<3 Gaming

For the last week, plus a little more, I have been working on transitioning Subcreation.net’s forum system to a new software platform. Our old setup was horribly out of date, and not to sound mean (<3 you Alc!), but sadly the source code had been changed so much that I couldn't even find out where original code began and new code ended.... or something like that. However the biggest reason we switched over was because PunBB, which has been a very decent forum for quite a while really just seems to be heading south. They have some great software, but sadly the community has seemingly gone kaput. There are a lot of details behind what has happened there, but the short version goes something like this:

Open source forum software gets bought, continues to be open source, but starts making fundamental changes to the general “concept” of the software because a major original party leaves. Old developers fork the code because they don’t like the new direction.

As such updates are far and few between, both projects really are somewhat interdependent as is apparent on both of the projects boards, and there is a lot of not good feelings that seem to be held at least from the FluxBB side of things (the forked version).

Another big reason for the move is that Subcreation, though it is a small community, has somewhat outgrown the usefulness of PunBB. Instead of being lightweight and minimal, we needed something with a richer feature set. Mainly for features for administrators. This brought us to SMF, or Simple Machines Forums. Which basically holds a lot of logging and other administration abilities that PunBB/FluxBB just lack without heavy modification.

Anywho, so the site has officially transitioned. Though now I am in the process of weeding out kinks from the change over. However I am happy to say that the state the forums are in should be good for a while and will hopefully last us for quite some time.

Way back when I first purchased my Nintendo DS (original baby!) I felt stupid not too long afterwords because being the huge RPG fan I am the Sony PSP was looking like it had much more potential for RPGs to be made. With its classic controller scheme and the fact that the Playstation (PS1) had been the RPG king of its day I was saddened that I had caved in to the neat stylus/touchscreen combo.

The DS has really come through for us RPG players of recent though. Let me give you a list of games. This is a list of all the upcoming and current Nintendo DS games that are RPGs or variant on the RPG genre. You may notice that the grand total comes to about ninety different games. Ninety!!!! That is in fact, a ton of games. I probably own just about every decent RPG ever made for the Playstation and that total barely touches thirty.

Quality is definitely an issue here however, and the total number of good RPGs out of all of them may be much much lower, however from my small library I am willing to bet that most of the ones with the words “Square Enix” written on them are pretty damn good.

A couple of the upcoming titles that will be released this year (some this week) are Valkyrie Profile, Pokemon Platinum, and Black Sigil. All three look fairly solid in their respective ways. Black Sigil is the most appealing to me as it is the most traditional JRPG of the bunch. It almost looks like something out of RPGMaker XP. Lets hope it can stand up to the good things I have heard.

Otherwise it will become Izzy fodder.

She is vicious, trust me!

P.S. – In hindsight I probably should have called this blog <3 RPG Gaming…. oh well.

This is what I see every time I log in to my home box.

For a few hours each weekend I have been replaying the original Paper Mario, praise be to virtual console, and have been quite thoroughly enjoying it. Paper Mario reintroduced us loyal nintendo RPG lovers to a lot of the concepts that were introduced by Nintendo and Square (now Square Enix) in Super Mario RPG. Most specifically the action commands which could be performed during battle, and right before, which allowed you to deal extra damage or reduce incoming damage. Which would happen with correct timing of certain button presses. The actual story of Paper Mario is what really made the game fun however. The silliness of the paper citizens of Mushroom Kingdom coupled with the comical nature of the events in the game really make it a game you can laugh with while playing. For example, the haunting voice of Tutankoopa, or the Invincible Tubba Blubba who loves munching on ghosts both have quite amusing dialog to go with their ridiculous appearance and nature.

The sad news is that the latest game in the franchise of Paper Mario was nothing but a disappointment. Leaving out the incredible turn based combat system that held the series strong for two iterations was a complete disaster. Another thing that made me very sad was the secondary characters. The pixl’s were though part of the story, not very unique in appearance and mostly just sat in the background as a a helper. This may as well be called a platformer/action adventure game. Lets hope the next time around they can return to the formula that makes the it fun to play.

In summary:
Paper Mario – Awesome
Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door – Awesome (though I made no mention of it above)
Super Paper Mario – Crap crap crap poop crap awful bad.

Recently I decided I wanted to start reading, or in some cases rereading, a few children books that I never got around to when I was in fact a child. I decided to begin with C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series.

Side note: The first movie is actually pretty damn accurate I found out! Still haven’t seen the second one yet… maybe Netflix will help with that.

While reading/rereading the series you can not help but notice that it definitely is a series aimed at instilling a strong sense of Christian values. Good for the Christians getting this out into the mainstream again, but frankly I could care less about the religious affiliation. Other than those blatant overtones which tend stay strong through each iteration of the series (Ok, Aslan == God, we get it). The stories actually do tend to be enjoyable regardless and every story needs a moral. One thing that does annoy me though is that somewhat recently the actual ordering of the books changed. Right now I am currently reading The Horse and His Boy, which if you follow that link will tell you that it is the third book in the series. In fact, it was originally the fifth book. I know this because the copy which I am reading says right on the cover “Book 5 in the Chronicles of Narnia” (note to self, pics.or.it.didnt.happen). Possibly it is because the main characters from the first two books resurface in this book since it is more of a prequel than a sequel, but I think its phooey! Phooey dammit! Original order should have been preserved and that is all I have to say about that… overall fun books to read, if at worst for the interesting characters such as marsh-wiggles.