Experience Points 04: Quad and September 1st, 2014

Experience Points 04: Side Story

The Gaia/Blazer/Creation Series

(original larger post here)

Quintet was Enix's "go to" developer near the early days of the SNES.  Soul Blazer is the least amazing looking of the 3, but it probably has my favorite gameplay "gimmick".  In Soul Blazer you are given the task of finding and liberating a soul that is important to an area, and after liberating it, you start seeing the town grow and mature over time.  Illusion of Gaia was made a bit differently than most action RPG's.  There is a linearity to it, leaving previously visited areas of the game unreachable for the rest of the game, this gets rid of the traditional "sandbox" style of gameplay that is expected with this genre. The masterpiece of the series and Quintet's crowning achievement was Terranigma.  Again the protagonist rescues a dying world that has been devastated by a war between 2 gods, and instead of rescuing towns like in Soul Blazer, you're reviving entire sections of a world.  Until I saw the "chip" enhanced games Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean, I chose Terranigma as the most impressive 2-D achievement on the SNES, the game is beautiful.

 The "series" has its own Enigma, one I had not realized despite it being a personal favorite of mine.  There is a game called Granstream Saga, a game I rented and later had to own myself.  In the early days of the Playstation, many games were 3-D-kinda-sorta, but not.  One of the first fully polygon RPG's I played was Granstream Saga, and it had beautiful anime cutscenes to help the story along.  If you are a fan of overhead Legend of Zelda and Secret of Mana games, this series is a must play.  While they fall short at various points to being as good as those series, they all have enough great gameplay and awe inspiring(for the era) sequences.  By the time you get to Terranigma, they are doing some things that just aren't seen in some games, and by then were pros at using the hardware.  The Trilogy is only a loose one, so you do not need to start at the beginning, you can choose where you want to start and go from there.

The reason why less is known about the series is that Soul Blazer was released in very little numbers here, and Terranigma was left in Europe, as Enix was not finding as much success in North America and thought the cost of marketing in our stores would not lead to enough profit, if any.  Its a loss and a rather large hole in our gaming knowledge that should be revisited as these types of games are given new life in the indie scene of today.

September 1st, 2014

Starting out with something light hearted.  Never let anyone tell you that Europe has a more progressive tax set up(keep with me, this is neat/silly).  They have what is called a V.A.T. which stands for Value Added Tax, and if you have ever dealt with shipping things to the European Union(of which I did quite a bit of), you have to deal with this.  In the EU, things frquently travel across boarders to finish assembly elsewhere.  Europe has a Tax set up so that at every part of the creation process where value is added, they tax it.  Add paint, V.A.T.  Add two separate pieces together, V.A.T.  Ok, this leads to some pricey taxes that businesses like to get around.  Enter the GREAT BISCUIT/CAKE WAR.  Biscuits of course being "cookies" to us in the U.S.  See, there is this thing called a Jaffa Cake that is popular in Britain.  The catcj is, Cakes do not get V.A.T., causing them to be cheaper.  Cookies, however, do get V.A.T.  The makers of Jaffas consider their product a cake, the European Union sued them, saying that the name didn't mean jack, it was a cookie.  They went to court, where it was decided that a definition of a cookie and a cake was needed.  In the end, the Jaffa was indeed classified as the less taxable cake.  Why?  Because if you leave a cookie on a counter, it gets softer as it grows stale.  If you leave a cake on a counter top, it gets hard as time passes.  They left a pack of Jaffa Cakes out on a table, and after a few days examined:  they grew hard like a cake.  Jaffa Cakes are not subject to the V.A.T. fees.

Ok.  So the decision for Nintendo to market their newest console as the Wii U was not the smartest of decisions.  Understand it or not, the truth is a high % of their Wii gamer base though the Wii U was an add on, and they had already been conditioned to ignore upgrades throughout the Wii life cycle.  You would think that with the upper management at Nintendo admitting it was a mistake, they would stop making decisions to confuse the hell out of their customers.  Enter the new 3DSLL.  Let's look at the past.  The Nintendo DS came out, and then there was the DSi and DSXL, both were just shape and style changes, but played the same games.  Then we got the 3DS, then a 3DSXL and the 2DS, both were just shape and style changes, they all played the same games.  Now we have the 3DSLL.  The 3DSLL looks like a larger 3DS, but has been upgraded, so now games made for the 3DSLL will only be usable by the 3DSLL.  The system looks the same.  There is no "3DS ADVANCE" name, there's ONE letter different in the name, the cartridges look the same.  How is this not going to confuse people?  They are literally splitting their market without having the balls to do a real new system.

Half a decade.  You all have had half a decade of consumer/enthusiast grade parity on PC tech, and I honestly do not think this has happened in my life time, let alone the past 20 years.  For half a decade your ram, CPU and GPU options have pretty much stayed similar.  The same slots, the same motherboards, the same tech in hard drives, and even GPU architecture is largely the same.  If you created a top of the line consumer PC 5 years ago, it would all look similar to the best you can get last week.  The end to this era starts this week.  Usually new tech trickles in fairly singularly, but we're having a converging storm of technology releases in the next year.  A new standard of RAM is being implemented that is not backwards compatible.  Monitors are going to need upgraded as videocards adopt "Active" and "G-Sync" refresh. Solid State Drive tech is set to plummet, and having 1 TB of SS storage is not going to break the bank.  Then there comes the new hard drive war for your PCI-E slots, with M-2, SATA Express, and a couple of other tech vying to win an update war to the SATA connect.  Not only motherboard layouts are changing, but cases are as well.  Both leaders of the gaming case market, Corsair and NZXT, are now releasing cases that do away with 5.25 inch drive bays(where your CD roms go).  They're using that space for radiators and hard drives..  Does this mean if you are building a high quality computer now that you should wait?  I would say no.   I know I rarely do 2 part posts in the bottom area, but this is getting long.  So tomorrow I'll explain what this means and why it doesn't make sense to spend so much to "future proof" your computer right now.