You Best Check Yourself, Fool: Mother 3 Fan Translation Out Today

I think I know what I'll be doing in the foreseeable future.

I am too excited to type coherently right now. Find it here.

Entertainment Ennui

The annual deluge of holiday releases has begun in earnest this week, and here I am, sitting at my desk, confused and unhappy, struck by waves of exuberance and complete indifference in equal measure.

Left: Hideo Kojima feels the same exuberance and indifference that I do about videogames, only towards alcohol

Few rational creatures follow the enthusiast press as enthusiastically as I do, and if one were to look at my Google Reader or the list of podcasts I subscribe to in iTunes, one might get the impression videogames consume the entirety of my mental faculties. I read gaming related stuff across the entire alphabet, from actionbutton.net to Michael "Zonk" Zenkie. I read the British PC games blog Rock Paper Shotgun; the last PC game I played was probably Irrational's underrated superhero strategy game, Freedom Force -- which is something like six years old (also, Rock Paper Shotgun's British sensibilities are sometimes lost on me, what with their Dues Ex enthusiasm being waaaaaaay out of proportion with what my experience with the game led me to feel). I just read an essay by some Lucasarts employee about the difficulties of choosing middleware solutions best suited for your development philosophy and project goals on GameSetWatch. Weirder still, I enjoyed reading about middleware.

Does this immersion in games journalism correlate to a similar expenditure of energy into the actual playing of videogames? Well, no. Not really. I'm estimating that, since the beginning of July, I have spent my gaming time with the following:

1. Metal Gear Solid 4 (beat it; still wondering how I'm going to write about it)
   
2. Soul Calibur 4 (3 hours against my friend Onuliak; loved it)
   
3. Bionic Commando ReArmed (didn't finish the game; wonderful accomplishment, but the level design in Bionic Commando wasn't all that good, really.)
   
4. Mega Man 9 (beat it; going to write something about it later)
   
5. Vintage arcade gaming at Ground Kontrol (90 drunken minutes; crazy awesome)
6. Games played at PAX (???)
7. Final Fantasy IV DS (beat it; it's Final Fantasy IV, and it's pretty swell)
8. PixelJunk Eden (played it quite a bit; mixed feelings)
   

Nothing to sneeze at, that -- serious time that could have been spent in more "productive" ways went into gaming -- but not enough time to develop ideas about the experience. When the zeitgeist shifts as constantly as it does in videogame culture, when every AAA game gets dissected incessantly months before hitting retail, disappearing from the conversation a week later, sucked away in the undertow as the next wave of hype crests, when one posts on blog comments sections and on message boards not because one has something exciting to say but because one does not want to feel left out and because it beats grinding a couple levels out in a remake of a Final Fantasy game one has beaten like 5 times... it's hard to keep up. It's frustrating to keep up.

Yet.

Little Big Planet. Mirror's Edge. World of Goo. New, exciting IP. Coming out in multiple SKUs. New ones, at that.


Fallout 3. Yakuza 2. Persona 4. Chrono Trigger DS. Not so new, but very exciting IP. Games bound to take me about a year to finish. Except Chrono Trigger - not a very long game. But I have been playing Chrono Trigger, on and off, since 1998, and having an opportunity to do so on the bus is reason enough to make with the jazz hands.

Fuck it. I only wrote this post to support Blog Action Day (if the script embed worked, there should be a little thing at the bottom of this post. Click on it, would you?). You guys fight poverty. I'm gonna play me some Blazing Lazers.