The Game Overthinker

How is it that I only discovered this guy recently?

Seriously, our videos are so similar in style and subject matter that it's amazing I stumbled on his series literally weeks ago. And I know he didn't get the idea from me because he's been around longer. Crazy.

Anyway, the reason I bring him up is for those of you who haven't seen him yet either. I highly encourage checking his videos out. I don't always agree with his take on every topic, but he always puts together a strong argument and manages to keep a pretty objective viewpoint (despite his admitted Nintendo fandom). Like my own series, the main point is to get people thinking and talking, and his videos definitely succeed in that regard.

Another reason I'm recommending him here is because ... well, I know my own release schedule is atrociously slow. But now you know of another guy who does similar videos that you can enjoy while you wait. Go ahead and check him out. I won't hold it against ya.

In other news, I just made it through two of the busiest months I can remember ever having. Now I've got a nice long holiday break, during which I plan to get started on the next episode. Yay!

Talking About These: The Soundtrack

Quite a few people have asked me about the intro and outro music I use, so I figured an in-depth post might be in order.

Long before I started making these lectures, or even thinking about games in depth, I was part of a community called OverClocked ReMix. If you haven't stumbled across the site before, it's a community full of musicians who rearrange and remix video game music. I've been a contributing member there since 2003, though I haven't had time to remix anything new over the last year or two (I use the remixer handle "sephfire" there, if anyone is feeling curious).

Anyway, all of the music I use in my videos comes from the artists at OCR. If you ever wished you had a longer version of any of those outro tunes, you can find free downloads for all of them at the links below.

Penguin Cap by CarboHydroM

Mario 64 remix. This has been my intro music since the beginning. I wish he would submit more of his work to OCR. Fortunately, you can download most of it at his website.

Burning Up by Dj Redlight

Dr. Mario remix.

Fortuna Favors the Funk by djpretzel

Star Fox remix. djpretzel is actually OCR's creator.

Walk on Water by housethegrate

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 remix.

Bumpin by Joshua Morse

ToeJam & Earl remix.

Illusional Hop by Anthony Lofton & Joshua Morse

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night remix. Another track that was never officially released on OCR, it was part of a separate remix project by Bad Dudes. They've released multiple full length albums devoted to numerous games, from Chrono Trigger to Zombies Ate My Neighbors. You can download them all from their official site.

Test Dummy by AE

Mega Man 2 remix.

The Passing of the Blue Crown by Sixto Sounds, Steppo & Zircon

Mega Man 3 remix. Truly bad-ass.

I highly recommend exploring the site and enjoying all of the repackaged nostalgia it has to offer. All of the music is 100% free, spanning every genre from classical to techno to metal. You can use the official torrents to download large chunks of their library en masse, or you can peruse the site and pick-and-choose at your leisure.

Enjoy!

Video Games and Facing Controversy

The new lecture is live!

Digital Cowboys' Latest Guest: James Portnow!

I don't think a lot of viewers realize just how key James Portnow is to my lecture videos. Even before he and I officially teamed up, his articles and columns had informed my views on games. He is where most of the real gaming insight is coming from. I'm just the parrot who sits on his shoulder and squawks it out for the world to hear.

That said, I (like the rest of you) had never had the opportunity to hear his actual voice before. Until now!

The Digital Cowboys brought him in to appear on their latest podcast, where they discuss the terms "Game" and "Gamer" and what impact those terms have on our medium. It's a great discussion and an absolutely fantastic episode. I highly recommend giving it a listen.

Lecture Update: About 60% Complete

Our next video lecture, discussing Controversy, is well over halfway finished. I have a couple days off from work and I finished my school assignments early, so I was able to sit down at the computer all day and hammer out a huge chunk of the next video. At this rate, I expect the next lecture to be released by next weekend (hopefully earlier).

Again, sorry for the long delay since the last episode. This is the longest gap I've ever had between lectures and I'm not thrilled about it. I plan to have the next episode underway much sooner.

Mini-Retrospective: Final Fantasy X

I'd been feeling cravings for my PS2-era Final Fantasy games, so I recently played through Final Fantasy X again. I have many fond memories of the game: it was the first game my wife (girlfriend, at the time) and I played together, start to finish. But now I'm older and my critical analysis muscle is much more developed. Years later, I have realized two things about Final Fantasy X:

1. The translation and voice performances are worse than I remember.

This isn't really news to anybody. Whether we loved or hated the game, we all knew the vocal work wasn't perfect. It didn't stand out so much when it was released, back when voice acting in games was pretty mediocre across the board. But looking back today, it's pretty poor.

And it's understandable. This was Square's first attempt to include voice acting in their biggest franchise. You can't expect them to nail it perfectly the first time. And considering it was their first attempt, they did a decent job. Much better than many of their Japan-based competitors were doing at the time.

But playing through FFX today, especially after seeing the amazing translation and voice work Square-Enix pulled off with Final Fantasy XII, the flaws really do stand out. The occasional awkward sentence structure, the prolonged pauses, the unexpected shifts in dialogue pace from "very slow" to "very fast", etc.

The easy place to assign blame is with the voice actors themselves, but I don't really believe they were the ones at fault. Most of these performers have proven themselves to be capable -- if not exceptional -- voice actors over the years. I imagine the real source of the problem lay in other factors: most of them to do with Square's localization pipeline.

But once I got past the awkwardness of the voice work, I noticed something else:

2. The story is actually better than I remember.

I was a bit shocked to realize how strong the underlying story to FFX was. If you can see past the translation and voice acting, there are some powerful themes and character arcs happening under there. The death cycle that is the world of Spira, the recurring theme of accepting death, the reality behind a summoner's pilgrimage and the weight that realization adds to earlier scenes. Even the love story that develops much more subtly than that of FFVIII, but turns out to be so much more moving by the end.

It's a shame you have to look past the animation and voice performances to see the quality underneath. I started watching the cutscenes and shutting out the voices, focusing on the text and not the speech. I was impressed by how much easier it was to take the story seriously.

In fact, I'm prepared to say that Final Fantasy X might have the strongest story in the entire franchise. It's too bad it was told so clumsily.

I'll probably move on to Final Fantasy X-2 next. It should be very interesting to see how well that one has aged.

Lecture Update: Script Finished / Narration Recorded

First off, I want to apologize for updating this thing so infrequently over the last couple months. Life has been pretty jam-packed for me lately, but the whole point of having this blog here is so I don't vanish for long periods of time. I'll be working to keep the updates a little more frequent.

Second, the script is complete for the next lecture episode and the narration is recorded. James is back at the wheel and has some great topics lined up for us. The upcoming topic: Controversy.

Third, if you haven't checked out the Digital Cowboys podcast yet, I highly recommend it. They asked me to join them again last week to talk about storytelling in games and I think the resulting episode turned out rather well. Why not go have a listen?

Hatin' the Sports Games

Kotaku's Luke Plunkett recently put up an article examining why we gamers get so cranky over sports games. Quite an interesting read.

I recall feeling some indignation over sports games in years past, but I can't really remember why. I've actually enjoyed plenty of sports games throughout my gaming "career." Tecmo Super Bowl and Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball on the SNES. Madden on the N64. Since then, I've drifted away from the licensed "simulation" sports games and stuck with the "video game-y" type. You know, the kind that abandon realism to ramp up the fun: NBA Street, the SSX games, Mario Tennis, etc.

I've been wondering exactly why so many of us get riled up over the sports genre. I've come up with a few guesses.

1. Electronic Arts.

Until recently, EA could be counted on for two things: making piles of money and making gamers angry. They've been working hard since 2008 to make up for past transgressions, and I forgave them completely when I heard they were picking up Tim Schafer's Brutal Legend after Activision abandoned it. But for years, you could always rely on EA to bring gamers' blood to a boil. And a lot of the time, it seemed like their sports game franchises were at the center of it. Like when EA got exclusive licenses to NFL teams, eliminating competitor franchises. Or the fact that each annual full-priced release of a franchise felt almost exactly like the last with a new roster.

For better or worse, when you think "sports games", chances are that your first thought involved an EA sports franchise. And that connection probably didn't help sports games gain favor with the gamer crowd.

2. Not "For Us."

I'm not sure what causes it, but we gamers tend to act openly hostile towards game genres and franchises that don't cater to our tastes. I don't know why we do it, but it happens all the time. We hate on sports games. We mock "kiddie" games. We scoff at fishing games, hunting games, movie tie-ins, Hannah Montana karaoke games. We seethe with anger when we see a developer "dumb down" a franchise to appeal to people besides ourselves, the hardest of the core. Maybe it ties into the same part of us the drives fanboyism. I don' t know.

We get especially indignant when we see games cater to the "frat" demographic, the "bros". It almost feels like a personal insult or being cheated on, in some weird way. "Games are our thing! We're your dedicated audience!" Our resentment of the audience causes us to resent the games that target them. And sports games tend to fall in that category.

Is this reasonable of us? Hardly. But it still happens.

These are just a couple of possible explanations for the sports game hate, and I'm sure there are many others. What about you guys? Why do you think we whine about these games so much?