’s baby GarageBand, Reaper, and other DAWs around – but all my music is in Logic. My music workflow is in Logic. I can neither pay for Logic 9 with PayPal (because my Apple ID is registered in the wrong country) nor can I use Logic 8 on it. Buy Snow Leopard or don’t make music on the laptop.

I can handle the cosmetic differences, and I can appreciate much what’s changed under the hood, but when a machine I wanted as a portable music studio can’t do music anymore, it makes me mad. I have half a mind to write a message to Apple on the machine and throw it through the window of an Apple Store somewhere. I try to resist the urge of slamming the thing into the wall. This is not the ease of use that Apple promises its users.

In trying to find solutions to these problems, I’ve found that long-time Apple users all over the net despise Lion. If they want everyone to get an iPad instead, why create Lion at all, why not sell 27” iPads?

I’ve been spending the past day trying to figure out how to get Lion to behave, but it doesn’t let me. Perhaps I should just get Linux, it’s probably less trouble.

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edit: I now got Logic 8 working, and I got rid of Lion’s TexEdit and replaced it with SL’s. Progress!

My introduction to Zelda was during the snes era, when a friend from school lent me ALttP. I made it all the way to Turtle Rock but couldn’t figure out how to get it. That was then. I found Seiken Densetsu 3 in the days of the internet before console game companies realized their games were just sitting there for random ppl to nab, before Nintendo started with Virtual Console. And it was awesome.

It’s not like I haven’t played other games along these lines, I have vague memories of Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia, Terranigma, the Lufias, Romancing SaGa, Bahamut Lagoon, Front Mission, Breath of Fire, EarthBound, Tales of Phantasia, Star Ocean II, Super Mario RPG, and of course I know the FFs and Chrono Trigger. Most of these I encountered during the wild wild net period of the console game scene.

But ALttP (and some of the more recent Zelda games) and sd3 stand out. Why? Link is a blank slate mute whereas the sd3 characters are all well characterized with their own stories in the game plot. sd3 goes all over its world to a plethora of friendly and unfriendly locations, while ALttP has essentially one friendly town in the entire game. ALttP is full of minigames. sd3 has tiered equipment. ALttP is an action-adventure puzzle game. sd3 is an action-jrpg. Zelda has block puzzles. sd3 has grinding and element spells. Zelda is single-player. sd3 could be played two-player, and has a three-member party. Many of the aforementioned games have some of these elements, but they didn’t appeal to me nearly as much.

Both games have nice music. Iconic, even. Angel’s Fear might not quite compare to the popularity of Zelda tracks, but it’s repeated and alluded to all over the sd3 soundtrack, cementing it as the central theme of the game. Most of the music is location-based, some belong to or has ties to characters (the Zelda theme we’ve heard ad nauseam was introduced in ALttP), keeping the flow of the game rather than breaking out a rocking battle track whenever a rabite appears and jumping forth and back between an overworld/dungeon and a battle scene. They don’t separate travel from combat the way using random encounters does. They don’t take control away from the player just because a minor enemy shows up.

Both games have a fairly standard snes jrpg look. It’s an unrealistic, cute-ish look that still allows the characters to appear capable in combat. And on that topic, the combat isn’t menu-driven (aside from inventory/spell screens) – it’s action. Yes, there’s some cooldowns between attacks in sd3 – so is there in fighting games like Street Fighter, don’t tell me there’s not action in SF games.

Both games have unobtrusive characterization. In Link’s case, it’s because he doesn’t get much characterization. He’s not very emotive in this game. The characters in sd3 are quite emotive, tho mostly in cutscenes. They were used well imo, not detractingly, not breaking up the game into grinding to the next scene, not a lot of superfluous sprite films. Once you’re through the character intro section and in the game proper, the characterization is kept out of the way of the action, only brought out when needed (or funny).

Both games have friendly npcs that explain the world and offer some services or hints. Interestingly, both games have fortune tellers. Both games had important npc characters, be they Sahasrahla or the king of Forcena, or whatever. They also have prominent bad guy characters, like Jagan and Agahnim (…ish).

Both games have magic and mythology, be this the Triforce, the descendants of the seven sages, and the ruins all over Hyrule; or the Mana Tree, the mana god-beasts, and the ruins all over whatever that world is called. A lot of the world storytelling is done in the world design rather than long cutscenes and monologues (intros don’t count). They have a Mana Goddess in sd3, and later Zelda games established the games’ three creator goddesses.

Both games exist in a medieval-esque era, with peripheral anachronisms. They both feature convenient transportation over long distances. They both let you backtrack (most of the time), whether to grind against easier enemies or to look for treasures and rupees. Both games have a varied world with fairly easily defined or distinguished locations – be they thematically winter-y, mountain-y, desert-y, swamp-y, ruin-y, or whatever.

Storywise, the world is in peril and ONLY YOU CAN SAVE IT. And there’s a legendary sword. And you’re a teenager. As much as I loathe the idea of teenagers being the saviors of a world, for some reason this doesn’t bother me at all in these games. Why not? probably because they’re not as annoying as more recent teenage heroes, and their characterization doesn’t get in the way of _my_ saving the world.

You know, this is all well and good, but the formula for a good game according to this is just:
- great music, with leitmotifs
- no separation of travel and combat, player retains control
- cute-ish look
- action gameplay
- unobtrusive characterization
- friendly npcs
- fortune tellers
- bad guy characters
- magic and mythology
- ruins
- storytelling in world design
- medieval stasis
- anachronisms
- quick transportation
- lets you backtrack whenever
- patchwork map
- the world is at stake
- legendary sword
- you’re a teenager

I think the big thing about it is the feeling of adventure. These games maintain it better than many others. Chrono Trigger does quite well, as does FF6 – but their gameplay isn’t as action-y. Even if CT has a more active battle system than the FFs, it still amounts to standing around, waiting to get hit. Tales and the FFs take you off the map when fighting (random encounters are stupid).

In other words, the ideal Zelda/sd3-like game would be something that instills and maintains a sense of adventure and wonder (as someone somewhere else phrased it). The title screen from ALttP, the intro missions and opening credits of sd3 – they instill adventure and wonder, and then move on to exploration of the world. Xenoblade didn’t do that for me, despite my brother’s insistence that it gets better later in the game.

So I guess I’m asking for more wonder, less tedium, in future games. Can I have that?

This is gamification, the practice of using game-inspired elements, such as short-term goals and little rewards for meeting them (such as acknowledging that you’ve reached an arbitrary number of posts on your music/rant blog). There’s a few places where it’s a bad idea, there’s a few places where it’s a good idea, but it’s mostly just annoying. The fact that it works says something about ppl.

I guess I’m now one post from that magic number. Hooray.

I had a similar problem with an old version of Photoshop Elements, where every so often after I’ve started it, it “couldn’t get info” from… somewhere. Didn’t matter if I was in the middle of tweaking an adjustment layer or effect, it just dropped everything to let me know that it couldn’t get info from wherever. I’m tolerating that because once it’s tried a few times, it stops. Besides, I don’t use PS for much anyway, and that old version will be retired along with my old laptoip once I get a new one.

But when Apple does this to me, it’s worse. It’s not a glitch, it’s something that someone decided was a good idea. I don’t like the idea of logging in to do stuff on my own computer. I don’t use the iTunes store, and I’ve only bought a handful or Apps via the App Store. While it never actually requires me to log in, asking – twice – is annoying.

Speaking of which, I’m not likely to purchase much of anything from either store anyway. I don’t have a credit card, and I can’t get either store to accept PayPal, which I use for my online purchases. I’ve heard there was an issue with the App Store charging as much as 4000USD for Lion through some glitch, but that’s no reason to pull support for it… especially as so many other parts of the internet use PayPal without any apparent problems. I mean, every game I’ve bought on Steam I’ve bought via PayPal. IIRC, all the music software I’ve bought over the net I’ve bought with PayPal.

And segueing from iTunes, the fallout from the rightfully rejected SOPA/PIPA has shown the true colors of the MPAA and the RIAA. The way I see it, we could do without those two. The less power they have, the more they’ll have to focus on good music, not just metrics and a bland copy of the next hot thing. Maybe they’ll support real artist instead of manufacturing their own?

The way I understand it, Spotify has to deal with whatever they demand for their music, and if Spotify doesn’t make enough dough to keep up, they lose their contracts with the big music companies. That might actually be a good thing. If I knew my money was going to the ppl that make the music I listen to, I’d happily pay for a subscription to Spotify. Currently, I wouldn’t.

If the big labels pull their stuff, Spotify could survive as a transparent, independent music platform, delivering great music, supporting the artists that make the music, promoting new and interesting indie artists. Last I used Spotify, it was a search engine for names of songs and artists, with a “featured” page with the “hottest” music. I don’t care. I’m apparently too hipster to like most modern pop music. What if I wanna find some new, cool, underappreciated artist, or discover the unknowns hits of some niche genre, or catch up on jazz history or video game releases?

The movie industry could do better too. While stuff like Attack the Block and other gold does appear from time to time, we’re still getting huge budgets on mediocre films. Sure, Inception was cool, but Avatar was predictable and gimmicky, like the entire, color-ruining, still not focus-altering 3d thing. Granted, you need money to make movies, so why not spend more money on movies and less on bribes?

While big, spectacular films, good or not, will always draw ppl in for the things that money can buy on screen, the record industry is in a terrible position where music is all over the place and the value of any given album or song has dropped dramatically.

While Apple tries to remedy this with a convenient means of buying music, and Spotify paying big money to use the big names on its service, I’m hoping someone’s gonna come up with a, big new music service that’s better than both of those. Something that doesn’t ask you repeatedly to log in to your own music, and that actually pays the artists.

In the mean time, I’ll use PayPal to buy my music from artists’ bandcamp pages or from cdbaby or something. As for my own music, I’m still on Logic Express 8, and while I’ve been meaning to upgrade, Apple doesn’t make it easy for me to hand them my money…

PS. I’m still displeased with wordpress’ new interface. I can see one or two paragraphs of text in the New Post text box, and the resize thing doesn’t work. Navigating through the site to get to the Add New Post page thatactually works is troublesome because the whole thing defaults to the wrong blog. I have two. This belongs on the music one. Dear webmasters, stop “fixing” things by b0rking them!

This post is _only_ about WordPress screwing up. I like WordPress, but YOU DO NOT PUT FLASHY NEW THINGS THAT ARE BORKED IN THE WAY OF FUNCTIONAL OLD THINGS. Really. Here’s what happened:

New post page. Okay, let’s try it. I write the stuff here… not difficult. Oh, live preview. That’ll work greeeaaat on my old computer, when i blog from there. I add the tags down here… I miss the list of the tags I often use, I’d hate to have variations of the same thing show up as separate tags… Categories, where…? Post. Okay fine. I’ll go edit it to get that right.

Oh, nice, the old editor. Edit tags, edit categories, remove the last remarks, they’re unnecessary… Publish? This is a draft? Okay fine, I’ll publish it now. What, -of-stupid-2 in the permalink thingy? This is a double post? Check blog. Oh great. Back to edit, and write… this.

In other words, this is a good example of how fixing things that aren’t borked borks things. Grr.

Well I don’t. I use WordPress and gmail, and hang out on ocremix.

I recently got myself a bandcamp account to make sure no impostor claims rozovian.bandcamp, but I wasn’t sure if I could use it because Teosto, the music copyright group and royalty collection thing of Finland prevents its members from using it. I’m not a member, but if I want my music on TV, I gotta join some organization like that, and as I live in Finland, that one is the obvious choice. Except I apparently can’t use bandcamp if I join Teosto. Whatever, I’ll figure something out, suggestions welcome.

But while trying to find ppl who’ve discussed bandcamp and Teosto, Google decided I was looking for myspace as well. Granted, MySpace would present a similar scenario, but I was looking for bandcamp/Teosto stuff specifically. I’m glad there’s a verbatim search feature on Google, but there’s no options in between. Say I’m also looking for the words Teoston and Teostolla (Finnish for Toesto’s, Teosto has, belonging to Teosto)… but not myspace. having to write out every permutation and adding OR in between them all is not practical.

While there’s certainly a lot of improvements to Google, there’s a lot of junk in today’s Google that I not only don’t use, but am bothered by when I’m just looking to search for something.

Dear Google, I’m glad you strive to not be evil. Please avoid inconveniencing your users, too.

(Get rid of the stupid site preview, and add an option to remove spammy aggregator sites from the search results.)

On a related note, surfing on a pre-Intel Mac laptop is getting slow, likewise on a pre-4 iPhone. Dunno how much of this is the fault of Apple trying to give everyone the newest and flashiest OS and browser, and how much is the fault of web designers making their sites flashy and ultimately ridiculous to view on the phone. My home parish/whatever updated their website the other day. Now I can’t scroll on their pages, and can’t get to the links to the pdf bus schedules.

Dear internets, please stop being stupid.

(I wish.)

Wait, how do I see which tags I usually use? WordPress…!! Internets, stop inconveniencing ppl with flashy new stuff that screws stuff up. Where are the categories?

I wrote a little dialogue (or monologue) script, essentially a one-sided dialogue tree, and that got me thinking further, on how to actually taking combat mechanics from jrpgs and make a fighting game about talking. Say you have three ways of influencing someone – appeal to their heart, their brain, and their guts. Just three, to keep it simple. Different characters would have different values, so they’d be influenced differently. The attacks would be akin to those in Pokémon, attacks of different types.

Dude attacks Opponent with Vulgar Reference. -20 IP.
Opponent attacks Dude with Your Mom. -7 IP. It’s not very effective.
Dude attacks Opponent with Appeal to Honor. -63 IP. It’s SUPER EFFECTIVE!
Opponent uses Pep Talk on himself. +12 IP.
Dude attacks Opponent with Your Mom. -3 IP. It’s not very effective.
Opponent attacks Dude with Neologisms. -33 IP.
Opponent is confused.

You get the idea.

Another way of doing it, or a way of adding to the above, would be to string attacks together in combos, where Vulgar Reference would do some damage, but Your Mom would do _more_ when following up a Vulgar Reference (against someone weak against those kinds of attacks), not to mention that it might let the user recover some of his IP. Not sure what IP stands for here, I forgot what I wanted it to stand for while I was writing the examples. Oops. Intellectual points? Maybe it should be Conviction Points, or Persuasion Points? Or Willpower?

There’s probably some game out there that uses stuff like this. Would be interesting to work on a game like that. Wonder how they make the graphics as appealing as combat graphics… on the other hand, FFX and similar game has a lot of redundant animations between combat options, and old FF just have the sprite move forward, wave an overlaid weapon, and the enemy flash and shake slightly.

Character design would need work, tho. A suit might sway the brain, a sweater the heart, a military uniform the guts? idunno. What kind of equipment do you need to talk? Megaphone? Talkbox? Breath mints?

On a mostly unrelated note, the dialogue-wise uncomplicated (well, occasionally an option more advanced than before, and some humorous responses) new Zelda game is out. And I have it. Yay.

edit: silly me, I forgot to write a post title. The Twitter post was smart enough to just use the text instead, with the last word getting hilariously truncated.

Instead of sitting and doing nothing, my brain switches to some other creative mode, getting me interested in something else for a while. I go back to stories, writing, fiction, worldbuilding, and from there to just about anything. I might come up with an idea that would make a great movie or TV show, or a great computer/console game, or a great board game (less risk of appearing on torrent sites), or a great book, or a great… idunno, comic book?

Now, I could pursue a career in writing for these media, but I fear that’d take me away from doing what I love doing… and I don’t even know what I love doing. Maybe I love telling stories. Maybe I love to build things. Maybe I love entertaining. Maybe I love educating. Maybe I love expressing myself. Maybe I love putting hidden messages in everything I do to manipulate ppl into doing… something.

I realized the other day that despite my liking of video games, it’s not what I wanna spend the rest of my life making. Yes, I wanna make video games. Yes, I have more than a handful of ideas. Yes, I have stories I wanna tell through video games. Yes, I have game mechanics I wanna make use of. Yes, I think my games would be pretty good.

But I also want to write a couple of books, and I wouldn’t mind making a TV series (tho the thought of letting go of my intellectual property is a little troubling, good thing it’s not something I have to think about). I wanna make some board games. I wanna make lots and lots of music.

I wonder what the best approach is. Naturally, I’d wanna get the remix project I’m heading out of the way before trying to build a career doing something creative, but I should figure out what to do next. Try to make that board game I’ve been sketching out? Try to do something for a real video game (indie, probably)? Isolate myself from everything and everyone to write my book or my music? Try to juggle work, life, creative pursuits and sleep?

In any case, I should get a proper job, tho. I wouldn’t mind one in the game industry, but there’s quite a surplus of ppl who can write stuff or make music. Dunno how to market myself anyway. Sure, I’ve got an almost unique artist name, and ocremix has spread my name all over the net, but how do I actually communicate to the right ppl that I want to make music or write stuff for their game? Who are the right ppl, where are they?

tl;dr: Rozo, stop whining, get a job, learn programming.

You don’t need fragile little transports to move units across the sea anymore, tho why you can’t upgrade your old ships to ocean-faring ones at the same time bothers me, and I’d still like to see an explorer ship that can find new land and build some kind of colony, or at the very least make landfall and explore further.

The hex grid. So much cooler, and it makes distances a little more sensible. I’m still waiting on a spherical map. Realism. Coolness. An icosahedron subdivided into triangles, maybe?

No “stack of doom”. The new system isn’t without its problems, it doesn’t always recognize that I wanna switch places between two units… and what if I wanna rotate places between three units?

I want ability to just draw how I want my land to look like (tile improvements) and have the workers just work accordingly. I don’t trust the auto function, and working with them manually is annoying. Besides, idle workers could reduce maintenance on tile improvements. Someone, make this happen. Currently, I don’t know what to do with them once they’re done with all tiles until I discover Oil, Uranium or Aluminium in my territory. Fortifying them somewhere and then trying to find them amongst other units and details on the map is annoying.

I want more diplomatic options. I can’t threaten blockade or go to war, and I can’t threaten to attack the other player’s friends or allies. It’d be nice to have more spice in the single-player mode. Civ is a difficult game to play multiplayer, in that not everyone have that much time to spare, and games today tend not to be cheap, either. Not seeing who is friends with whom (especially with city states) from a single diplomatic window is annoying, I have to close two diplomacy views to get to a scren that provides _some_ of that information.

I want a more advanced culture system. Yes, it’s simplified to make it a more valuable and versatile game mechanic, but I’d like to see culture divided into multiple cultures, a military culture that every military unit, military structure, and military diplomatic option adds to. Likewise, science, industry, and whatever else works. In Civ 4 you could basically take over the world with culture, much like the USA seems to have been doing irl. Why not have a few stacks of policies that require a certain amount of a specific culture type to use, so that a militaristic civ gets bonuses for their military, while a scientific civ gets bonuses for that?

I want Animal Husbandry to be researched faster if there are animal resources in the Civ’s territory, likewise Mining if there are hills, naval research if there’s sea, metal research if there’s metal, etc.. Combine this with a spherical map (assuming axial tilt) and Calendar would be research sooner further from the equator.

But most of all, I want a game that loads faster. I don’t need every graphical detail, the game can’t possible need to load the main menu for a minute (and the legal notice before the menu may be necessary the first time you start the game but it just annoys ppl after that). Really, the game looks nice, plays ok, and does a lot of unnecessary stuff in between.

I want options to turn off all sound. I want options to turn off leader backgrounds… or leader screens at all. Having to start/load a game every time I change any video options (or worse, restart the whole game) is stupid. A lot of the game is stupid. I don’t mean gameplay things, I mean the program itself. A lot of it is stupid. And slow.

So what I really want is less waiting, more playing. And a Mac version that’s not watered-down. It doesn’t even do mods without screwing with files that any update would revert and who knows what else.

But I’ve been having some problems following the thing. I’ve had a few crashes while reading news sites. The Washington Post is one of those sites that without fail crashes Safari for me. Just to be sure, I fired up the site on my iPhone, let it load, and waited. Then the screen went black and returned to the menu. On my laptop, Safari just hangs, and I must force quit. Granted, my laptop is old, and I haven’t updated to the most recent version of Safari (see last post for one of the reasons why), but my phone’s OS and Safari are kept up to date.

While I doubt the Washington Post web crew are anti-Apple (especially with Steve Jobs’ recent death) or deliberately setting up their site to crash browsers and drive readers to other outlets, it’s symptomatic of a problem that a lot of sites has: clutter. Fancy new flashtastic features that most users don’t notice until it bothers them somehow, and clutter. Back in the day, most search engines filled their front page with categories and options, while Google stood apart with its simple, clean, and quickly loaded page. Today, even Google’s filling up their pages with clutter, tho it has the foresight to not load the stupid preview thing on the outdated Safari version on my old laptop.

Really, too many sites today are full of junk. Long pages that take too long to load on a phone, full of superfluous bloatware that crash browsers or that just slow everything down. I might have mentioned 1up.com‘s terrible, terrible ad before. It covered the whole window, and I had to take a moment to look for the “close ad” button. Not good design, not a good user experience. Many sites use a networking bar at the bottom of the page, one of my favorite sites the Escapist is one of them. Obtrusive and annoying, not just on old computers.

Seriously, while some machines have a lot of real estate on their screens, laptops, the more and more ubiqutious pads, and of course phones, have small screens. Sure, I get to about 2.5 megapixels on my desktop machine, but my iphone? Way less. (Sure, you can zoom, but that requires you to change your grip or else you’ll get tendonitis or something from trying.)

So, websites need to be smaller and less demanding for a few simple reasons:

- small screen devices
- compatibility / not crashing
- not annoying users

Rant over.