First off these guys said that mobile is the future of gaming. While ambitious and very optimistic as this claim is, it’s also false. You can definitely do some pretty cool things on the mobile platform, it’s still a phone at the end of the day.

Let me break down what my phone has on it. I have purchased four game apps so far. The first being the T-pain app because quite frankly after playing Saints Row the 3rd I absolutely need a vocal box for myself so I can lay down the jive with my homies while I’m at the Bit, you dig? While not an actual game it is still for entertainment purposes. My biggest issues is that there’s no way that it functions like a true voice box because it has to record everything then auto tune it. You can set up some pretty funny presets I would have like to had the feature to you know do it live.

Second thing I downloaded was Infinity Blade. This was pretty good, it was a cross between quick time events, Demon Souls and a little bit of Dragon’s Lair/Space Ace. The game is very simple and just banks on a gamers’ OCD to collect items and level up. I did find myself playing this late night in bed alone (yes wearing horse head) with a few perfectly good consoles in the room next to me. I have killed the King and I have joined the King so in theory I am done with the game. The only reason why I still play is to get the weapons and armor that I want before I move on to the sequel which probably won’t use the save file anyway. In any case I wish Epic Games made more games this good.

The third thing I downloaded was the Angry Birds free version. I wanted to see what all the hype was about and I kind of was not impressed. I could see how people can get addicted to it but it doesn’t feel like something someone just has to play. It made me nostalgic for another actually.

Which brings us to the last thing I downloaded. The game called Eenies plays just like Gunbound (which Korean superstar Jake Choi bodied me free at). Angry Birds made me miss this game because you just adjust angles and control power to hit targets. Eenies is not exactly like the original game it was modeled after but the gameplay is what I craved and the practice.

Everything else I’ve seen so far I’m not too thrilled about most of the retro games I have on console already. The games based on franchises are usually really simple versions of the game which is fine if you never experienced the real deal before. The real issues for me stem not from the games but from the phones themselves.

This is more or less what my hand looks like, giant palm area tiny fingers. This is what they call a monkey paw the shape of most phones are made for people with human hands. Gaming on these things aren’t exactly comfortable I need a little bit more to wrap my hands around you know.I also suck terrible at touch screen anything it’s like my fingers flat and cold so the screen never picks up my presses ever. If you could only see me butcher the English language when I send out messages. So trying to do stuff on a touch screen isn’t quite so easy for me.

I am around video games constantly, if I want to play something I can. The only times I’m not around games is when traveling by train or in the bathroom usually then there’s a portable near by. I see if people don’t have a DS, PSP,etc and how a phone could supplement that but my diet is already rich with gaming goodness. Also my phone is my phone, it’s bad enough I double up by using it as my Mp3 player as well. My phone can’t be everything can it?

Does anyone have any suggestions on games I should play? Send em on my way. If you will excuse me I need to play some Infinity Blade.

I feel that games back in those days were meant to be played while games now are trying to be more of an experience. You know the type with huge budgets with cinematic events, engrossing story and dialogue and unforgettable characters. While that is very ambitious and commendable, it sometimes feels that games forget that they are indeed games to be played and not movies. Even though the Video Game industry is just as big (if not bigger than the current movie industry) I sometimes feel as if my experience or level of accomplishment has grown/improved that much over playing retro games which had obviously smaller budgets. Why is that?

I don’t buy into the whole achievement point/trophy rush of this generation. I feel as if it’s an artificial way to extend the life of these games. Most achievements you do receive in game are for things you would have done normally anyway, complete X level, find this item, use a gizmo a certain way, create something, reach this level, etc. while this could be seen as some sort of positive reinforcement to encourage people to keep playing, it also encourages people to play easy achievement games just to get a few free achievement points (which aren’t used for anything by the way just to have a gamer score). There are some feats however that are pretty respectable that achievements could possibly serve as a badge for but the flip side of that is you can hack your gamer score and achievements. I’ve seen someone actually do this and I just wondered why he would (I figure he may just want acceptance from other gamers for his skill or to be seen as a serious player something, who knows.)

When you look at the older doing certain things like beating a certain game, speed running, running up a high score, etc seems as if more like a notable feat. I don’t know what the devs were thing back then it’s as if they hated the players (kidding, but some games do make it seem as if you winning was bad), I’m sure the buffed cheapness and difficulty of some games were just to give it life. There were no DLC updates and no sequel announced every year. Secrets in the game were actually secrets. There was no internet to disseminate the info and make it common knowledge or Wikis to plan out what your character and team will be. And at the end of it all you only received a thanks for playing screen and no accolades that you can show off to your friends.

Gameplay today is night and day different from yesteryear. There are so many save points, check points, full restore life on level up, healing items, etc. within a game that it’s really hard for someone to die once they get a hang of the game on any difficulty that isn’t available initially. But back in the older games you’re lucky to get a full restore item randomly or finding it when you need it and the sad thing is you could not back track in some cases to go get that item to heal you (as you can tell I’m a little bit salty about Castlevania.) You also did not have infinite continues in some of the games or if you did continue you had to restart that entire level over even if you were at the boss. (Ghost ‘n Goblins started you off right from the start of the area you died at, thank you based god.) This means you have to make perfect runs by memorizing patterns and knowing the game very well (still mad about Castlevania) in order to navigate most sections of a game.

Yes the plots and experiences were simpler but the game play was the focal point now it’s the other way around game play is being simplified while the plots and experiences are being described as epic. You’ve mashed a single button, followed on screen commands and destroyed a giant monster, in theory you’ve just played a mobile phone game on your console but due to presentation you’ve accomplished a near impossible feat. I’m still celebrating about landing the plane consistently in Top Gun.

While not everyone is guilty of this obviously, it is a growing trend because quite frankly it sells. In part two of this rant which will probably be next week, I’ll talk about how this stacks up to the multiplayer aspect and more than likely complain some more about the newer stuff.

Released in 1983, Jumpman was a platformer for the Commodore 64, amongst other early PC units. The visual presentation was quite rough, even for its time, with some stiff controls to boot, yet there was a charm to Jumpman that I hadn’t experienced before. What little music that was available did come off quite well, with clarity and distinction between them all. It wasn’t the longest game out there, but when you’re as young as I was, in an era where a high difficulty was a prevalent notion, it felt much, much longer.

Players guided Jumpman around each static stage, reaching each bomb and defusing them with a simple touch. Random obstructions appeared throughout each stage, from the elementary art of dropping too far from a jump, to bombs dopping from the top of the screen, to the unusual slow moving projectiles that dart towards you at random moments. If the player is hit or falls from too high of a distance, a comedic bouncing downward off each platform below them comes into play. If you lose all of your lives, a rendition of “Taps” is played, which is another reason why I always have to come back to Jumpman as the first game I can vividly recall. Whenever my dad or I lost ll our lives in Jumpman, Taps would play, and I would instantly begin to cry. I mean, I was 3 or 4 years old at the time, so it’s forgivable, but without fail, each time it came on, I would just break out into tears.

I have not had a chance to fire Jumpman back up in a good 15 years or so, though I do have my Commodore 64 stored away, as well as Jumpman (though the latter’s location I cannot recall this instant.) It wasn’t the most extravagent game in the world, but it was an introductory tour of the staples of platform gaming to my young self. There were other standout titles on the Commodore 64 that I can remember, such as Ghostbusters, Kung Fu Master and Q*Bert, but the one that I always remember first and will label as my “first” video game, will always be Jumpman. Check out the video below to see exactly what Jumpman looked like:

At the time Nintendo and Sega (especially Sega) loved to make games with random mascots. Nintendo had Mario and pretty much started slapping him in every game while Sega did have Sonic but they made games with random animals as the protagonist. While we clearly know Sonic was in fact the hedgehog and we all know what hedgehogs were capable of(this is going to be a later post) one game that didn’t properly convey this was Ecco the Dolphin.

Ecco is a puzzle game released in ’92 for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis. The main character, Ecco, is a bottlenose dolphin controlled by you through a series of side-scrolling under water levels. The story is a bit complex however(there are spoilers below)

The game begins with Ecco as he and his pod are swimming in their home bay. One podmate challenges him to see how high into the air he can jump. When he is in the air, a waterspout storm forms and sucks up all marine life in the bay except Ecco, leaving him alone in the bay. Upon leaving the bay to search for his pod, he contacts several dolphins from other pods, who tell him the entire sea is in chaos, and that all marine creatures had felt the storm. After talking to an orca, Ecco travels to the Arctic to find a blue whale named The Big Blue. The Big Blue tells him such storms had been occurring every 500 years and directs him to the Asterite, the oldest creature on Earth. He leaves the Arctic and travels to a deep cavern where he finds the Asterite. Although it has the power to aid him, one of its globes is missing, and needs it returned. However, this can only be achieved by traveling back in time using a machine built by the ancient Atlanteans.

Ecco travels to the sunken city of Atlantis, where he discovers the time machine and an ancient library. He learns the cause of the storm; it was a harvest of Earth’s waters that was conducted every 500 years by an alien species known as the Vortex. The Vortex had lost their ability to make their own food, and so every 500 years, they would harvest from the waters of Earth. Learning this, he activates the time machine and travels 55 million years into Earth’s past. Ecco locates the Asterite in the past but is immediately attacked by it. Forced into battle, he manages to dislodge a globe from it. This opens a time portal and he is sent back into the present. After receiving the globe, the Asterite grants him the power to turn his sonar into a deadly weapon against the Vortex, as well as the abilities to breathe underwater and to slowly regenerate lost health. The Asterite instructs him to use the time machine to travel back in time to the hour of the harvest. This time he manages to be sucked into the waterspout with his pod. Once inside the waterspout, Ecco makes his way towards the Vortex Queen, the leader of the Vortex race. Eventually, the Vortex Queen is destroyed and Ecco rescues his pod.

(Thanks Wikipedia)

The game play focuses on you using your dolphin powers to solve puzzles and save the day your dolphin powers include high speed swimming, ramming the s#!t out of anything that gets in your way, sonar that can generate maps for you, a song that allows you to speak to other sea life and could potentially be fatal to some enemies. You have to maintain your oxygen because lets face it you’re a dolphin not a submarine.

Aww isn't that cute?

With all that said and the background out of the way lets review the facts. Dolphins are highly intelligent and swim in groups called pods. This is also covered by the game so it’s facts. Nothing out of the ordinary here. Dolphins do use their sonar for a bunch of stuff so that’s also a fact which is evidenced by the genesis game. So far so good nothing out of the ordinary my childhood knowledge is holding up. Dolphins are capable of killing sharks, scary but true. In the game sharks and octopi are the enemy more or less. So all the base stuff is pretty much true. However what Ecco didn’t tell me was that dolphins in the wild are murderers and rapists. D:

Dolphins for all their cuteness and their playful nature are cold blooded killers, the smiling assassins of the deep. Everyone will point at sharks for being the default killing machine, jellyfish being the legion of doom and squids for being the exotic killers. Dolphins are way worse than all three combined. Take for instance the porpoise genocide committed by dolphins.These aren’t just random attacks they are carefully thought out, dolphins are using their sonar to home in on vital organs and give it one of those high speed rams I mentioned earlier. No one knows why this happens as the two animals don’t share any of the same diet. I believe it’s because it’s the dolphins sending those porpoises a message whose turf it really is.

Don't be the wrong set

Dolphins are brutal warriors. In addition to just beating the crap out of poproises they often fight amongst each other. The older a male dolphin is, the more likely his body is to be covered with battle scars. They do it for apparently for the same reasons as humans do personal disputes or over some dolphin chicks. These fights can be so intense that the loser is often exiled if they lose. It’s no wonder why the miltiary have been using dolphins for years. They are a highly intelligent almost amphibious killing machine. Luckily they haven’t been made into cyborgs…yet.

Dolphins are just like humans in the sense that they do engage in sex for fun. Dolphins are just like humans because if you’re not careful they will rape the pretty little ass of yours and I’m not just talking about our lovely female dolphin readers I’m talking about our human readers as well. You see groups of males will gang rape just about anything . It’s really bad so much so that Scott Randleston of the Dolphin Research Institute of Boca Raton, has been studying dolphin behavior for 17 years, and came up with the decoy program.

In every case the decoy was set upon in a short time by groups of dolphins ranging from 8 to 20 young males. It seems there are gangs of dolphin predators roaming the open waters looking for humans to sexually assault. The dolphins in each case were observed circling the swimmer as one of the group grabbed them with their penis and dragged them under, then the others followed. You see dolphins have a prehensile penis, it is full of powerful muscles and they can wrap it around objects, such as a human wrist, ankle, neck, or waist. One could compare it to a boa constrictor or an elephant trunk….The decoys never resurfaced in any of the studies…. We tracked one of the decoys to an underwater cave where it had been repeatedly raped and torn apart by the dolphins. ”

There are at least 14 cases of dolphin rape reported each year in the United States, these usually occur near the shore where victims are able to escape before they can be dragged into a dolphin rape cave. There is no real estimate of how many deaths are the result of dolphin rape each year as many of these occur in open water where there are few eyewitnesses if any. So next time you’re watching people at Sea-World or the aquarium think about that.

The bait has been taken

Male dolphins also commit infanticide,some people feel that it is because of mating needs since mother dolphins are ready to mate again once their calf (the name for baby dolphins) die. Not to mention male dolphins are known to kidnap female dolphins or start drowning them until she is a bit more ‘receptive’ to his advances. These guys are total assholes and poon hounds.

Tonight...You

So what have I learned in all this, well obviously there’s a rapist in those waters and you need to hide your dolphins,hide your wife and hide your husband cause they rapin’ everyone out there. Seriously it was an eye opening experiences learning about the true nature of Ecco. I always wondered why would a dolphin need to hang out in a cave now I know, personally I feel like taking my chances with a shark or just not swimming in dolphin infested waters would be safer . I suggest you do the same.

The truth is out there

Stay Dry.

Metroid is a science fiction action-adventure video game conceived by designer Makoto Kano and artist Hiroji Kiyotake and primarily produced by Nintendo.  Metroid chronicles the missions of bounty hunter Samus Aran who protects the galaxy from the depredations of the Space Pirates and their attempts to harness the power of the Metroids. Metroids themselves are large jellyfish-like creatures with quadripartite nuclei. They are capable of siphoning e life energy from any life form, generally causing the death of the victim in the process. This energy can also be siphoned from the Metroid in turn, allowing it to be used as a living power source. Though Metroids are dangerous animals, they are presumably not intrinsically sinister or evil, but act only on instinct. Nice to know.

This game has spawned many sequels, fan fictions (fan made stories) and a ton  of cosplay, some good some bad. It probably is one the most iconic games that Nintendo has put out. If you ask any player that knows his stuff he will mention Metroid on their list of best Nintendo games ever. I didn’t play it because in ’86 I was four and I was completely horrid at games. As I got older I ended up making the switch to Sega and then I never looked back, until now. When I told my friend about this he simply said “good luck, it’s got the expansive world, but also old school toughness to boot”.

Alright so the controls seem quite simple enough. There’s a jump ,shoot and weapon swap button. You can aim in three directions and you can only use down once you get the ball transformation thing. The only thing that pisses me off about this game is that there is no map. I feel sorry for the poor bastards in ’86 who advanced through this game on trial and error. I have to foun the fortitude to get as far as I can without using an F.A.Q. or a map. It’s a straight forward game for the most part  it is  just that when you get to some doors that won’t open you’re suck looking for the weapon that will some how make them magically open. The platforming can feel cheap at times but that’s the old school. I can see times where I used blink time (in many old games if you were hit you blinked invincible for a few seconds) to get through some parts easier. Thankfully the game keeps all the pick ups you’ve made to that point and saves you at the next ‘area’ if you make it that far. I found the first elevator (yay!)

Story wise I don’t know what the hell is going on. All I know is I’m on that planet to kill a Metroid, I haven’t received any mission updates and I am just wandering around this underground base/lab/planet picking things up that I have to assume will help me. This is the 80′s so I guess that’s reason enough to do anything. I have been staring at Samus run for a bit and it reminds me of a White Stripes video. I can see people getting attached to Samus due to the sheer amount of time that you spend with the character. I’m sure the fact that she is a woman must have blew a few minds at that time considering she was really one of the first few female protagonists.

Me personally I found it kind of difficult to relate like Samus. The sprite reminded me of a weird alien (from James Cameron/H.R. Giger fame). I wouldn’t be surprised it the design was inspired seeing how the first movie was release in 1979. It’s a solid platformer that relies heavily on trial and error. Those poor internetless bastards in the 80′s they had to wait till Nintendo power did the FAQ for the game. Based off of this game alone I cannot see how there are soo many Samus Fan boy/girls.There is no place in this game where you interact and get attached to her as a character. She doesn’t even make a sound if she took damage. I would have to assume the wave of them came after the SNES game. I would also bet that Smash Brothers had a HUGE hand in her popularity.

Did I finish the game? Yes I did. It took me a few days because I didn’t want to burn out. I went through a few deaths but stuff was learned. Ridley is the easiest boss (you can stand in front of him while he’s on the ledge and all his shots miss) while Kraid is harder (I couldn’t figure out a cheap pattern aside from freezing his projectiles), Mother Brain is super easy - it’s just dodging all of the side shots being fired which makes it tough. Escaping the base was made a bit more difficult than it should be. Samus is the goddamn queen of fucking backtracking. I estimate that without picking up items this game can be finished in about 20 to 30 minutes (if you want horde health). Metroids themselves are cheap but the ice gun is cheaper. There are multiple endings in this game depending on how long it takes you to get through it and the ability to continue playing with the gear you picked up is a staple of today’s modern games.

Do I feel as if I missed out on anything in my childhood? Having a good relationship with my inner child I would say no. I probably would have hated this game growing up because it doesn’t tell you to do anything. You’re doing of either of the following running around shooting things unitil you die, falling quick sand/lava/kool aid until you die or you get bored and play something else. I think maybe in my teen years 12-13 this game would have been a good part of my development. Now I understand back tracking and how tough it was for the older generation. Do I recommend this game? Yes for people who wanna get in touch with their roots, no for causal gamers looking for a platformer.

Team Teamwork has been working with electronic music production since 2007 with the initial intensions of working with traditional mashups. “I originally set out to make a remix album of mashups of rap songs and Justice’s †. In figuring out how to make that work, I learned why that was an awful idea and I decided to try sampling other things.” This lead to the creation of “Good-ass Remixes Vol. 1,” a hip hop remix album that is a little more straight forward (but altogether awesome, as the title implies).

Like many collaborations of ideas the video game mashups occurred through happenstance. “One day I was really frustrated with not being able to find a sample to use. Serendipitously, my girlfriend was playing Ocarina of Time and I noticed that the Overworld theme was around 80-90bpm, which is perfect tempo for hip hop. So I tried using that as a sample, and it worked so well that I set a goal to make an entire album using OoT-based samples.” The result was the aptly titled “Ocarina of Rhyme”.

Team Teamwork’s third album “Vinyl Fantasy 7” took the idea of video game hip hop beats just a bit further. The general idea stayed very much the same as “Ocarina of Rhyme,” but the production quality improved.  “Between OoR and VF7, a friend taught me about compression and EQing. And I spent a lot more time on the mixing of VF7.” This insistence on improvement carried through to his newest album. “On SNSG, I spent about twice the amount of time as OoR and VF7 combined on mixing and had an engineer friend help me with mastering. “ The difference is noticeable, with “Super Nintendo Sega Genesis” having a much broader range of frequency and complexity. Listening to a track from “Ocarina of Rhyme” next to a track from “Super Nintendo Sega Genesis,” it is apparent what a difference this extra work and time can make.

While these albums may strike a chord with hardcore retro gamers, Team Teamwork never personally identified himself as a ‘retro gamer.’ “I actually didn’t know a whole lot about the SNES or Genesis soundtrack worlds going into this project. I didn’t have an SNES as a kid and I sometimes borrowed my aunt’s Genesis.” That’s not to say that there has not been any context with the games he has based his project upon. While he may not have known everything about the 16-bit era of video games he did have some experience with the source games for “Ocarina of Rhyme” and “Vinyl Fantasy 7.”

While these 16-bit games may trigger a sense of immediate nostalgia for gamers, this reaction is not the reason Team Teamwork does his thing.  In fact, the video game music is far more for aesthetics than nostalgia or reference.  Team Teamwork samples “video games for beats because it seems like a largely untapped area with great samplable material – as opposed to sampling soul, new wave, Brazilian funk, or whatever.”

Much like the games that the source music comes from, Team Teamwork’s music is fun to listen to. There are no heady ideas to pull out of it, nor absurdly complex mathematical aspects to decipher. In a way, the music has done just what the source material achieved so many years ago: it presents something seemingly simple and makes you want to experience it again and again. This is a fantastically difficult result to attain in a medium in which redundancy is a core component.

It is easy to tell that I am a fan of the projects Team Teamwork has undertaken over the last few years and desire to hear more, but not everyone has warmed up to the mashups like myself. “There is a lot of nerd-outrage… It’s mostly from kids that hate rap and see anything that puts rap with their precious memories as blasphemous.” It is important to remember that these ideas and games belong to the culture at large, and are not propriety of our past. It can be difficult for us video game fans (or hip hop fans) to severe our conceptions of those songs we love so much and hear them in a new context. But the ability to disassociate your conceptions and absorb past ideas born anew is an ever more necessary skill in this increasingly Meta, postmodern cultural landscape.

It’s an interesting experience to hear Childish Gambino rap over a track from “Streets of Rage.” Yet, in my opinion, it feels oddly natural. Anything with a 4:4 beat structure is able to be remixed. Any of the songs we knew so well as kids can be used to create something new. Let’s not fight the tide. If anything, Team Teamwork will continue to make music that he would like to hear. As of now, I find that I have similar sensibilities, so I look forward to what comes out down the line.

Oh, and its good to know that Team Teamwork had the same reaction when he found that Dr. Octagon matched up with Yoshi’s Island. “I yelled ‘AWWW YEAHHHH’ as soon as I had the Yoshi sample beat mapped with the vocal.”

Check here for the full interview next week!

Click here to visit Team Teamwork’s website (where all his music can be found)

Click here to see Team Teamwork’s twitter

Games that can stand the test of time are becoming too few and far between as of late. On the other hand, some of the games that have held up extremely well over the years, have done so for literally decades. Dig Dug has to be one of the games in question, which was released years ago on Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade for a paltry sum. The deceptive arcade title looks elementary enough; dig underground, inflate underground dwellers full of hot air, blow them up, rinse and repeat. The formula becomes increasingly more difficult as each stage passes, offering either a different enemy type, different speeds or the ability for your adversaries to turn into a ghostly form, travel through solid matter and materialize in the already dug out caverns you created. The Xbox 360 version is as close to arcade perfect as you can get, offering simple, functional visuals with some charming audio clips. As with any classic game of its time, the challenge is increased significantly with each passing level. While Dig Dug retains the one hit death mantra throughout the game, unlike the more artificial additives in today’s games. Dig Dug was never an arcade title that lit the gaming world on fire, as Pac Man, Donkey Kong and Centipede did, but the charm, simplistic and approachable nature of the gameplay and increasing difficulties far and away help mold this title into a true classic. Best of all, the price is almost a give-away, and well worth the Microsoft Points.

Minimalist approach, due to limitations during its era, still created one of the best games one could ever play.

Rating: 8.5

The gorgeous visuals are almost as drop dead as Arthur will be when playing even five minutes of Ultimate Ghosts 'n Goblins.

Rating: 7.0

It was the return of the completely out-of-left-field institution that dominated most of my early gaming life:

The arbitrary objective.

We’ve all been there. You love a game to death, you play it to death. Somewhere in-between purchase, mastering, and fondly archiving it for good, players go through this phase. A game gets completed, mastered, and because we don’t want to let go of it just yet, we start making up new rules in our head. Racing games can be beaten without nitro. A fighting game can be beaten without special moves. These pointless, unnecessary, dare I say..arbitrary tweaks to a game’s established formula can extend its relative value long past is shelf life, and it’s exactly what happened to me here.

The funny thing was, I didn’t even need to finish the game in question. It happened while I was playing through the game by myself as Scott, I realized that essentially, aside from some very unique attacks, everyone played the same, and because they had openly customizable stats, simply powering them all up to maximum would just make them homogeneous. The gears in my head began turning almost immediately. I knew I was going to play through the game with each character, but how could I indulge my hardcore sensibilities and still keep the game fresh 4, maybe even 5 playthroughs later? I thought of one of the game’s many inspirations: Streets of Rage.

I remembered how each character, despite having the exact same moveset, had different attacks, and not only that, but they also had stats giving them all a distinct feel in addition to this. Axel was a power character with great moves, Blaze was the balanced type, Max was slow but powerful, and Skate was small and fast, if lacking in stamina. I wanted something like this for this game. After all, what better way to highlight each character’s individuality (and give players something to call dibs on during multiplayer) than to give them completely differing strengths and weaknesses?

It took a bit of time, but I got it. Thinking of each character’s personality/ability in the comic, I went about balancing them all out, albeit in RPG-grinding fashion:

Scott became an all-rounder, given his reputation as a fighter (and his uncanny ability to adapt), Ramona, being the “American Ninja”, became the fastest character, yet relatively low on strength and high on defense. Kim, resident drummer (and situational damsel-in-distress) became above average on technique, strength, and speed(drummer qualities!), but has absolutely no defense, and Stephen, aka “the talent”, became a tank, sporting relative strength, but maxed technique (talent, natch) and defense (he did date Julie, after all) at the cost of speed.

If the stats seem kind of high, it’s because I balanced them all to be used on either medium, or hard difficulty..and for the most part, it worked out wonderfully. Scott is as powerful all around as he should be, Ramona’s speed goes well with the range offered by her weapons, Kim’s strengths go well towards a solid offense that masks what she lacks in defense, and Stephen is the strangest feeling one, having the lowest speed but a wealth of special techniques at his disposal.

The funny thing is, none of the hours I spent doing this felt wasted at all. I just finished the game with Scott yesterday, and now I can’t wait to go through it again with Ramona. She’s much faster, with much lower attack so her juggles are a lot more fun to indulge. I single-handedly introduced character balance and an extra layer of strategy to this game, and while I didn’t have to, the experience for me (and the people I’ve played with) was that much richer because of it.

Labor of love as it was, It brought me back quite a bit. I remember my tenure in Sonic 3& Knuckles, having separate files for having completed with or without all emeralds. I’m still proud of completing Super Mario Bros without touching a single fireflower (never touching a mushroom was beyond me). This sentiment extended past “old” games as well. In high school, action games like Ninja Gaiden weren’t spared, as a friend and I finished the entire game on “very hard” without upgrading ANYTHING, and my girlfriend, notorious for her Need for Speed exploits, did everything short of finishing Most Wanted by driving backwards before she was satisfied. The arbitrary objective knows no genre, and no limits, being clearly defined by a gamer’s ability, and imagination.

Hell, I’ve even become fond of what I named “stock mixing” in DJ Hero, playing a song through for 5 stars with no (extra) multipliers or modifiers.

If any of this sounds crazy, it’s because well…it is, but it’s something we gamers are well acquainted with. Microsoft may have capitalized on this old art by giving it a mainstream name in the form of “achievements”, but at the end of the day, they have no real value, and it’s the pride that we put into them that defines their value. Putting a score on it doesn’t really change the fact that we’ve been assigning arbitrary objectives to ourselves since the beginning, and it’ll continue as long as we have the drive to push the limits developers have assigned us.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to practice M.Bison in SSF4 by beating arcade mode on hard using only his normals.