Couple Random Topics

So, the internet meme of the day was this website called Garfield Minus Garfield. This was a very impressive meme, considering that I think 3 of my daily addictions linked it (and considering that one is an Apple blog, one is a web comic, and one is a movie news blog, that's pretty impressive).

Anyways, I agree with them. This is something amazing and special. I have to admit I'm not sure I totally appreciate the little foreword, but that would be my only complaint. Actually, I think my other complaint might be that the author does a little too much filtering (I'm okay with some of the comics completely not making sense or having anything even resembling a punchline).

In any case, this is something special. I know nothing about art, but this could easily be one of the most intelligent and funny internet creations I've seen. It might almost qualify as art.

I love the amount of empty space that it is forced to utilize. I love that this forces the reader to fill in a story. It's so interesting to me to look at these empty spaces and realize that they're actually providing more context than whatever was originally there. With Garfield gone, these empty spaces are typically the peace that Jon disturbs with his antics, and the peace that returns once he leaves. The repeated frames become moments of introspection or simply the depressing lack of motivation to actually do something. Both are funny.

Well, either way, it's really amazing. It is way funnier than the original comic could ever hope to be. It's also significantly more depressing (reminding of Peanuts in its prime, in the best cases).

Next up is this game Rogue Galaxy. I know it's a PS2 game and I should be playing PS3 games, but there's an explanation for this. The situation was that I had gotten to the last boss in this game a long while ago, but my ancient PS2 stopped being able to read the disc (although the disc was fine).

In fact, for some reason it simply lost the ability to read any games published by Sony, which I thought was a little disappointing (although it made the decision not to buy God of War 2 quite a bit easier).

So, now that I have a PS3, I used that as an opportunity to finish the game (after getting around to buying a little USB adapter for the memory card so that I could start from that point).

Anyways, the game is just okay all around, but decently fun. I like these more action-based battle systems, and this one certainly kept me on my toes. It also helped that some of the random battles would have random challenges, with rewards, which kept battling from getting totally repetitive. It helped that the voice acting didn't suck, too. As a whole, though, this was a very generic RPG.

However, I really didn't like the end of this game. It was frustrating to me that they managed to do so much wrong, right there at the end. First, let's look at the final boss battle.

Throughout the game, the rule has been that if your entire party dies, it's game over, start at the last save point. So, anyways, players are basically taught that having their character die is completely inconsequential, since another party member can bring them back to life immediately (at full health, too). In this final battle, there are 8 (one for each party member) single boss battles. For all of these, the party size is one, so if your character dies, it's immediately game over. What's worse is that these are boss battles and the boss can easily knock off a third of your maximum life per hit (and sometimes hit's 3 times at a time).

The result was a really frustrating time, because the game hadn't actually taught me how to properly engage in a one on one fight, because that's not what the game had been about. Plus, even a single mistake forced me to start all over from the beginning of an hour long battle (which sucked, especially when the boss managed to one shot me a couple times in the very last battle).

My other complaint is that the ending is stupid. So, the cute girl who was totally into the main character and stuff leaves to become the queen of some planet or other (who cares). Anyways, good byes are said and while the credits are rolling, the party realize that they miss her and they don't want to lose her to that stupid planet. So, they decide that since they're space pirates they should go steal her back (fair enough).

And that's where it ends! We don't watch them do it. We don't control them doing it. Nothing actually happens. They just decide to do it. This can safely be called a "poor decision". This could have been a fun cool scene or it could have been a neat post-game challenge. Instead, it's just nothing. That's stupid.

Anyways, none of that really matters, since the dudes behind Persona 3 are releasing an expansion type extra thing in April. Yes, I have to get it. Yes, I have literally no other choice. So, yeah, I'm glad I got Rogue Galaxy out of the way so that I'll be prepared for Persona 3: Fes when it comes out.

Completely unrelated, I forgot to mention that I found it slightly depressing that I could kind of relate to Jon in Garfield Minus Garfield. That's probably a bad thing.

That is all.

Francis