Wow, my first blogpost post-boardout! I wanted to make the banner pretty whilst all the posts were invis-able. It WAS the only thing you could see, so that made it all the more crucial that it made the website still look proper. Plus, isn’t that cool?! If you ever run into ANY WordPress blog that is bork’d in the future, you don’t even have to use some User-Agent switcher to go Mobile on a computer (which also works, however inconvenient). You can just pass along that accept_mobile variable in URL, and you get access to all the blog’s contents in a fun, nearly text-only state.
I must say, that was the source of more drama than I was expecting. The first WordPress support topic I contributed to — all my posts in it (and those of the person arguing with me about keeping the theme) got deleted for… not being related, in-spite of me having the exact same problem as them? I’ve never heard of a support forum deleting someone trying to find help on a similar issue just because they didn’t start the topic themselves. Also, I feel like the staff member specifically waited until the user had updated from their broken K2-lite blog to a modern theme before responding, so they could say, “It looks like everything’s working okay! Is there anything else I can do for you?” I’d like to hope better of someone who’s going by “totoro” online, but it sure would make their job easier if they waited for everyone to fix their own problems. Tuxedo Mask-style.
And when I tried to make my own topic on the topic, the Exact Same forum member, assumedly lying in wait for me to return, picked up right where they left off. It felt as if I was personally offending the forums for liking being Old on the Internet. This feels like the Apple Genius who scolded me for having Flash Player on my computer, as if THAT was what caused it to have Touch Bar failure. Me and notfire know the truth– everything’s Old on the Internet the moment it releases, which is just an exaggeration of the way that this accelerated human society operates in general. And they’ll try to make you feel bad for not keeping up, but let’s treasure the “Version History”, as it were, for as long as we possibly can.
Speaking of notfire, he taught me about this really interesting way to hide text called snow. It makes blank space that isn’t blank at all.
For instance, maybe THIS VERY SENTENCE has some secret blank/full space if you check this in its HTML source by right-clicking!
I could’ve even hidden the same thing in THIS VARIED SENTENCE, if you just select this sentence normally and copy it, but this Time, I used a more user-friendly online tool.
It might even be this tool.
You know, for instance!
It could be anywhere!
But I guess I’ll be leaving this banner up at least until August– at which point, I think 15 years calls for another banner! (That’ll make hand-amount of banners in total! How evenly odd!)
I had planned on making this post another revisiting of old material, with some shiny-new to justify doing so… So I spent the past few hours transcribing a Microsoft Word printout in Comic Sans MS, circa 2001. (Comic Sans MS, Curlz MT, Impact, and… Tacoma mebbe… were the only fonts that existed to me back in 2001.) It’s a document I’ve actually spoken of before on the AweSomeBlog: a walkthrough I wrote for a fictional installment in the Mana series called Seiken Densetsu 5: Legend of Mana 2. (Well, actually, the paper doesn’t have space after the colon. I must’ve been using it stylistically, like a “|”…)
Before you think I was either being cheeky with my naming convention, or just making up crazy-numbers, back in 2001, there had been exactly four Mana games. I did my research. Seiken Densetsu was Final Fantasy Adventure when localized, Seiken Densetsu 2 was Secret of Mana when localized, Seiken Densetsu 3 was Trials of Mana when localized (it’d take until one fateful day in 2019 until the US was granted an official translation– so it’s been Seiken Densetsu 3 to me this whole time), and Legend of Mana had just come out in 1999. So… 3rd Grade me assumed maybe the next game would be the first game to be properly released as a sequel. And I’m not out of my mind to signify its order this way. Two of my favourite games ever had already done this– namely. Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land followed by Wario Land 2 onward, and Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island followed by Yoshi’s Story onward. Like, if we were to continue climbing this logic tree, Wario Land 2 really SHOULD be Super Mario Land 4: Wario Land 2… right? Shan’t we forget that Super Mario World 1 was known as Super Mario Bros. 4. So, really, I should be saying Super Mario Bros. 5: Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island…
So I wasn’t just going mad with power because I thought that Super Mario 64 meant there’d been 63 Super Mario games before Super Mario 64 (although I did– wonder if there really were at least 63 Mario games b’fore then…), and it wasn’t just because I encountered all those Mario and Sonic hacks with those fake sequel numbers — you know, the 128s and 256s… there was even this great Crayon Shin Chan GB hack — that great World 1 theme makes it all worth it.
Plus, now that I’m a little older, I know I’m even more right about what I did back then. Just take a look at my disentangling of the Wonder Boy series:
(… No, seriously, go look into each page on Wikipedia. One of these games was genuinely referred to as Wonder Boy 5: Monster World 3. [Also, I nearly forgot I’d already posted this list on the BlogPost at the Time.])
I had quite a love for a well-written walkthrough. I feel like walkthroughs are kind of a lost art now– before, the best of them were full of personality, reading off as partial reviews or verbal Let’s Plays. As someone who’s never been particularly good at games that take getting good, I’d often read ahead in walkthroughs to imagine what it’d feel like to get to later areas of the game. Due to the excitement expressed in these walkthroughs, I could feel it, too. I even tried to write a walkthrough and get it published on some fansite in a webring I frequented. It was for Ranma 1/2: Akanekodan Teki Hihou which, at the time, hadn’t even been translated into English. So I was just goin’ around, as I was wont to do, trying to make things happen that seemed to further me along, then documenting what made things do what. I had so much fun, and my walkthrough basically consisted of me writing my own nonsense plot to go along with what I witnessed. (I never even got a reply to my e-mail submission.) So what I was doing here really WAS just a fictional as my previous walkthrough, hahaha.
An interesting note to this walkthrough is that it was primarily based on a dream I had, involving experiments on some newly-excavated dinosaur bones, realizing my cousins were mind-controlled (possibly just a way to explain why they were so mean to me in real-life, teehee), and boarding a boat in a flourish of tears… all while the music from Seiken Densetsu 3 played. You see, there’s this incredible story that plays to signify when you’ve reached the turning point in your chosen character’s origin story. And… then they march off and board a ship in search of their destiny. (In-fact, here’s a beautiful picture-in-picture version of this occurring for each of the six characters!) And I apparently wanted to do just that when my cousins wouldn’t listen to me. That sure would show them!
You might be wondering — if my cousins didn’t join my party (Ah, gotta love the word “party” in RPGs… because no one playing an RPG gets invited to any parties. : )), who did? In my walkthrough, I chose my sister Sara, an ex-employee from the hospital my dad worked for named Paul (he doesn’t exist– I made him up in my dream), a scientist named James, a warrior named Duran (obviously from Seiken Densetsu 3), a monster called The Kårton (not so obviously Seiken Densetsu 3– basically just Kevin the werewolf), a lighthouse keeper named Geno (obviously from Smurpurg/SMRPG), and… Gina. … I assume I mean Gina from Sesame Street. I mean, like, it was either Gina, Lady Aberlin, Brenda Blue, or Didi Conn. I’d trust any of them to be valiant and true.
Then, as I attempted to flesh this one dream out into a full RPG (and a proper JRPG is massive, y’know?! I feel like people don’t appreciate just how sprawling these games were, in a way that I think studios often can’t do anymore, simply because the triple-A of it all. Imagine if a big studio was allowed to just make a straight-forward 2-D sprite game. Imagine what they could DO again under those constraints.), I incorporated my sessions of make-believe. And– I can’t be the only one who felt like the bathtub was a whole other world. Like, especially when you’re small enough to still get lost in a tub, it feels like you get to go to the waterpark every night. So the second half has the player explore a flooded world to save a trapped party member, and also has a blatant take on the City of Zeal falling into the ocean. I didn’t understand games — I still don’t understand games. All I understand is dreaming and playing pretend. Having just gotten through the 3,000+ words of the incomplete walkthrough, it’s all just me living through my own Odyssey, being tossed in the waves of intrigue and mystery, in search of answers, which I then obfuscate with more exciting events. And stats!!
It’s nice to know that the way I’ve come up with my art, of all kinds, has stayed so consistent throughout my whole life. Music, writing… even visual art. Often, when people have asked me what I’m drawing while I’m drawing it, chances are I’m not quite sure what it is I’m drawing until I’ve drawn it. I come up with stuff while I’m dreaming, I come up with stuff while I’m playing, or I come up with stuff while I’m doing some other configuration of the two. Isn’t playing kind of like pretending I’m dreaming?
My mind was on this fictional walkthrough due to recent computer-game-related travails. My interests tend to be on the type of game that initially taught me that anything is possible. I’m not meaning that the game has to be one from the era, or one I knew at the time. I’m currently playing Full Void, for example– a recently produced adventure game which completely exemplifies everything that gets my imagination going– including perhaps the most indefinable quality: A hidden… impossible… unpredictable… aliveness. As if the game could do or be anything… as if, at any moment, you could be sucked into the game, or the game could manifest itself in this world.
(Weirdly enough, Mr. Yes, one of the original contributors to the SomeBlog, is extremely well-known now for telling this kind of story– honestly, the first incredible webseries of this kind.)
… And it’s probably because I always come at games from that angle that I find myself at a loss of how to develop a coherent or feasible game– because what I desire is to pull off a series of magic tricks for each and every player. That’s certainly different than game mechanics– that’s closer to trying to write a mystery. Really, I’ve got to find a way to marry solid game mechanics with my desire for evoking the mystery of simulated, heightened reality. (That’s hopefully what things like my Get Rich Quick remastering will be for people… hahaha, to tie everything together, the banner’s all 256-colours because of my ongoing game-making escapades.)
And certainly, this is something that a lot of Internet storytellers have gravitated towards– the ol’ MY VIDEO GAME CARTRIDGE IS HAUNTED?!11? But while I’m always excited by the idea, rarely do I ever feel like the results are any good. Frog Fractions, Bubsy 3D, moon: Remix RPG Adventure, Undertale (can’t downplay its effectiveness), OneShot, Labyrinth no Kanata, Dreaming Mary, The Stanley Parable, The Beginner’s Guide, Anodyne– these are some of the very few times I’ve been impressed by a meta-bent game. The fact that I want to play with convention in a way that… just about every indie game or budding creepypasta found-footage series wants to do… It’s a tricky task I’ve presented myself with! That’s why I’m going back through all of my formative encounters with the medium– I’m just… trying to figure out how I’m going to avoid all the overplayed tropes of The Meta Game.
…
…
…
Hello?
…
Uhp. I’m not really sure if you’re there, but I’m going to just assume you are, since I see you’re on. But I can’t hear you. Websites require you to grant access to your microphone. It’s kind of different for every browser, but there’s probably some… icon that looks like a microphone?
…
I mean, it’s not like I need to hear you. All you need to do is hear me. We could be here all day sorting out technical difficulties. I’ve done it before– trust me, it’s not worth it, as much as it may drive you mad to know what isn’t working.
But, uh, you’re the one playing the game. If you’re there, just… hit Play whenever you’re ready. It’s the one that says “はじまり”– the, uh, the top one. You probably insinuated that; that’s standard, just about. It’d be weird if… like, Settings or something was at the top. Conventions of game design and such– Oh! Hi! You are there– how nice of you not to leave me hanging! I was planning on having to just sit here and repeat myself until you showed up. Or until the hour passed. I’d probably end up sounding just like some NPC in desperate need of a prompt. Will you accept my quest? Will you accept my quest?
— Oh, wow! You weren’t kidding in the e-mail; this has got all the trademarks of the era. 1-bit pixel art, these… sweet-looking thingamajig animal-people… And just listen to that sweet, warm MIDI tone. Now, that says… “Rararan”– ooh, kind of a tongue-twister if you pronounce it right. “Rararan, this is… the last time you forget to do your chores.” Oh, the littler one with the pointy hair swoop must be Rararan. “You will be the parent today, and I will be the child!” Woah, haha, and there they go! Now the big one’s got the swoop, and the little one’s got the waves.
Hey, that’s novel, you get to choose which of them to play. Big Rararan or Kid Yaa. I wonder if you get to play both of them in a single playthrough, or maybe we’re going to have to circle back around after the game’s finished? I mean, I believe in being thorough. I don’t mind if we’ve gotta schedule more sessions to get through all the text in this. If I’m being completely honest, I don’t want to come off as a pushover, but I’m willing to do additional translation work for free. Sometimes, I gotta work on stuff I have very little interest in– or that it seems like my CLIENT has very little interest in, even. But your request just seemed so genuine. Like, you had to track this down from some defunct university FTP site that had it mirrored, and you did all this research even without knowing Japanese. Like, props. I can’t help but have some of that enthusiasm rub off on me. Sorry, you can choose– bet you didn’t know there was going to be unskippable dialogue this whole game long, all provided by me. Phbft.
Oh, Kid Yaa! I thought for sure you’d pick Big Rararan. He IS the one on the cover, in spite of the box not mentioning his name anywhere. But it DOES look like the kid’s world will be really unusual, even just from the way the background changed there at the beginning. Yeah, just look at that lil’ chiclet. No way you’re getting up one solitary stair. There’s so many things to click on, though, something’s gotta do something. Oh– do you hear that? Sounds like water… maybe we should get to the stairs later. I don’t know if things in this game are timed or not. Time limits always freak me out. Or I guess most of the time, when it comes to point-and-clicks, it’s more like you have a click-limit. Click conservation in a point-and-click– not getting to do more of the one thing you bought the game to do– genius. — oh, great! Each of the items has a description just from the roll-over. Les’see, that one says, “Receipt paper — now that I’m little, I feel so lost in my own purchases! It just seems to go on forever…”
What happens if you click on it?
WOAH, I didn’t realize it was supposed to be covering the walls, too! — WHH– did it just knock down… a tooth? From a frame on the wall? Yeah, look, it’s on a little cushion-y pillow and everything. … “Rararan’s first Lost Tooth. It fell out when Rararan was hanging upside-down.” Mayb–
Uh.
…
Well, uh, I guess it’s our tooth now.
Why did we just… have a place in our gums to stick it? … Does it do anything now that it’s in our mouth? … Can you take it back out? I don’t know if I want you to take it back out. What if most things are just going to go in our mouth? Freud DOES say it’s all about understanding the world through the mouth when you’re a kid. Er, that one says, “Double-A batteries! They power everything in the world with electricity! Or at least in this house!” Okay, so that one we do get in our inventory, that’s nice. Weird inventory, too, but I couldn’t expect much less. All mixed-media, with the googly eyes everywhere. The batteries look like they’re made out of modeling clay or something.
Wait, did the water sound stop?
…
Oh. Nope, now it’s back again. Wonder what that was all about? Or-- I don’t know if it cut out on your end at all, it could’ve just been for me. Sound tends to drop out when you’re doing screen-sharing like this. Or-- haha, wouldn’t it be hilarious if the water sound was just coming from in my house? I– er– actually, let me go double-check about that. I can waste my own water as much as I want, but this is an Airbnb. Gimme a sec’. Don’t eat the batteries while I’m gone.
Yes, ThatAweSomeBlog 
